Well many of the good teachers stayed in the schools to keep teaching. I’m not saying every single one that stayed is a good teacher, I’m saying they’d be the kind of teacher to keep teaching while the union lovers went to Madison.
The bottom line of this is:
1. teachers in general for the amount of time they work get good pay and benefits - most of the private sector doesn’t have it as good, and since almost no teachers quit, they think so too.
2. Everyone has stuff about their jobs they don’t like, teachers aren’t any different than anyone else. If you don’t like it teach somewhere else or get a different job altogether.
3. Stop complaining to the rest of society that doesn’t have your job security and benefits and decent wages for 9 months of work, whining about how hard you have it isn’t going to get people who have it harder than you do, which is most of us, on your side.
4. Either stop whining or don’t call yourself ‘professionals’ (that somehow have to have a union....?). No other ‘professionals’ have a union to protect them. And they don’t live off taxpayers either. They have to produce net gains, not net income drains. If you guys got paid according to results like the real world does, (ie how well the kids are doing) most of you would be earning far, far less than what you make now. And please, before you bring up “the greedy CEOs” make a real comparison to other working people, not top officers of a company. Compare your UNION BOSSES and SCHOOL SUPERINTENDANTS that make millions and hundreds of thousands of dollars to the CEOs, and compare yourselves to the average private sector worker and how they are compensated. You wind up doing better on average than the average person who’s paying your salary and benefits, by far.
I don’t know the stats, but more teachers quit than you would think. Both of my parents were teachers and it isn’t the cake job many people make it out to be. There’s a reason I never considered it for myself and it has nothing to do with money.