When I watch or hear some of today’s teaching professionals whine about their rights and wages (while sprinkling into their tirades about how it’s really all about the children), I could go off on a tangent that would be unprintable in this particular venue.

There are unionized public school teachers who make taxpayers — and the lawmakers who are the guardians of their hard-earned tax dollars — the guilty parties for allegedly not wanting to give teachers the relaxed standards and increased pay and benefits they demand. Again, they claim it’s all really for the children.

Some of these teachers have taken unauthorized leave from their jobs to protest and harass their targets. In doing so, they have left thousands of children to fend for themselves for the daily duration.

What’s even worse is that some organizers/teachers are even being publicly rewarded for coordinating hookey-playing teachers’ unauthorized activism.

As reported by the “Michigan Capitol Confidential” website of the Mackinac Center:

On Dec. 11, the Taylor School District closed because so many of its teachers skipped school to go to Lansing to protest right-to-work legislation. As a result, about 7,500 students in Taylor were forced to miss classes that day.

For organizing that “sick out” protest, the American Federation of Teachers-Michigan gave Taylor teachers’ union president Linda Moore an award for “outstanding organizing.”

It was part of a larger “sick out” that plagued three school districts and forced around 26,000 Michigan kids to miss school. That meant countless working families had to scramble to find childcare (or left the kids at home with the remote control as a babysitter) with little advance notice.

This is a problem that President Obama is citing as an unacceptable consequence of the federal budget sequester. But the inconvenience is apparently not a crisis when the goal is a liberal priority.