Here’s the crux of the complaint against teacher unions: Unions keep administrators from firing bad teachers. And to hear people tell it, almost every teacher is a bad teacher. Further, in the popular mind that’s why our schools are “failing” and we are falling behind schools in other countries.

This claim requires some analysis because the problem is not as straightforward as it seems. First, there are bad teachers. I had a few myself when I was in school in the Dark Ages, aka the Fifties. Right off hand, I can’t think of one, but I’m sure at least one of those people who showed up every week day during the semester to stand in front of our classes to teach had irredeemable flaws.

I know my children had one or two bad teachers because I taught in the same school district where they went to school. One man ran a small grocery store in addition to teaching biology and he would often show a film to the students while he took a nap. He needed his rest after waking up at 4 a.m. to open his grocery story. A middle school English teacher disliked one of my kids for some reason and when I had a conference with her about my child’s grades it was obvious she didn’t like me either, even though I never figured out what we did to earn her enmity. One guy, a shop teacher, poked one of my kids with a soldering iron hard enough to leave a mark on his palm. When I confronted him about doing this to my child, he got on my case for not disciplining the kid at home. However, when I questioned him about what my child did to deserve such treatment, he hemmed and hawed and couldn’t come up with an explanation. I don’t know if he was any good as a shop teacher, but as a human being he was a failure.

So, yes, bad teachers do exist. Most of them are weeded out before they gain what some people call tenure rights, yet some do manage to squeak through. By and large, however, the people who do stay with the job are professionals who are almost without exception good at what they do.

When I taught at the community college, I took on the task of helping instructors with grievances. That is, when they were reprimanded or told they were being terminated, I worked with them and the appropriate administrators to see what could be done to settle the conflicts without going to court. Sometimes nothing could be done, especially in the case of terminations, because a teacher could be fired in the first three years of the job without the administrator giving a reason. This was also the case if the administrator had done his or her evaluation of the teacher in a timely and competent manner.

The teacher evaluation is key to getting rid of bad teachers. Evaluating teachers is probably the most important job an administrator has outside of handling the school budget. In fact, one principal of my acquaintance lost his job because he tried to fire a tenured teacher without doing the evaluation before the state-imposed deadline. The teacher won the court case against the principal.

Why is it so important that teachers have these union-mandated safeguards? Evaluating teachers is a subjective exercise that brings into play personalities and peculiarities. Without contractually-guaranteed safeguards, teachers’ jobs are safe only at the whim of administrators’ attitudes. Teachers may be quite effective in the classroom, but if they have run afoul of a principal, their jobs are always on the line.

I had the experience of getting on the bad side of principal. I was the journalism adviser at a fairly large high school. I taught my students the tenets of good journalism. They followed those tenets—get the facts, remain objective, cover the story no matter whose toes get stepped on—and I found myself getting low evaluations from the principal. This after eight years of getting high evaluations and after my students consistently won awards at the state journalism competition.

So what happened? Did I suddenly become a bad teacher in that ninth year or did the other principals not do a good job of evaluating me? I know what happened. I had some ambitious students that year. They published some news stories that the principal didn’t like. He couldn’t do a thing about them because Kansas has a strong student freedom of the press law. The only person he could come after was me and the only way he had to do it was through evaluations. It was as clear as a summer Kansas morning what he was up to.

Did I win my case against him? It might be a disappointment to readers to find out that I quit that job. In fact, I had wanted to quit for years, but I wanted my kids to be off to college before that happened. My kids were gone, I was offered a teaching assistantship to pursue a degree I’d wanted to work on for a long time and I just quit. Some of my KNEA colleagues were upset that I didn’t stay to fight. I know I could have won because this principal didn’t have a leg to stand on. The truth is, I was sick of that job and I didn’t need it anymore.

What about those who didn’t want to quit their jobs, those teachers and community college instructors who got on the wrong side of their principals or deans? Out of all the people I represented, only two lost their jobs. I know for sure one person’s job loss came about because she got herself in a position that made her vulnerable, even though she knew the dean had been trying to get rid of her for reasons that had nothing to do with her job performance for a long time. The other person who lost his job hadn’t been on the job long enough for what we call tenure. Otherwise, the deans and college administrators worked with us to settle the conflicts in a way that was satisfactory to all parties.

The NEA came into being for several reasons, but the most important reason was to give good teachers job protections. The union ended the practice of women teachers being paid less than men. It ended the practice of a principal making secret deals with certain teachers to pay them more than others. Union contracts also defined and improved teachers’ working conditions.

Neither the NEA nor the AFT is responsible for the failure of American schools. Most American schools aren’t failing, in fact. What is failing is public support for public education. People don’t want to pay for public education. They think back to a time when teachers were paid in room and board at the superintendent of schools’ house. If they were paid, their pay was measly and they were, in the worst understanding of the term, “public servants.” If a woman teacher married, she had to quit teaching. There was no such thing as sick leave or family leave. Often only the most privileged got an education and many students dropped out of school before they reached high school to help the family on the farm.

Those times are gone forever. We now have as a goal to educate every child in America. We have to educate kids in an age of television, computers, computer games, iPhones, and a host of other distractions. Teachers have to be nimble in their approach to teaching students who often don’t see the point of reading Hamlet, studying calculus, or learning a foreign language.

Schools in many cities are falling apart and teachers have to deal with outdated equipment. They also face students who don’t get enough to eat, who might be watching one parent abuse another, or who are being abused themselves. We ask our teachers to be superhuman when they face the problems of educating students in contemporary America.

Unions help teachers by making sure they can teach without fearing unfair treatment. Unions help students by giving them teachers who are secure in their jobs. Politicians who turn their backs on unions are missing the big picture.