Daily Show host John Stewart eviscerates those asking teachers and other unions to make sacrifices in the name of cutting the budget deficit, especially when those same people (literally!) did not ask the same from Wall Street bankers following the trillions of dollars of bailouts and easy money:
Incidentally, much of the rhetoric is centered around asking the unions to “contribute more” towards their benefits package, but how does one contribute more than 100%?
Jon Stewart is right on the mark. His commentary also shows who runs the mass media, and it's not teachers.
I know quite a few teachers. This 9 months a year attack is especially absurd. Good teachers work 7 hours a day at school and then go home to do at least a couple more hours of work at home. And good teachers work on weekends too. I'd bet they average more than 40 hours per week over the entire year, some of them far more. We need to pay them decent wages if we want to attract the best teachers.
To be fair, though, I'm not a big fan of many of the tactics of teachers' unions, which have too often assumed the short-sighted goal of working less for higher pay, rather than working with the administration on improving the quality of education. I'm not saying that the administrators and school boards are angels either.