[anigbrowl]

If there is voucher money available, then the poverty of a neighborhood is a lower factor than it is for, say, retailers.

On the other hand, poor neighborhoods can be more dangerous and involve greater academic and social challenges. The solution is not to measure schools in poor areas against those in good ones and declare them worse because they perform more poorly (due to circumstances beyond teachers' control), but to measure students' baseline ability and then fund and reward relative improvement, rather than on the basis of absolute outcomes.

For example, say you go into a neighborhood on the first day of school and find that only 50% of 10th graders meet expectations for literacy. The best teacher in the world is not going to be be able to bring that up to the 95% level in a wealthy area on the other side of town, but if the proportion of students who are literate rises to 75% by the end of the 12th grade (correcting for dropout %ages), then that's a huge improvement. In economic terms, it's worth adding more funding right up to the point where marginal net gain falls below zero.

There are obviously willing and committed teachers willing to take on these important challenges. Maybe they would do better by setting up nonprofits and applying for funds to establish charter schools instead of abdicating their negotiation power to the national unions.

[yequalsx]

National unions do not negotiate salaries at the national level. Salary negotiations are done at the local level from district to district done by local union reps.

[anigbrowl]

Not all negotiations are about pay and benefits. Presumably there is some benefit in being organized at the state and national levels or unions wouldn't bother to do so.

[yequalsx]

Definitely there are reasons for having a national union. But you made a statement about not abdicating negotiation power to national unions. I assumed that by this you meant salary since that is the subject of the article about which all these discussions come from. Of course, things do get off topic and so I'm sorry if my assumption was incorrect.