In an information-based global economy, knowledge is power. And America is risking a power outage.

Released just this December, the Program for International Student Assessment compared the educations of American 15-year-olds with those of their peers in 56 other countries. The results are grim. In science literacy, American students placed 21st out of 30 developed countries - just above the Slovak Republic.

In math literacy, the U.S. placed 25th out of 30, performing worse than third-world Azerbaijan. (Fittingly, due to printing errors on the U.S. test, American students' reading scores were not tabulated.)

Why are these numbers so awful? After all, the U.S. is still the undisputed global leader in countless industries, from high-tech to Hollywood. The answer is simple: While American businesses are shaping the twenty-first century, our public schools are stuck in the nineteenth. With a shortage of schools that can prepare American students for the modern workforce, our economic edge is steadily eroding.

Who would support an education system that cripples America's ability to compete in the global marketplace? The National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and their thousands of affiliated unions.

They have vested interests in maintaining the educational status quo. Even if it makes us lag behind Azerbaijan.

Teachers unions derive their money from the fact that, no matter how badly they function, public schools don't shut down. That's why they bitterly oppose any attempt to introduce competition into education.

It's why the Detroit teachers union organized a walk-out that sabotaged a $200 million private offer to fund charter schools in that troubled city. (The new schools would not have been unionized and would have competed with Detroit's decrepit public education system.)

But competition between schools isn't the only kind that teachers unions can't accept. Competition among individual teachers, with incentives for the best performers, also undermines the unions' chief selling point, collective bargaining.

If teachers are paid on their individual merits - like every other kind of professional, from accountants to dentists to engineers - why would they want to negotiate their salaries through a system that collectively lumps innovative, energetic educators together with slackers doing the bare minimum?

Opposition to merit pay for teachers leads unions to oppose any effort to determine who is teaching well and who isn't. This selfish position leads to the ridiculous systems of industrial-style seniority that dictate most schools' payrolls, where salaries are determined by little more than years spent on the job.

Though she was named Minnesota's Teacher of the Year, Cathy Nelson was laid off when her school's enrollment declined -- because of her union's contract, which required the most junior teachers to be canned first, regardless of ability.

Sarah Gustafson was laid off from her teaching job the day after she was named to the Florida Educator Hall of Fame - again, because her union contract valued seniority over talent.

Union blindness also protects some truly unfit teachers whom no one would want in a classroom. In most schools few teachers need to be replaced, but tenure laws keep the numbers down to very, very few indeed.

In Illinois, a recent study found that only two out of the 95, 500 union-protected, tenured teachers outside of Chicago are dismissed annually for poor teaching. Of the 21 school districts investigated by the Center for Union Facts, not a single one - including Boston, Columbus, Houston, Minneapolis, and Newark - had a tenured-teacher firing rate in excess of 0.5percent a year. Surely they can't all be that good, in light of our kids' demonstrated skill levels.

In fact, teachers unions and the tenure laws they promote have made it so difficult to get rid of incompetent teachers that it might be more productive to encourage them to quit. To that end, the Center for Union Facts has established the "Ten Worst Union-Protected Teachers in America" contest. Parents, students, educators, and concerned taxpayers can visit www.teachersunionexposed.com to nominate the worst. The Center for Union Facts will pay ten "winners" $10,000 apiece to quit.

Call it a down payment on schooling that can keep us ahead of Azerbaijan.

Richard Berman is executive director of the Center for Union Facts.