One of our favorite quotes, often attributed to Julian Bond, is: “In a contest between the shameless and the spineless, the shameless always win.”  And nowhere does that seem to be proved more frequently than in local government, where bumbling bureaucrats and feckless elected officials combine to mismanage our institutions and our tax dollars.

Tonight at 7:00 p.m., the District 207 School Board will be meeting at the Maine South H.S. auditorium to discuss what is looking like the latest spineless maneuver by the Board to appease its lord and master: the Maine Teachers Association, a/k/a, the teachers’ union.

As we reported in the 1/30/10 Update to our 1/26/10 post, “When The Inmates Run The Asylum,” District 207 is now planning to dip into its reserves when, just a couple of weeks ago, it was saying that it could not prudently do so.  That kind of flip flop reminds us of the classic courtroom cross examination question: “Are you lying now, or were you lying then?”

But with teachers playing administrators/businesspersons, and elected officials playing politicians, lying and ignorant incompetence are hard to separate.

Whether the District 207 Board and administration is lying, incompetent or just plain gutless, however, is beside the point: The teachers’ union is shameless, and has been so for at least the past decade.  That’s why teachers are getting paid sizeable annual salaries for only 2/3 or 3/4 of an actual work year, depending on how you count and consider vacation days, holidays, sick days, paid leave days, teacher institute (snicker) days, etc.

And they continue to receive something so wonderful, and so costly, that it has become virtually extinct in the real, private-sector world in which most of us toil: the defined benefit pension.  And let’s not forget tenure, and a job which has positively no chance of being relocated to another state or country.

Fed up with teachers’ union greed?  One of our readers, Kenneth Butterly, is.  And he sent us a copy of his letter [pdf] to District 207 and the case study [pdf] he refers to in his letter, along with the permission to publish both of them. 

Just to show we’re not unfair, however, we are also providing the MTA’s “Myth vs. Reality” propaganda sheet [pdf], which we obtained from its website and which focuses primarily on criticizing bad budgeting, accounting and management by the District’s administration and Board. 

We can’t disagree with that.  But that alone doesn’t mean the teachers aren’t greedy and unreasonable, especially when the District’s mismanagement consists in no small measure of constantly caving in to the teachers’ demands. 

Tonight we will see whether the School Board has a spine of steel or of mush. 

We hope we’re wrong, but we’re betting on the latter.  Because we know that, once again, the teachers union will be shameless.