By capitalist I mean free market.
What do you mean by free market, exactly?
Effective services
When is effectiveness, and when can a service be qualified as effective?
for the most part the functional elements will be capitalist and the non-functional ones will be non-capitalist
Depending on your definitions of effective and free-market, the existence of Sweden, at the very least, might make you want to question that reasoning.
the filters you likely get your news through
I don't select the media from which I get my news. While the press in general does operate a selection on what information they release to the public, I do not think favouring teachers' unions is one of their priorities.
A specific reform is making it possible to get rid of incompetent teachers.
Well, in the end the institutions are made of people, and applying game theory oversimplifies many factors. Such as public backlash: I cannot imagine teachers being stupid enough to risk the public backlash that opposing such a reform would cause (supposing that reform is exactly what it says on the tin, rather than making it possible to fire teachers for other, less avowable reasons. Unless teachers in the USA already had such a low social image that they would not care about degrading it further.
EDIT: You know, someone keeps down-voting both of us, and I don't know why.
Such as public backlash: I cannot imagine teachers being stupid enough to risk the public backlash that opposing such a reform would cause
Well, adjust you're priors appropriately.
Unless teachers in the USA already had such a low social image that they would not care about degrading it further.
Or rather they have such a high social image that the people who aren't paying much attention react the same way you just did.
I have found this most wonderful (if fairly lengthy) article, and thought you would enjoy having it brought to your attention.
It is so good, I think we should include it among the references in the "Politics is the Mind Killer" wiki page. But, before that, I submit it to you, and ask you: is there anything in this article that would warrant its exclusion from this site? I mean, besides the fact that it is about politics, and written by a notorious Social-democrat (And is that in itself grounds for exclusion?).