the public benefits when teachers are paid well and work in a good environment - what well qualified teacher would want to work in a place that treats him like a slave? do you want your kids' teachers to be indistinguisable from wal-mart employees?
teacher unions organized precisely b/c that's how they were being treated, as slaves - how do you propose public employees exert influence to insure they're treated fairly? i suppose they could use the election process, but that's much more unwieldy and requires getting a lot of people who have no direct connection to the problem to get involved.
Things were better when teachers were single and family-less, travelling the prairie and lodging in townsfolk's homes. I think they used to get paid in whatever was leftover from the harvest or something. Those were the days.
Hopefully, Palin and her teabagging friends get elected so we can return America back to it's halcyon days of yore. Afterall, she knows how to field-dress a moose!