I'm having a difficult time replying to this without getting into a long political/economic tangent. My brief thoughts in response would be that in my experience, people in well paid jobs typically also have decent vacation and sick leave allowances. Unfortunately, I was not able to find a comprehensive look at paid vacation levels relative to salary. Based on the lifestyles of professionals around here, well paid white collar work seems to come with many weeks of paid vacation and many paid holidays. I mention that only because it factors into length of work year, although I would acknowledge that teachers work a shorter year.
That said, under current common pay structures, I think talking about "average salaries" is misleading. An employee who has made an average of $50-60,000 per year from the very beginning has been compensated overall at a much higher cumulative level than the employee who started at $30000 and earned $1000-$1500 more each year until they reached that average salary. After 15 years, there is around $150,000 difference in cumulative pay, (and that assumes no forward movement by the employee who started at $50,000). Kaukana, by the way, has (or had) one of the highest salary averages in the state in 2009-10, which is the most recent year with reliable data, so that $80,000 in the article, which is significantly above average, is also being paid in a district that is outside of the norm in Wisconsin.
I would also recommend looking at:
State and Local Workers Earn Less than Private Sector Workers, Even Factoring in Benefits As far as the changes in Kaukauna...reduction in class size is always nice, but but doing it by increasing the number of periods that teachers teach, while raising the overall numbers of students they see, is not good for students. Being well prepared to teach 6 periods per day, and keeping up in any kind of meaningful way on the work of 130 students is not doable with an hour of prep time per day. Anyone who has ever given a presentation knows the work that goes into being well prepared--imagine doing that daily for 6 periods a day (even if some hours are same material to different sections of students), never mind trying to do that while differentiating and grading the assignments. Rigorous instruction is not delivered through seat of your pants teaching. Strong subject knowledge and strong instructional skills still require adequate preparation and follow up time.
I'm going to leave aside commenting on the insurance issues since my views on that are bound up in a much broader political analysis.
I would agree with the article's contention that the fight in Wisconsin has been bitter and ugly. I would add disturbing and frightening, but that's another story....
