> There are seniority based unions, and there are merit based unions.
In my observation (going by reports from both my own teachers back in the day and from friends and family members who are teachers), teachers' unions are squarely in the former category. Tenured teachers get raises, competent teachers get pink slips.
And you aren't addressing what I'm saying. I acknowledge unions that promote/pay based on seniority. Those exist, 100%. They do not necessarily need to be the way a union operates.
While it may be in the best interest for a union to reward people for how long they've been a working member of the union, it isn't the only structure that exists.
My middle/high school teachers certainly seemed to have an inverse relationship between tenure and effectiveness, with maybe two exceptions.
> They do not necessarily need to be the way a union operates.
And you aren't addressing what I'm saying: sure, meritocratic unions might exist, but given that this is about teachers' unions specifically, and given that (at least in my observation, as anecdotal and therefore flawed as it may be) teachers' unions seem to very rarely (if ever) be meritocratic, any mention of "oh but unions can be meritocratic" without even so much as providing an example seems off-topic and irrelevant.
Realistically, merit is much harder to measure than tenure. No surprise that tenure is consequently the more common metric by which teachers' unions measure the teachers thereof.
In my observation (going by reports from both my own teachers back in the day and from friends and family members who are teachers), teachers' unions are squarely in the former category. Tenured teachers get raises, competent teachers get pink slips.