can teacher's unions change in the US?

On the Real News Network, Professor Lois Weiner discusses teacher strikes worldwide against privatization and defunding. She talks about the situation in the US and signs of change. Weiner calls for a coordinated, national one-day strike by both US teacher unions to build a movement. Full transcript here.

And it's important to understand that the reason there's this assault on teachers and teachers unions is that teachers unions are impeding the privatization and the defunding of public education--really, the destruction of the system of public education--and turning it into a source of profit for multinational corporations. That's what we're seeing globally. 

Well, the unions here are calcified. That's the best way for me to put it. They're calcified at the national level. They're mainly calcified at the state levels. There are two major unions, the National Education Association and the AFT, and they're bureaucratic and conservative in different ways. They're not--the problems are not identical, but the results are the same. And the result is that the unions are--number one, they are not democratic. To me that's a key issue. Another issue is that they're not militant, they don't mobilize the members. And the third issue is that if they often--their bargaining demands or the way they're looking at themselves is they're fighting for members' interests as defined very, very narrowly by what's allowed in union contracts. 

And I will say that we're seeing changes that are not being picked up by the corporate media. For instance, the Portland--Portland is the largest city in Oregon. It has the largest teachers union in Oregon. They waged a campaign for a new contract that put class size first and was not about salary.