It’s incomprehensible to me that people think our teachers have it easy and are overpaid for what they do. My wife taught in every grade of our schools and ended up as a full professor of education. I worked very hard as a college professor, but not nearly as hard as she did when she was in the schools.

She would get to work at 7:30 and teach six high school classes a day. She had literally hundreds of students. She’d get home around 5, after all her committee meetings, conferences and drawing up the lesson plans for the next day. She was a hard-working college professor, too, but she had survivor’s guilt because no matter how hard she worked at the college level, it paled in comparison to the work she did in grade school and high school. I happen to think that as a class, teachers are the best, hardest working professionals in America.

Think about it: we’ve all had teachers who have made a tremendous difference in our lives. Mine was a man named Eugene Steiker. When I walked into Joan of Arc Junior High School (J.H.S. 118) in Manhattan, I opted for orchestra class. Mr. Steiker handed me a trumpet and changed my life.

I really wasn’t all that good, but I was good enough to have a band throughout high school and college so my twin brother and I never needed an allowance. When I was 14, I saw Pete Seeger at summer camp and started learning to play the banjo. Now, at 70, I still play with my group, The Berkshire Ramblers. That all came from one teacher—Mr. Steiker.

He was my hero and, though he is long gone (I dropped everything to get to his funeral), I’ve never forgotten what he did for me. I’ve never forgotten how much interest he showed in me. I’ve never forgotten his incredible sense of humor.

Everyone has had a Mr. Steiker in their lives. Everyone has had a teacher who went the extra mile to help define them and their potential. Teachers deserve to be honored. They deserve to be paid what they are worth. Remember, we entrust the most important people in our lives, our children, to our teachers. If you think a teacher isn’t every bit as important as a doctor—any doctor—think again.

True, there are some not-so-good teachers. It is important that the system have fair rules to encourage those folks to move on. On the other hand, we have to do more to keep the good ones on the job. The more teachers are made into scapegoats, the worse it is for our children as the great teachers say, “Who needs this?” and leave the profession.

My son, Jonas, runs an organization based in New Orleans called Leading Educators. The thrust of this group is to keep good, young teachers in the classrooms. The more abuse that is thrown at our teachers, the more quickly we will lose our best and our brightest. We have to develop strategies that will encourage them to stay.

Of course, we also have to keep our eye on unscrupulous politicians who play to the stereotype and imply that teachers are not as hard-working and influential as we know they are. They’re trying to win points with the voters by being divisive. The next time you see that kind of thing happening, I encourage you to call the offending politician on it. Frankly, I give the speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, high marks for his good words about teachers. That, in my mind, is what a leader is all about.

Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

Let’s face it: there are three guys who call the shots in the Legislature, the famous “three men in a room”; the governor, the speaker of the Assembly and the Senate majority leader. If a freshman legislator wants to get the attention of his constituents and the state media, he has to do something that will make people look up and say, “Golly gee whiz, Martha, look at that.”

That is exactly what Assemblyman Sean Hanna, an obscure upstate freshman legislator has done. He has proposed that the members of the state Legislature take a whopping cut in pay and show up for a much shorter session. Of course that isn’t going to happen. In fact, legislators are always sniffing around for more pay, something their constituents hate. So when Hanna comes along and proposes that they give up around a third of their $79,500 (before perks) income, he will be about as welcome as a skunk in the basement.

I suspect, however, that Hanna is no hero. That’s because the devil is in the details. In order to get their previous raises and keep the good government groups off their backs, legislators had to give up much of their license to steal honestly. There are now all kinds of rules about what they can and can’t do. For example, they can’t appear before state agencies representing legal clients and they must—to a degree—disclose how much income they are getting from outside sources.

According to Hanna, if they took less pay, they could be more productive as good private sector citizens. Presumably, then, some of the rules would have to be relaxed.

If you asked the citizens of this state whether stripping their legislators of a good chunk of their pay is a good idea, they would overwhelmingly say yes. After all, poll after poll shows that people hate the Legislature. Many people think that their legislators work far less than full time and make a lot of money on the outside from law and consulting practices.

In that they are correct. These legislators, who only show up in Albany for a few days a week between January and June or July, believe they deserve the hundred grand that most of them are now getting. They will talk to you about all the time they are in their offices and the time they devote to their communities. In some cases that is true, but I daresay in most it is not. These folks have a lot of staff to do much of the scut work while they are out working at their other jobs.

I fear Hanna is offering us a poison pill. I suspect he wants to go back to the good old days when no eyebrows were raised about conflicts of interest.

Even though his plan won’t happen, it is still worth thinking about. Many people wonder why we even need a Legislature, since only three people are calling the shots and the others are playing make-believe. The Legislature is a play in which everyone should have a part. If you ask the leaders and their members about any of this, they will tell you that they are giving their leaders instructions about what to do. That is, of course, nonsense.

Right now, Shelly Silver and Dean Skelos are negotiating with Gov. Andrew Cuomo about all kinds of things. When those negotiations are complete, they will go back to their various conferences and say, “Well, ladies and gentlemen, I did the best I could,” and their conferences will eat what they have been given to eat. But don’t let anyone tell you that these people are in charge. They are happy to have their jobs and when they die, they will have their titles on their tombstones.

Good try, Hanna. Enjoy your 15 minutes and thank you for the proposal.

Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

In politics, there is an old saying: “First you have to win.” A corollary is “Winning is everything.” Another companion idiom in American politics is “There are no co-winners.”

I was speaking with someone the other day who said that in the American presidency, Democrats get the chance to be either Jimmy Carter, a man with integrity who lost, or Bill Clinton, who was all about winning. With that in mind, let’s take a look at President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address and just a few of its implications for New York State and its voters.

A lot of people voted for Obama when he said, “Yes we can!” They thought he meant, “Yes we can [fill in the blank].” Many of them were disappointed when he showed that he’d rather be a Clinton winner than a Carter loser; he had the center left, and they weren’t going anywhere. He needed to win the folks in the middle and those who held the purse strings in the skewed economic system in which we live.

You need money to win. You can call these people the 1 Percenters. If you are not taking from their pot, they might actually let you live. There were many folks who wanted to punish the bankers whose antics left so many people with homes that were underwater, but many of those in key economic positions around Obama were way too close to the bad guys in the great American economic disaster.

If you examine the State of the Union message, you can see two Obamas.

One is the progressive president. He tells the college-aged that he is with them when it comes to how much their education is costing them and their families. This is the group of people who helped put Obama over the top in the last election and he needs them back. He needs their passion. By telling young people that the federal government will punish states and colleges that raise tuition, he re-energizes those kids to get out and vote and work for him.

On the other hand, in New York, State University Chancellor Nancy Zimpher, a ball of fire, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo came together with the Legislature in an agreement to save SUNY in this very tough economic climate. In order to do that, the University, which has always been a relative bargain, is raising tuition.

My bet is that the folks who fashioned that deal cannot be happy with what they heard from the president. To some degree, I imagine they thought they were being punched in the solar plexus.

They weren’t the only ones. There was the proposal by Obama that we move ahead with hydrofracking, a drilling process that employs dangerous chemicals to extract natural gas from shale. Here in New York, there has been so much passion appropriately raised about hydrofracking that Cuomo, thought by some to have been in favor of it, seems to have cooled on the idea. No matter how much politicians want the revenue and energy that hydrofracking might provide, they can’t seem to convince the people to accept a process that threatens to poison our drinking water.

So here we have just two of the many things that the president spoke about that may be good for his politics but not necessarily good for the people of New York State. Let’s face it: The president knows what he has to do to win. Under no circumstances will he lose New York State. He will get these electoral votes, so he doesn’t have to worry about New York the way he might about Florida or Ohio. It’s sort of like a wife who will always be there as opposed to a fickle mistress. Get the analogy?

Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

So these three guys walk into a room. That sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it turns out that this meeting is anything but funny. The first man in the room is Speaker Sheldon Silver of the New York State Assembly. He’s the Empire State’s senior serving politician. He’s a canny, brilliant, politically astute guy who, up to now, has known how to win elections.

He is connected to the New York State power brokers and their lobbyists, like the teachers union, and he doesn’t break the paradigm of power. He isn’t about to change the game plan, even when confronted with the likes of former New York City Mayor Ed Koch. Koch, one of the great political phonies of all time, has a penchant for grabbing good issues and riding them. This time, it’s reform of the “dysfunctional” Legislature.

When really pressed, Silver gives a little to the forces of reform in the State Capitol. There are a number of ways to do that. One is to make a good bill into a lukewarm bill that will change little or nothing. That’s exactly what he did with the call for ethics reform. Gov. David Paterson correctly vetoed that joke.

Another Silver specialty has been the famous “one house bill” that he knows will never be passed in the other house. This used to be very easy when the other house was controlled by the Republicans. Now the State Senate is controlled by a group of pathetically inept Democrats who can’t get their act together, so the game is a little more difficult.

The Senate Dems’ leader is John Sampson, and he’s the second man in the room. Like his hero, that other Sampson, he has tremendous strength but is likely to be given a haircut by others in his Democratic Senate conference who just can’t seem to master the skill of playing well together. Sampson was chosen by his conference to pick up the pieces after a group un-herdable cats, among them the infamous crew of Hiram Monserrate, Pedro Espada and Malcolm Smith, came very close to committing hari-kari before our very eyes. Sampson has the respect of many internal players, but the public’s initial impression of the Senate’s ineptitude has been so lasting that no matter how much perfume they put on, the stench persists.

Sampson and Silver recently went along with Paterson’s plan to furlough state workers. A federal judge put that plan on hold and now they are hated by the unions and have little to show for their efforts.

Finally, there is Paterson, the third man in the room. He isn’t running for reelection and he knows that the way to political salvation and historical canonization is doing the right thing. His state is broke and he is trying to get civil servants to forgo pay raises. He is hopelessly outclassed by Andrew Cuomo, who is waiting in the wings but who won’t indicate what needs to be done to right the ship of state. So Paterson has put the spotlight on the Legislature and is holding tough, unable to make the other two guys come up with a plan that will allow New York to live within its means. Come January, he will be out of office and he will smell clean. The newspapers tell him that he’s doing right, but castigate him for being inept. He’s a good guy who deserves more support for what he is trying to do.

In the meantime, back in that room, chaos prevails. The reality is that the state is broke. The little boy who cried wolf is about to be eaten by that very same animal and everyone assumes that somehow this will turn out all right. As William Bendix would have said in The Life of Riley, “What a revoltin’ development.”

Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.