[Coda]

No, I have to strongly DISagree there. When teachers strike, it's not just greedy whining. Depending on what part of the country you live in, $36k/year is NOT enough to raise a family. I make... well, I make more than that (and I have three jobs)... and I have a family of three, and we're making ends meet, but some months it gets uncomfortably tight. Considering the average US family has 2-3 children instead of just one... And with education cuts getting more and more common, a lot of teachers are stuck with buying classroom supplies out of their own salaries because the school district budgets don't cover the stuff that the school district policies demand every class have. And the REASON they have to strike instead of negotiating is BECAUSE otherwise people do exactly what was done here: assume they're just whining.

Furthermore, good teachers are hard to find in the first place, and it's been well-established by countless studies that employees with job security do better work and work more efficiently. Fear of being fired makes the employee tense, prone to mistakes, and makes them spend time dotting i's and crossing t's just to make sure the boss doesn't have an excuse to give them a pink slip when they could be doing something productive. Worse, if the school district were get a reputation for being fire-happy, a lot of prospective teachers would just find another job rather than deal with the stress and low paychecks for a job they can't even be sure they're going to keep. Quality of education just goes down.