New Jersey Teachers Threw Away Decades of Goodwill

by Warner Todd Huston | May 28, 2010 10:00 am

The New Jersey Star-Ledger has a wonderful little editorial[1] excoriating New Jersey’s teachers for having destroyed their own reputation with the public because of their petulant behavior towards Governor Chris Christie’s attempts to balance New Jersey’s over spent budget.

Take a gander at this…

Once the patient darlings who nurtured our kids, teachers now look like insensitive, out-of-touch, can’t-think-for-themselves union robots who, when forced to face economic realities, clung to an insulting sense of entitlement, heartlessly sacrificed the jobs of colleagues, called the governor naughty names and used students as political pawns.

Ouch!

For the Star-Ledger Kevin Manahan explains what happened to the once respected New Jersey teachers:

How did it happen? That’s easy: One bad decision, one stupid miscalculation: An overwhelming majority of teachers refused to accept a pay freeze. They could have won taxpayers’ eternal gratitude, but instead demanded their negotiated raises and fought against contributing a dime toward budget-breaking health insurance benefits. Teachers could have pitched in, but they dug in.

They thumbed their noses at taxpayers, who have lost their jobs, had their pay cut, gone bankrupt and fallen into foreclosure. As taxpayers made less, teachers demanded more. You do that, you become a villain. Fast. It doesn’t matter how many stars Junior gets on his book report.

This is, of course, the natural, logical end of the actions of all unions. but it is especially egregious behavior from people that are supposed to be servants of the people. After all, these teachers work for us, we the taxpayers. We pay their generous salaries (New Jersey teachers average $63,000 a year while the median household income in New Jersey is about $55,000 a year), we pay their huge pension benefits, and we pay most of their generous healthcare plans. And these haughty public servants refused to take a stinking one-year pay freeze and a small increase in their out-of-pocket for healthcare? In fact, they demanded generous raises?

No wonder New Jersey’s voters have turned against these ingrates.