Now the teachers union is ready to dump its old colleague in the next election – and hope to pressure her into not even running again.

Some of her longtime allies in the Legislature and the business sector also are cooling on her. House Education Chairman Dave Quall, D-Mount Vernon, for instance, talks of “an erosion of confidence” in Bergeson after months of debate over the state’s high-stakes graduation test.

He and Senate Education Chairwoman Rosemary McAuliffe, D-Bothell, say Bergeson marginalized herself during the recent legislative session by being absent from key negotiations over the Washington Assessment of Student Learning. At the end, she was bypassed, they said.

Union activists, who gave her a vote of no confidence but failed to dump her in the last election, have increased their attacks and say they’ll support someone else next year – the favored candidate still unknown. They say Bergeson has two problems: She’s obsessed with the WASL and has failed to produce big budget gains.

Bergeson is exasperated, too, with the union and lawmakers.

She defends education reform, including the test, and says she won’t be a party to watering it down.

“I’m always trying to get the union to be a force for change for the kids,” she said. The fight for more tax dollars has to be waged within the context of stronger standards and rigorous accountability, she said.

More money alone isn’t the answer, she said.

If lawmakers see her as a hard-head, she sees some of them as weak-kneed. Asked to grade the Democratic Legislature, she gave lawmakers high marks for the budget, but otherwise could say only, “They didn’t wreck the system. Policy-wise, they confused people. The danger is that we’ll go out with a whimper, not a bang” if Olympia flinches.

Bergeson said she isn’t apologizing for her positions or her tactics. As she departed for a vacation, she said she hasn’t decided whether to seek a fourth four-year term. She said she knows her critics are shopping around for another candidate.

Bergeson is a Cape Cod, Mass., native who has spent nearly her entire education career in Washington.

After positions in Tacoma and Central Kitsap districts, she worked as WEA vice president and then president. She lost a state superintendent’s race to incumbent Judith Billings in 1992, and then-Gov. Booth Gardner recruited her to run the Commission for Student Learning, which developed the broad outlines of education reform – setting “world-class” standards and learning requirements and then developing tests. She won an open race for superintendent in 1996 and was re-elected twice.

Her old colleagues at the 80,000-member teachers union cooled on her when she didn’t advocate enough for money, and spent much of her time implementing reform, including the test that many students failed. The WEA backed Billings in a rematch in 2004, but Bergeson won again. Since then, the bad blood has gotten worse.

The WEA’s monthly magazine recently took note of her 10th anniversary in office and said “performance has been poor.” President Charles Hasse wrote that “Bergeson remains obsessed” with the WASL, bashes teachers and fails to win adequate financing.

Activists alerted the media when they protested outside her office recently, delivered petitions signed by an estimated 14,000 teachers.

“She’s not doing the job,” the incoming president, Mary Lindquist, told the rally, which is posted in a film clip on the WEA web site that has a headline “Testing our patience.”

“The superintendent of public instruction should be the primary advocate for K-12 funding, and she has just not fulfilled that role at all,” the Mercer Island high school teacher said later. “The only thing I’ve seen her fight for is the WASL.”

Bergeson also is bruised from clashes with education leaders in the Legislature.

Quall said he and others became frustrated with Bergeson when lawmakers were searching for alternatives to the WASL as a graduation hurdle. Eventually, they stopped negotiating with her because she wouldn’t hear of any substantial changes, he said.

“She’s in a tough spot,” he said. “She is the architect of the WASL, and she has been working tirelessly to get it fixed. But people have lost faith in the WASL, especially math and science, and lost faith that Terry can fix it.”

Bergeson shrugs off criticism. She said the promise of education reform will never be fulfilled without clear and effective accountability, including tests that show whether students are meeting rigorous standards.

“Confusion is the enemy of achieving our goals,” she said, referring to efforts to water down or eliminate the WASL.

The criticism doesn’t seem to apply to Gov. Chris Gregoire, who shares many of the same views as Bergeson. Gregoire, who did most of the administration’s negotiating on WASL, didn’t respond to a request for comment on Bergeson.