Are there any other rights on your list that you would like to deny to others?

I do not participate or contribute funds to my union's political action committee. I pay them, and pay them well, to bargain collectively on my behalf so I can provide the best life for my family and myself. How is this wrong?

I never claimed that police or fire were listed among the most dangerous professions but neither does this mean that both professions aren't dangerous.

Nor have I ever claimed that others in our society are not heroes…good and effective teachers are most certainly on my list of community heroes.

No police officer, at least in Long Beach, can possibly “work 30 years, retire at 50 at 90% of his salary”. Cops in Long Beach have to be at least 21 when they are appointed, this means that they have to be at least 51 to be able to retire with 30 years of service and to my mind any cop that survives a 30-year career in Long Beach deserves every single penny *and then some* of service retirement payments that they receive.

Walk a mile in their shoes, kathy. See what they see and deal with the things they deal with in Long Beach, day in and day out for 30 long years and then see if you don't agree with me on this.

You must belong to the union, or be a politician. The only people they ever mention on the campaign trail are: police, fire and teachers. There is enough union money behind all of these individuals to fill their coffers.

By the way, police and fire are not listed among the most dangerous positions, and the word “hero” applies to an individual, not to a groups of people, i.e.; police, fire teachers.

Just how much would you be willing to pay a police officer who works 30 years, retires at 50 at 90% of his salary?

Why is it that we demand efficiency and productivity in the private sector, push and wish for it in State & local government, yet give education a hall pass? Education is nearly 50% of our state budget. The same state budget that people are freaking out about the wastefullness of.

I'm tired of it. I'm tired of teachers lamenting about being underpaid (although last time I checked they worked ~ 9 months out of the year). I'm tired of teachers pining that there is no effective way to evaluate teachers…we just have to trust that they're doing their best. I'm tired of educators claiming to be all about the best interest of the children AND opposing vouchers.

I'm sorry, because there are some amazing teachers that are in the public school system and I hope they can continue doing the job they love. But I'll show how fed up I am at the ballot box on Nov. 3.

According to the most recent data available from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), comparative per pupil funding (or PPF) reflects that California is right in the middle (ranked 25th) and only slightly below the national average in PPF.

There is nothing in NCLB that asks or requires any School or District to teach to a test. NCLB is, in fact, a vastly comprehensive educational initiative that makes at least an *attempt* at setting realistic national standards of academic performance for students, schools and Districts that receive federal funding. But it doesn't only mandate requirements -and even then only for Districts and schools that receive Title 1 funding- but also offers many, many resources to help accomplish them.

I believe your analogy between Teacher and public safety performance to be fallacious. A teacher's job is (or should be) to educate according to specific and measurable standards and their performance assessment should be based upon how well they do that. The only reasonable and objective way to assess this is through an appropriate and standardized test of their students.

Conversely a cop's job is to enforce the laws, to keep the peace and to promote public safety and these are not nearly so easily quantifiable. For example; the average Beat Cop can only be in one place in his/her Beat at a given time and, so, he/she cannot possibly be responsible for failing to prevent a crime that occurs wherever he/she is not, nor can he/she always prevent a crime that occurs in his/her presence but, rather, can often only react appropriately to the unlawful actions of another. Conversely how do we accurately quantify the number of crimes the officer *has* prevented? How do we accurately count crime occurrences that did not happen?

No, Mr. Wrong, on my planet teachers are required to teach and to teach well. When they do so they should be *highly* paid. When they consistently fail to do so they should be summarily dismissed. The only way to guage their competency as educators is by testing their students.

NCLB has it's faults and flaws, no doubt. But at least it attempts to set academic standards and enforce them, something our public education system stopped doing on its own long ago.

I too am willing to tax myself to pay for various public programs and services. But since it is our money that these public education institutions are spending, they must remain fully accountable to us and right now they are not.

There's an excellent study on Public Education Finance by Vanderbilt's Dr. James Guthrie from 1996 entitled: “Reinventing Education Finance: Alternatives for Allocating Resources to Individual Schools” that you and others might find worth the read:

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs98/finance/98217-5.asp

One of Dr. Guthrie's suggestions is that education revenues should be seen as belonging to the *School*, and not to the *District* and that these revenues should follow the student as they transfer from school to school.

Such a paradigm shift would serve to empower the School over the District and would help to re-focus our attention where it is most appropriate…with the student.

Is it not true that California is among the lowest in the US in per student funding?

I think the teaching for testing (NCLB)is a waste. It's like basing your police pay/performance on how many tickets you write. I wouldn't want to hire private security firms to compete with our police public servants.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd like to put LOTS of money towards our schools and our schoolchildren. We can pay for it by ending all the corporate/rich people welfare idiot bush pushed. I mean, just locally, how much monthly rent does the LBYC pay the city-$900? What a joke!

In the same light as teachers, I have no problem paying our fire and police heroes top dollar.

Teachers/students, policemen, firemen; feel free to raise my taxes to load them up with everything!

Let parents keep more of their money thus enhancing their education choices for their own children. This will instill much-needed competition into a currently monopolistic and overly bureaucratic public education system. This will also diminsh class sizes and make it easier to better encourage and reward excellent public school teachers and dismiss the poorly performing ones (since they aren't helping their Districts newly established need to be competitive).

In short, the “rising tide” of instilling competition into our public school system will lift all of the education “boats” thereon and, most importantly, we help to better guarantee that our children are well-educated and better prepared to, themselves, be more competitive and successful in a rapidly changing world.