Editorial: If teachers walk-out of classrooms after last week’s $400 million (or more) in new taxes to fund a $6,100 teacher pay raise (on average), $33 million for textbooks and $18 million in additional school funding… they should all be fired.
Education reform was absent in the package. Oklahoma suffers over 500 school districts, half a hundred small institutions of higher education (an apparent retirement system for politicians) and teacher unions best described as Marxist.
Fire them all.
School districts and media are complicit with administrators and government unions working together to indoctrinate the young and rob the old.
Local school boards can pay workers whatever they would like, but would rather float a bond for a new football stadium than teacher pay.
In this fabricated crisis, there is no education reform for Oklahoma and, oh by the way, this is not the first time Oklahoma has thrown large chunks of money at the problem.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat 1933-1945) wrote, “…Meticulous attention should be paid to the special relationships and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government.
“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.
“Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees.
“Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable,” Roosevelt wrote.