It's disgusting how teachers in the USA are treated...

In many other countries around the world, ideally the teachers are looked upon as nation-builders.
On May 5, Indiana’s Republican Governor, Mitch Daniels, signed two bills into law establishing a statewide private school voucher program and expanding charter schools. The passage of these bills comes after two anti-teacher laws passed in April restricting collective bargaining rights to wages and benefits and tying evaluations and pay to student test scores. Together, these measures are a major step toward the dismantling of public education in the state.

The real irony of all the supposed "advantages" of private education are a hoax:

One of the two new bills, HEA 1003, will provide tuition vouchers, based on a sliding scale fee, for students to attend private or parochial schools of their choice. Families of four, earning up to $62,000, are eligible for some level of scholarship, making this the most expansive voucher system in the nation; 60 percent of Indiana residents will be eligible for the program.
The other bill, HEA 1002, creates a new state charter school board designed to open more charter schools, allows public schools to convert to charters under certain conditions, increases funding for virtual charter schools, and allows charter schools to move into closed public school facilities.
Indiana joins a growing number of states diverting public money from traditional public education to subsidize private schools. Many of these institutions have narrow admissions policies and oftentimes few to no credentials.

Indiana’s voucher program is the first in the country to offer vouchers to higher-income families and to students in any public school, not just those considered failing. The only restriction is that the student must have attended a public school for at least one year prior to applying for a voucher. The program is being phased in over a three-year period: 7,500 scholarships will be awarded in 2011-2012, 15,000 in 2012-2013, with the program becoming uncapped in 2013-2014. At that time, there will be no restrictions on the number of scholarships awarded, as long as families are within income guidelines.
Private schools serving grades one thru eight will receive up to $4,500 per student; those serving grades 9-12 will receive $4,964 per student. Any additional tuition charged by the school must be paid directly by the families, meaning that the best private schools can charge higher tuition in order to exclude working class children, including many minority and special-needs students. In addition, families without access to transportation will be limited to choices available only in their neighborhood, meaning that many low-income families will have few to no choices at all.
The bill also includes a tax deduction of $1,000 for each child in a private school or home school. This will lead to additional state revenue losses possibly totaling $3 million, which will presumably create further budgetary shortfalls for public education.

Indiana Democrats, meanwhile, launched a hollow protest against the Republican sponsored bills: fleeing the state for 35 days, the Democrats were able to force Republican lawmakers to agree to lower the cap on the number of students who can receive vouchers in the first and second years of the program by 25 percent. However, because the program is entirely uncapped beginning in the third year, these concessions are meaningless.

While Democrats pose as the defenders of public education, more than half of the “school choice” programs enacted over the past five years have been passed by Democratic legislatures or signed by Democratic governors. At the same time, the failure of the two major Indiana teachers unions, the IFT and ISTA, not only to stave off the voucher and school charter legislation, but also the earlier attacks on teachers’ collective bargaining rights and job security, is a clear indication of their bankruptcy.

The expansion of school vouchers is part of a long-standing attack on public education. The modern school voucher movement traces its history to the work of conservative economist Milton Friedman, who advocated a free market approach to education for nearly six decades. He is perhaps most notorious for providing the free-market blueprints adopted by Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s and 80s, which led to widespread privatization of public education, the segregation of poor students in low-performing schools and the driving down of teachers’ wages.

I guess we value the right to everyone to have an equal education?