Regarding my original point, that nobody stands up for teachers.. I mean look at that stimulus bill. Teacher pay makes up a huge portion and often an outright majority of local budgets. When local budgets are crunched, and it's either lay off teachers or raise taxes, guess which way the local populace usually goes?
Everyone wants something for nothing.
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf
They are also overpaid, particularly if you account for the value of all their fringe benefits, including summer vacation, tenure, defined benefit pensions, early retirement and gold-plated medical care (all of which are very expensive). In fact, they are usually paid right on the money if you look at salary alone - a 45 year old teacher with 20 years experience in NYC gets $83-95k/year (equivalent to $99-114k/year if they worked all year). That's not bad even for NYC.
http://schools.nyc.gov/Offices/DHR/TeacherPrincipalSchoolPro...
It gets even worse when you realize teachers tend to be low human capital individuals, at least compared to other college grads. Most likely they would be below average if they pursued other professions: http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/gre_0809_interpreting...
You're proving my point: everyone wants something for nothing, and nobody stands up for teachers.
Is this surprising to you?
Look at many of the discussions about piracy. Many people feel it is their "right" to download and use software that would otherwise cost them money. It doesn't surprise me that people would have this same mindset for other things in their lives.
I dispute the term "everyone else" - most people who criticize teachers for being overpaid and underworked (which is uncommon) also criticize pork barrel spending.