Teachers must give like the rest of us

Every day I hear or read about some organization asking for a tax increase for education. Of course they don't call it a tax increase, they call it education funding. If teachers truly wanted to save some of their jobs they would make some serious concessions. Not agreeing to a one-time 3 percent increase instead of 4, or even a one-year raise freeze, but something meaningful that would save jobs. After reading the Daily Herald's recent series on public pensions, I was amazed to see how much money teachers make from their pensions. A person in the private sector working a lifetime can expect around $20,000 a year from Social Security. It seems like teachers are making triple that. The teachers union is a powerful and influential organization that lawmakers have traded goodies for votes over many years. How many times over the years have teachers gone on strike the first day of school, leaving working parents in a desperate situation and having to force school boards to give in so they can go to work without scrambling for child care, or bad teachers with tenure being next to impossible to fire for cause? Whatever happened to "it's about the children?"

When the automakers union got out of hand, we could just shop another carmaker for a better price. In this situation the answer we're hearing is "PLEASE RAISE OUR TAXES."

Jim Marks

Long Grove