Teachers unions a Juggernaut

Our government caved in to the largest union organization in the country, the teachers union, a system with bloated administration jobs, suspect productivity, wasteful spending, unchecked bonding authority, minor attempts at teacher merit reviews, leading to lifetime jobs with no accountability.

This organization significantly covers only part of the normal working year, yet increases pay scales the last two years of employment so they can access a much higher level of retirement income with personal contributions being insufficient to ever cover the value of their lifetime pension, leaving these billions of dollars in pension payments on the shoulders of the taxpayer.

All this, and our educational achievements have not really changed over the past many years. Dropout rates in may parts of the system are deplorable and yet the taxes to support this system keep climbing every day - real estate taxes, lottery taxes, state payments to school districts, borrowing billions to fund the "critically under funded" pension and now federal funds to prop up this system that shows no end to its appetite.

This system is broken and as long as we blindly keep feeding this organization, an appropriate fix will never take for this system.

Gary Kolbe

Geneva