Why?

The economy is really pressuring the unions. As it becomes clear that public pensions are right up there with the unfunded Social Security and Medicare mandates in terms of "things that will destroy our economy in the next couple of decades", the unions that have obtained their public pensions are having to spend more and more of their political capital just on maintaining their economy-destroying gains. The teacher's unions are one such union. (Not the biggest, but definitely a player.) Teacher's unions have a lot less political capital left over to defend themselves against reforms that may weaken (or eliminate) tenure or create the sort of individual accountability they've been fighting for a while.

I think their ability to resist this is tied to whether the economy gets substantially better in the next two years; if so the pension problem may fall out of focus (even though it will actually only be getting worse, but such are the vicissitudes of democracy), if it doesn't, I suspect the teacher's unions will end up spending themselves politically bankrupt at which point who knows what will happen? There's a lot of "reformedness" that's built up over the years, everyone's going to want to take a crack at it.

There is a potential here that there hasn't been for a while.

FWIW, I mean most of the above as descriptively as possible, without endorsement of the desirability or lack thereof of anything mentioned. Personally I would like to see substantial "reform", but only certain ones, not others. (For instance, I would oppose increasing hours spent in school; I think they are already far more than are necessary to meet current goals and to the extent goals are not being met it is not for lack of hours. So simply slapping an initiative to increase school hours with the label "reform" does not make me approve of it.) I perceive no guarantee that even if reform happens, I will like it.

This is a pretty biased account.

“Things that will destroy our economy” is primarily the financial services sector taking up 30 or something percent of the entire profit of the economy for several years, and decreasing tax rates for the last 30 years until by now they’re lower than they’ve been since the 40s, to the point that the federal government pays for things by taking loans instead, including sucking money out of the social security fund and using it as a general revenue source. Schools are less well funded now than they have been for decades, especially where I am in California where the public school system has been on a consistent tragic slide since Reagan was governor, from once being among the best in the nation.

Blaming teachers (or blaming “scary teacher unions”) for that is a tremendous distortion; teaching is only a reasonable profession because of a long history of hard fighting for decent wages. Most of the teachers work their asses off, for all of our children, and heaping scorn on them is one of the most reprehensible of the talking points of the right in America over the last 30 years.

(disclaimer: my mother is a teacher)

"“Things that will destroy our economy” is primarily the financial services sector taking up 30 or something percent of the entire profit of the economy, ..."

That's the past tense, what tanked our economy in the past few months. Looking forward, what will kill us is unfunded mandates. You know how I know this? Because even if we completely fixed the financials industry, completely and utterly tamed it and turned it entirely into a non-profit organization while still somehow retaining its efficiency, we still choke on our unfunded mandates in 10 to 20 years, tops. They're growing faster than inflation, faster than the economy, and faster than any conceivable first-world economy could possibly grow even if $YOUR_FAVORITE_ECONOMIC_THEORY was perfectly instituted and it worked exactly as you expected.

All of the unfunded mandates are gloriously sweet and wonderful things. Money for teachers. Money for old people. Money for retired firefighters and police. Money for public servants. Money for sick people and especially money for sick old people. Our political inability to say no to the sweet and kind and needy people is what brought them to us in the first place. But it doesn't matter how gloriously wonderful they are. They are unaffordable. We physically lack the resources to fulfill the mandates. When I say "physically", I mean, physically. We lack the energy and materials and manpower they are. When I say "physically", I mean that one way or another we will not pay those unfunded mandates, because we are actually, factually incapable of it. The only question is how we will fail to meet those mandates.

Yeah, the teachers have had a role in that. Not much I can do to prevent that from being the outcome. I can point out there are hardly alone, though. There's a lot of people lined up at the trough of unsustainable mandates. Thanks to Social Security and Medicare, that list is "Pretty much every citizen of the United States and a fair number of non-citizens". Outrage changes nothing. Here we are.

("Defined benefit payouts" ought to be striken from our vocabulary. They are physically implausible. What happens when you build huge chunks of the economy on a physically-implausible primitive should hardly be a surprise.)

Unlike "sweet, wonderful, sick old people", money for teachers is potentially an investment, not a straight up social cost.

Hmmm, investing with money we don't actually have, has that been in the news at all lately?

Besides, I seriously question the marginal value we're getting out of the part of the investment that's killing us, which isn't salary, benefits, facilities, or management costs. We've been trained by various things that the answer to "Do schools need more money?" is simply "Yes", regardless of context, but that produces pathological economic policies. At some point the answer becomes "No", and personally I think we long passed that point.

See also: "Do we need more money for crime enforcement?" "Do we need more money to fight drugs?" "Do we need more centralized power to fight terrorism?"

I am totally willing to reconsider that question as circumstances change. Reform things, start outputting better graduates (according to my rather strict standards which involve actual training to think and such, not just better test scores), and demonstrate that under these new circumstances the bottleneck is money and I'll be happy and overjoyed to reconsider.

My mom's a teacher AND I'm a Democrat, and no matter how hard individual teachers work, a system that:

* forces teachers to be layed off in seniority order

* spends decades failing to come up with a measurable actionable definition of teacher effectiveness

* squelches any attempt at merit or incentive pay

* proscribes any mandates to put in effort above the lowest common denominator of class prep and student intervention, and then

* attempts to enforce a monopoly on school management

... is naturally going to distort and retard any attempt to improve the system, which is demonstrably producing poor outcomes.

It's not about the teachers, it's about the system. Unfortunately, the things that are wrong with the system are all framed in terms of the welfare of individual teachers, so we're all jammed up.

To blame teachers’ unions as singularly responsible though is what I object to. I’m not going to argue that our current education system is tremendously effective compared to what it could be.

Read my post way more carefully, especially the beginning. I carefully structured it to avoid the "singularly".

Responsible? Yes, along with all kinds of other entites. But all that isn't terribly relevant to my actual point, which is that the political capital that will be expended on maintaining those benefits will create openings to oppose the teacher's unions in other ways.

If you want names named, the SEIU is the biggest problem of the bunch. But it's all the same problem, unfunded defined-benefit mandates. It doesn't matter who is getting them when they exceed what society can afford.

I'm refuting your point about the teachers union, while conceding that teachers do work hard and deserve to be compensated. The unions do appear to bear most of the responsibility for retarding school improvement. I don't see a reasonable excuse for running interference on merit pay, for instance.

The interference being run has to do with (1) merit pay being a quite deliberate attempt to break current bargaining methods so that overall teacher pay can be reduced afterwards, and (2) the metrics for “merit” being extremely difficult to do in any reasonable way, since every student is different and (for instance) standardized test scores are a pretty terrible proxy for learning.

(to further explain (1), in particular cash-scrapped governments and school districts would be all to happy to get to fire a bunch of older teachers who, because teaching was previously set up as a career, make more money than new recruits. This is precisely the kind of logic that meat packing plants or furniture factories also apply in firing veteran employees and replacing them with desperate undocumented immigrants or other similarly cheap new workers, and countering it, so that pay is predictable and stable for people being recruited to do extensive training and then work in what is frankly a quite low paid (compared to the responsibility and workload bestowed) career, is pretty much the entire point of labor organizing: it removes the tremendous power imbalance that otherwise exists between employee and employer.

I absolutely agree with you that our current methods of selecting, training, and critiquing teachers are deeply flawed. But they’re flawed for a whole host of reasons, and the teachers’ unions that fought against the often worse problems of the pre-union past are not by a long shot the biggest problem facing the education system.