re: #376 ShanghaiEd
Well I’m there with ya on the Troops, cops, firefighters,garbage collectors sanitation engineers (would YOU take that job, riding them trucks and all?) EMT and hospital workers at the better VA hospitals and some municipal hospitals, but I gotta disagree with you on the public school teachers my friend. I mean SERIOUSLY disagree. Public School teachers have the potential to shape the voters of this nation, generation by generation, but OBJECT VOCIFEROUSLY to any idea of Merit pay or doing away with tenure. Bill Ayers is a BIG DEAL in Public Education.
No, compare that to private schools - who gets the better education (and it’s my understanding that at least at Catholic Parochial Schools, the teacher may make only 40% of what Public School teachers make)?
Indeed, when President Obama started talking merit pay, the teachers unions took it as a stab in the back.
I’m sad to say that while we OUGHT to stand around and kick the butts of government employees who don’t do their jobs, we can’t do that - don’t have the desire, really, to do INSIST on better perfromance from teachers.
And for the record, I was a teacher (albeit not a Public University professor) and for one AWFUL year of my life I taught public high school history and civics classes - and saw teachers using class notes that were written on paper so old, it almost crumbled. Once given tenure, an unfortunately LARGE group of teachers just “mail it in” every day until they can collect their pensions.
And it’s interesting, to me anyway, that the jobs the government does best are: Military, Police, Firefighters and EMT workers.
And yes the US Postal Service HAS improved a great deal SINCE THE STOPPED BEING A GOVERNMENT AGENCY. See

The USPS is often mistaken for a government-owned corporation (e.g., Amtrak), but as noted above is legally defined as an “independent establishment of the executive branch of the Government of the United States,” (39 U.S.C. § 201) as it is wholly owned by the government and controlled by the Presidential appointees and the Postmaster General. As a quasi-governmental agency, it has many special privileges, including sovereign immunity, eminent domain powers, powers to negotiate postal treaties with foreign nations, and an exclusive legal right to deliver first-class and third-class mail. Indeed in 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the USPS was not a government-owned corporation and therefore could not be sued under the Sherman Antitrust Act.[10] The U.S. Supreme Court has also upheld the USPS’s statutory monopoly on access to letterboxes against a First Amendment freedom of speech challenge; it thus remains illegal in the U.S. for anyone other than the employees and agents of the USPS to deliver mailpieces to letterboxes marked “U.S. Mail

en.wikipedia.org