>In what ways do teachers' unions campaign to give agency to students' families and career choice to in-demand faculty?
I’m not sure what you mean by agency here or how many teachers you actually know. But unions have regularly campaigned for more resources for students outside of themselves, including access to things nurses, counselors, and libraries. Schools in many cities are highly racially and economically segregated in the US because of the country’s broader history of redlining and corresponding deprivation. Teachers unions are one of the only interest groups who have consistently fought against this denial of agency for their students.
As to career choices, I have union member teachers in my family and they change schools as they see fit. There are some problems with state licensing incompatibilities that prevent teachers from being as mobile as they might like and we should probably move to uniform federal standards to correct this.
>Seems like the incentives are mostly oriented around getting teachers to stay in one place and grind out another year of experience, round of continuing education, and extra degrees whether they are wise or not.
Otherwise, why don't teachers just quit schools with poor safety records, working conditions, pay, equipment funding, and uncompensated overtime? Because no district really has to worry about being held accountable like that.
Incentives around higher education are perverse in the US in almost every regard, so I’m not sure that teachers are that much of an outlier (especially for their domain, education). As to why teachers stay - I’m not sure if you’re aware but most people tend to live in the regions they’re actually from, where they have family ties and social bonds.
https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2008/12/17/who-moves-who-sta...
Applying some sort of rational actor economic heuristic to civil servants in a service profession seems a foolhardy endeavor. I mean, I’ve worked for big companies across the country, none of which were any better run and some of which were not better resourced than a failing public school, and they all had their fair share of people toughing it out too. What binds people to a place socially and materially, especially among more working class professions, is different from white collar workers.
