Hotspur,
I am not sure what your post is referring to. After 12 years of classroom experience and a masters degree (plus 30, close to getting 60), I make a very good salary with good benefits. I will not apologize for that, and I will not be ashamed of that. I earn every dollar I make. I never complained about my salary.
Additionally, there is no one "Board of Education". Each school district across the country has its own BOE. The Federal government does not have a Board of Education, so I am not sure which BOE you are talking about when you say, "The BOE stole a lot of money from the people."
I do not "poison children's minds with liberal babble jabble" and I know of many excellent, open-minded teachers who are personally very conservative. I resent the blatant insult to my profession. Teachers are too often easy targets for the public's frustration. Please do not make gross generalizations about teachers as a group. As in any field there are good and bad and everything in between and exceeding. It is truly unfortunate that there are bad teachers out there, but then it is also very unfortunate that there are bad doctors and bad police officers and bad anything.
I resent being accused of "shooting it out of your mouths". I have been "in the trenches" for 12 years. I have had incredible successes with my students as well as a few failures where I was sure I made the wrong career choice and didn't deserve to teach. I am very well aware of my responsibilites in my classroom to my students, their parents, and to society at large. I have been around long enough to have endured every crazy new teaching method visited upon the public school systems. I am also experienced enough to understand that No Child Left Behind is a very misguided approach to education and that more testing of children is not the answer to what ails the public education system. Bush does not understand the problems of public education as much as you would think. He does not understand what the children and parents I work for go through every day just to survive.
I wish I knew what the answer was to public education, but NCLB is NOT it.
A veteran teacher,
Susan L.G.