The point is that you can easily have a functional education system with strong teachers unions. Canada, Europe, most of the western world functions this way. To say that our education woes are due to teachers unions is short-sighted at best.
The issue with education in this country is in it's structure, funding, allocation, and methodology. Unions are a scapegoat for a larger philosophical failure in our approach to education. If people really cared about education in this country, they would look hard at how Finland moved away from the industrial model and towards one much more suited to an information economy.
As for Finland, their system only seems to work well for Finnish people. The gap in PISA scores between natives and immigrants (Gen 1 and 2, I believe) is almost 50 pts, vs about 20 in the US. This might work for Finland, with relatively few immigrants, but it wouldn't fly in a country like the US.
(For comparison, the demographically corrected PISA gap between the US and Sweden is 19 pts in favor of the US.)
Hypothetical: if teacher A has a class of poor black students, and teacher B has a class of rich asian students, shall we directly compare test scores? If teacher A's students perform 1 stddev worse than teacher B's, shall we fire teacher A for poor performance?
If you don't want to do it for teachers, why do it for educational systems?
I'm sure that's how you see it, but the fact is, that the OP posited the idea that unions were incompatible with a healthy education system. There are simply too many counter-examples to that.
Further, you've pushed the conversation into a discussion about race and class by way of an abstract hypothetical. From your posting history, I'm not really interested in having such a complex discussion with you.
The issue with education in this country is in it's structure, funding, allocation, and methodology. Unions are a scapegoat for a larger philosophical failure in our approach to education. If people really cared about education in this country, they would look hard at how Finland moved away from the industrial model and towards one much more suited to an information economy.