You're broadcasting your experience in one school across an entire state of some 150,000 teachers. Teachers can't go on strike, it's illegal. If the teachers in your school went on strike, they broke the law and hopefully were prosecuted for it. If teachers were "spewing left sided political remarks" they should have been taken to task for it. I had a student ask me just this past week if I was a Republican or a Democrat. Know what I said? "I'm not allowed to an'swer that." He asked me why. I said, "It's not my position to influence your political views." And that was that.

The tenure argument is simply bitterness from a public who doesn't understand how public education works. Without tenure, we literally could not do our job. We couldn't stand up to a parent who wanted to attack us for something unreasonable (something that happens far too frequently these days). We couldn't fight for a curriculum to improve our student's experience. We couldn't so much as assign homework for fear that a parent would want us fired and have the grounds to do that. Non-tenured teachers walk a very fine rope until they are granted tenure. It's not just a gift we get as part of our job - it's a protection against administrators who are incompetent, insane or vindictive, protection against parents who don't like that their child got a B, protection against a student who feels it was unfair we gave them detention for smacking another student on the head in the name of "fooling around." The number of bad teachers being protected by tenure is WAY outweighed by the number of teachers protected by it for legitimate reasons. Just like anything else, there's bad with the good of course, but the good far outweighs the bad.