Let me offer a brief opinion.  Teachers want to be treated as professionals, including receiving pay warranted for providing a professional service.  Yet, they want all the benefits of a union, which is designed to protect the weakest of them, negotiate as a group for pay and benefits regardless of performance, etc. Teachers salaries and benefits are no longer lagging behind other professions. In fact, as a result of union pressures and block voting of teachers unions (the largest voting block in any community), our school budgets and teachers salaries are strangling communities -- shrinking the population and the economies. This trend will continue, until we have local economies pushed into financial ruin.

The Governor is attempting to address these issues, with tax caps and pension reform. Yet we are seeing political pressures come into play that are preventing any meaningful reform that will allow the State and local communities to recover form the mess that NYS unions have contributed to. Short term abatement is not a solution, but simply a postponement of the inevitable -- the abyss of financial ruin.

It is time for New York State educators to be treated like professionals -- which means being held accountable like professionals. Unions prevent this from occurring, and the impact on the economy and on the children is devastating.