seven to one?

This Furlough Fridays nonsense is really tragic. The dirty little secret is that of about 82,000 Department of Education employees, only about 12,000 are in class -- seven employees for every classroom teacher.

Some of these are janitorial, cafeteria, maintenance and security people. But there is an unseen army of tens of thousands of administrators. We could double classroom teachers' pay by eliminating the nonproductive 50 percent of positions.

Meanwhile, the teachers union's entitlement attitude is shameful. For others professions, "preparation days" are called "evenings and weekends."

This mess is the result of a union stranglehold: Public servants become public masters. We beg and plead while their demands rise and the children fail.

Typical of government unions is that front-line people -- police, teachers, librarians -- are used as pawns in demands for never-ending budget increases. Higher taxes are always proposed to solve the resulting public frustration, rather than even considering reduction of the number of thousands of paper-pushers behind the scenes.

We simply have far more government than we can afford, and no one seems to have the fortitude to fix it.

John Corboy
Mililani