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Notes -
A principal might have more space for flourishing when existing in a conflict zone between two different agents. The principal can play the two agents against each other as opposed to being dominated by a single overpowering entity. That's true even if neither set of agents is particularly aligned with the principal.
On the other hand, the principal in question might be Poland, literally or figuratively.
In the case of employees facing unions vs employers, it's a bit of column A, a bit of column B. Both employers and unions have some level of alignment with the employee: the employer wants a productive worker (albeit at minimum cost) and has to maintain some level of happiness to avoid them switching to a competitor, and the union wants to keep its represented workers happy for fear of decert (albeit with minimal regard for the worker's career growth or more generally the long term growth of the company). This rivalry lets workers play one agent against the other, sometimes siding with the union at the expense of the employer (collective bargaining) and sometimes siding with the employer at the expense of the union (scabbing; ignoring work rules). At their best, unions push for utility increasing policies for workers at minimal cost to the worker; at their worst, they take their dues and do pretty much nothing except funnel it toward bureaucrats' salaries and political pet causes. Most of the time it's somewhere in between in the private sector, in large part depending on how easy it is to unionize (the easier, the more unions manage to extract for the worker).
Note that this is entirely speaking from the perspective of the individual worker, not society writ large.
In the teachers union example, the principal is students. Agent 1 and 2 are school administrators and teachers unions, respectively.
In the case of private sector employment, the principals are shareholders and customers, whereas agent 1 and 2 are managerial employees and ICs (possibly with the latter represented by a union).
I guess you're thinking that students can learn to read via phonics by somehow playing teachers unions against school administrators (or having their parents do so)?
Was speaking abstractly.
As far as public education goes, the issue is that there really aren't competing agents. Where they're most powerful, public sector unions don't exercise their power through competing with the employer for worker allegiance but through influencing the political process to remove their opposing agent as well as the market discipline that forces trade offs to be made. The result of that is a world where there's no accountability; if students are failing, then the issue is that the schools need more funds, which must be appropriately distributed through administrators/teachers/the union, who then use the funds to repeat the process. All the agents in public education are best thought of as a collective symbiote that has a parasitic relationship with the rest of society.
Students aren't agents here at all. Their parents might be agents, but only through the ability to vote or remove their kids from schools (which reduces funding). The political process has the latter avenue already in its sights.
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