The idea that teachers are among the lowest-paid and hardest-working is a persistent one. Teachers are the foundation for our success, yet their lowly paid, and consistently threatened to lose their job.

As Juan Williams says on The O’Reilly factor, “the civil rights challenge of this generation is education. Dr. King would never allow anyone to buy his silence, to buy him off, to sell out the kids. And that’s what’s happening right now.”

Williams talks about how he looked through some of the reports on union spending. His findings resulted that the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and their affiliates in New York gave 10 thousands of dollars to Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and the NAACP. And the same thing with the National Education Association, (NEA) but why? “Because they know that they don’t want those civil rights leaders to ever stand up and say yes to charter schools, yes to vouchers, yes to school reform..”

Juan goes on about how unbelievably ridiculous it is to have kids these days worship people like Cheif Keef who dropped out of school at age 15. He adds,
“what we are seeing now is civil rights leadership that is all too happy to take the money [from the unions] and shut up, and then pretend somehow that they are speaking to the interest of those children or to the community. In fact they’re not, in fact what they are doing is allowing money to shut their mouths and that right there is corruption.”

The best thing, in my opinion, is for local and state governments to start implementing merit-based pay and break the union stranglehold. Teachers should earn pay raises, just like everyone else in the world. Great teachers absolutely deserve pay raises, but horrible teachers shouldn’t get pay raises just because they’re teachers who happens to be in a union. If a teacher has students who continuously are failing, then they don’t deserve a raise. A teacher’s performance should decide whether or not they get a raise. Teacher raises should be earned, just like everybody else in the world. Unions need to stop corrupting our education system.