As anyone who has been a reader of this blog for a great length of time knows, I am going to teach one day...soon. I have had that yearning in my heart and soul since I was a child; teaching history has been the one enduring dream in my life since I was around 7-8 years old. I had great teachers who inspired me to want to do for other kids what they were doing for me, and to this day I can name every teacher I had from first grade through sixth grade...and a lot of my teachers after that. Teaching in my view is not simply a career choice, but in many ways is a calling for the people who do it well. Those are the ones that do not get into the profession looking to get rich, they get into it because it allows them to fulfill their calling and make a decent living at it. It is a position that allows them to touch countless children over the years, to have positive impacts on the lives of their students, and to shape the future in their own small way. Teaching, in many cases, is an almost noble profession. I have always thought that, and I still do.

However, the actions of the teachers in Wisconsin in the past week have put a black eye on the profession that I so respect and have worked hard to become a part of. By staging their borderline illegal quasi-strike, they have sullied the vocation that they so want to be seen as a profession by doing some of the most unprofessional things that one could think of: lying about sickness in order to shut down entire schools, smearing as Nazis any who dare to oppose their agenda, and giving impressionable children the idea that the way to deal with challenges is to either shout down opponents or run away from unpleasant responsibilities. That is not what teachers are supposed to do, especially in this era of "values education" that has been injected into the nation's classrooms.

The sad thing about it, though, is that it comes as no surprise to see Wisconsin's teachers acting this way. The problem with the teaching profession is that it has become in many cases just another union shop, more concerned with attempting to force concessions from their employers (the taxpayers) than in doing the jobs that they claim to be so dedicated to. What is even worse, is that the teachers in the unions don't seem to grasp the fact that they are simply pawns to be used in the machinations of the larger labor movement agenda. They aren't put out front of demonstrations like the ones in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana because they are the ones being most affected by changes, but because they are the ones with the best chance of manipulating public opinion to the side of the unions. They are the only ones who can come out, bleat "It's all for the Kids!" and have anyone take them seriously. The irony to the Wisconsin debacle is that this may be the last stand for that line of justification, because by doing so now people are getting a look at the money that the "poor, underpaid, overworked" educators are getting paid and the numbers are alerting everyone to the fact that it ain't about the kids. To quote Puff Daddy, "It's all about the Benjamins, baby!"

To hear the teachers tell it, they don't make any money...certainly not much in relation to the private sector. But the thing is, there are no private sector equivalents to what teachers do in the public sector. There is, quite simply, no real standard that teachers have to strive for in collective bargaining since there is no comparable job with a salary structure for the teachers to try to attain. They are able in many ways to create their own market for their services, because the only salary structure they have to compete with are teacher salaries in other states. And teachers make pretty good money, and when the benefits are added in, they make great money. We have seen the numbers on Wisconsin, but take a look at the numbers in other states, say the geographical region that I live in, the Southeast. What will follow are the average salaries for teachers in my immediate region (NC, SC, VA, TN) and the average median income in those states, and you tell me if the teachers are really suffering financially. Also keep in mind that these are simply salary numbers, not including benefits:

North Carolina	South Carolina	Virginia	Tennessee
Teacher:  $42,556.67	$46,306.67	$57,873.33	$45,926.67
Median: $46,574	$44,695	$61,210	$43,610

In two states, Tennessee and South Carolina, teachers make more in salary alone than the median household average (2009), while North Carolina and Virginia are below the state median household income, but when you account for the fact that the job is a 9 month per year job, and the upward skewing of the Virginia median by the high salaries of people in and around the DC Metro area, those teachers are still making a pretty penny. I have yet to see the first teacher starving because they are so poorly paid in their chosen field. These protests have nothing to do with kids, but everything to do with trying to insure the ability to ask for ever higher salaries financed by the tax paying public.

It is shameful to me to hear these striking teachers continue to say that their fight is for the benefit of their students, when it is so patently obvious that they are simply looking out for their own futures. How much money a teacher makes, or the amount of money they have to contribute to their pension/retirement plans, or how much they have to pay towards their health insurance plans  has nothing to do with the education that our kids are supposed to be receiving. And if it does affect the performance of those teachers then they need to leave the profession, because obviously they are more committed to being union operatives than educators.

In this current mess, the teachers unions of Wisconsin, et al have finally ripped the mask away and let the public see just who they are. The union does not care about the students, and those teachers who are lying in order to skip out on work to protest obviously don't care, either. I just hope that the reputations of all those truly dedicated teachers out there are not too sullied by this, and that someday the profession can regain the esteem in the eyes of others that I have always held it in.