I am a professional.

I do not earn hourly wages or punch a time clock. I am a salaried professional who works as long as needed to get the work done. My salary should reflect the importance of my profession in society.

I alone determine what, how and when to teach the components of my discipline within a range of recognized professional practices. I consult with my professional colleagues, but in the end I determine my teaching practices. I do not yield that curricular duty to textbook publishers or external agencies. While discipline knowledge may be universal, students are not uniform in experience background nor ability.

I teach both my discipline and my students. Students come into my course as unique students. They should graduate from my course as unique students.

I know my discipline thoroughly because a teacher cannot teach what a teacher does not know. And I know my discipline at least one level deeper than what I teach because I must get the lesson correct and be able to carry advanced students further. I have a broad liberal arts education because I am preparing students for a full life, not just for a job.

I have a unique set of communication skills that fit with a particular range of students. Other teaching colleagues have unique sets of skills as well that may often be different. By interacting with a variety of teaching personalities, students learn to interact with the variety of people they will encounter in life.

The duty of school administration and staff is to provide teachers and students with the support and resources we need.

Just as doctors are the core professionals of a hospital, teachers are the core professionals of a school. And just as the best of doctors lose patients, the best of teachers lose students. This does not mean that doctors want patients to die or teachers want students to fail, but that despite our best efforts, there are many factors beyond our control that are involved in the medical and teaching arts.

Teaching is an art. And artists vary in how they practice. A teacher who inspires one student may not inspire another.

As a teacher I am a role model for honesty, work and study ethic, and dignity. Within the context of my discipline, I work with my students. –To reinforce honesty. –To encourage hard work and study. –To promote personal dignity. –To practice students in tolerance and respect for others who differ in language, race, religion, physical features, gender, intelligence and values. –To require respectful behavior so they will in turn deserve respect. –To help students grow to become young ladies and young gentlemen.

I have a responsibility to be excited about my discipline. But each student is responsible for his/her intrinsic motivation.

I will evaluate each student’s intellectual growth with fairness and I will not characterize a student by any single examination. I alone will develop or select the evaluations to be used in my coursework. My teaching will be driven by my students’ needs, not by any external impersonal criteria. I will work to know each student personally, knowing that the totality of a student’s abilities are beyond simple measures and that an examination is not an education.

I will continually update my knowledge in my discipline and in education in order to improve my effectiveness as a teacher. I alone will select my professional development. My school will fully support my professional decisions in self-improvement.

Any country with a future will fully support the teaching profession because all other professions depend upon teachers to educate their future professionals. For without professional teachers, a country has no future.

John Richard Schrock is a professor at Emporia State University.

Happy New Year, Kansans! A new legislative session begins soon, and troubled state finances once again top the agenda. Kansas staggers forward in a perpetual budget crisis that our lawmakers have been unable—or unwilling—to solve.

The basic problem is simple. Kansas does not have enough income to meet expenses.

The cause of the problem stems directly from the Brownback income tax cuts. Those tax policy changes indisputably led to a sharp decline in the state’s revenue stream. As a result, in the last three years, Kansas has consistently spent more than it takes in, a practice that makes the state poorer and poorer.

At first, lawmakers made up the difference between declining income and growing expenses by drawing down cash reserves. A $709 million bank balance went to zero in less than two years.

With the bank account empty, lawmakers began drawing hundreds of millions from other state government accounts. The highway fund has been the prime target, but many other funds, including those set aside for early childhood programs and economic development, were also sacrificed in the attempt to keep the general fund solvent.

Of course, lawmakers also tried hard to cut expenses. Funding for public schools, a prime responsibility of the state, has been pulled down far below where it should be. State hospitals and prisons remain understaffed. The current budget slashes planned maintenance on roads and bridges. Yet, even these efforts have not lowered expenses nearly enough to make them fit within the dramatically diminished revenue stream.

The budget imbalance became so acute last year that even conservative lawmakers voted to raise the sales tax rate, a move that further shifted the state’s tax burden to low- and middle-income Kansans. The sales tax increase improved the overall revenue stream, but it did not come close to solving the problem.

The Brownback tax cuts brought the revenue stream down so significantly that truly damaging expense cuts coupled with a sales tax increase have not repaired the budgetary mess.

The financial problem and its cause are easy to identify, and so is the solution. Revisit the income tax cuts, which were far too deep.

Don’t expect that, though.

Gov. Brownback has announced that he does not want to deal with any tax changes this session. Nor do the conservative legislators who voted to raise the sales tax. 2016 is an election year for all members of the Legislature, so many would prefer that Kansans forget what happened in the last legislative session. It’s also unlikely that expenses will go down. In their latest gambit to lower spending, lawmakers voted to pay a consulting firm $2.6 million to find “efficiencies” for them. The results are not all in, but the early recommendations from the contractor suggest selling KDOT woodchippers and paying bills late—a very inauspicious start.

When baseball great Yogi Berra died in September, the media replayed many of his famous witticisms. A favorite, “It’s like déjà vu all over again,” was reportedly first uttered by Yogi when Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris repeatedly hit back-to-back home runs in the 1961 season. Yogi didn’t know it then, but his phrase applies to the Kansas budget now.

Another year. Another budget crisis. Déjà vu. If our lawmakers again avoid the real solution by taking even more money from the highway fund, or by borrowing, or by exercising “creative accounting,” and if we buy the governor’s recent declaration that “we are going to be in good shape,” then Kansas will arrive at January 2017 with yet another budget crisis. But our state will be poorer and another year behind. It will be like déjà vu all over again.

Duane Goossen is a Senior Fellow at the Kansas Center for Economic Growth and formerly served 12 years as Kansas Budget Director.

What a strange, challenging and dangerous year it was for First Amendment freedoms, at home and abroad.

2015 was but seven days old when terrorists, claiming to be angry over the publishing of satirical drawings of the Muslim prophet Mohammed, burst into the offices of the French weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people.

The tragedy sparked a worldwide outpouring of support for free expression — remember the signs and t-shirts declaring “Je suis Charlie” — I am Charlie? But the incident also prompted draconian proposals in France to limit certain kinds of free expression and new restrictions on Muslims simply because of their religious faith. And Nov. 13 attacks in Paris in which 130 died only added fuel to that.

As the year unfolded, free expression in the United States took a hit in the most unlikely places — at least to the Boomer generation which carried the protest banners in the 1960s of the “free speech movement”: Colleges and universities. Campus critics assailed everything from ideas and opinions they believe may make some uncomfortable, to professorial musings on subjects from gender to Halloween costumes, to the notion of inviting speakers with controversial or even repugnant views.

And at some schools — most visibly, at the University of Missouri, the home to a venerable journalism program — demonstrators against racism and bigotry assaulted freedom of the press even as they exercised their rights of free speech, assembly and petition. A group of activists including students and a few faculty members tried to keep student journalists from reporting on the protests at the public university — producing both a memorable pair of online videos capturing the confrontations, and perhaps the year’s best public example of the meaning of “irony” if not civic ignorance.

On the World Wide Web front, the ongoing War on Terror produced proposals to restrict or deny use of the Internet by groups like ISIS and raised again the old notion of banning “hate speech” from public discourse. The proposals came from both conservatives and liberals, who supported such censorious activity for reasons as varied as national security, public safety or simply as the means to purge unpopular or negative views from the “marketplace” of ideas.

Internet giants such as Facebook, You Tube and Twitter already have implemented strategies to take down posts by ISIS killers and recruiters using images of unspeakable violence to promote their views and recruit new followers. But there were calls for even more social media sanitizing to counter the sophisticated online strategies of militant groups promising earthly rewards and an eternal paradise.

Taking down videos of brutal murders beheadings and rants about killing Westerners are relatively easy calls. But Eric Schmidt, who leads Google, went a step further than most in voicing the idea of an algorithm that would relentlessly prowl the corridors of the Web searching and eliminating hateful speech — an Orwellian concept of censorship-by-technology that went even further than “1984” author George Orwell imagined.

In November, leading Democratic and Republican candidates for their party’s presidential nominations called for various kinds of “Silicon Valley solutions” to terrorists on social media — while mocking those who would raise First Amendment objections to silencing speakers as an alternative to producing positive messages and dealing with social and political issues being exploited by ISIS and others.

The year ended with the specter of journalists’ deaths again in headlines.

On Dec. 21, GOP front-running candidate Donald Trump mockingly discussed killing reporters (“I hate some of these people”) at a Grand Rapids, Mich., rally, to the laughter of some attending. He questioned reports that Russia had murdered some journalists, and said “I would never do that … It’s horrible,” but then finished with the observation “some of them are such lying, disgusting people.”

Just a few days laters came the annual, somber reports by the Committee to Protect Journalists and by Reporter Without Borders on the numbers of journalist worldwide jailed or killed in 2015. The CPJ report noted that “of 69 journalists killed for their work in 2015, 40 percent died at the hands of Islamic militant groups such as Al-Qaeda and Islamic State. More than two-thirds of the total killed were singled out for murder,” rather than dying in accidents or as the result of military conflict.

Freedom House reported in its 2015 annual report that “global press freedom declined … to its lowest point in more than 10 years. The rate of decline also accelerated drastically,” with just 14% of the world’s population living in nations “where coverage of political news is robust, the safety of journalists is guaranteed, state intrusion in media affairs is minimal and the press is not subject to onerous legal or economic pressures.”

Even on New Year’s Eve, free expression was under assault. There were reports that the various Web sites and digital services operated worldwide by the BBC — the international news operation headquartered in London — faced cyberattacks that blocked or crippled operations throughout the day.

The 2016 presidential election seems certain to raise again the First Amendment-grounded debate over restrictions on campaign spending and contributions and attempts to reverse the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision removing most limits on spending by corporations and unions.

Some First Amendment experts are now open to modifying a long-standing barrier to government suppression of free speech that is not a “clear and present danger” in light of the new and pervasive ability via social media and the Web to provide a far-reaching platform for those promoting negative messages.

The new year starts with “atmospherics” as measured by public opinion polls that are not kind to protecting First Amendment freedoms, from reports that a sizable number of Millennials have no problem with government officials or the Pentagon reviewing or controlling a free press and free speech in the name of public safety, to a survey showing overall faith in democratic ideals is fading among younger voters.

Still, a large majority of Americans — in the Newseum Institute’s annual State of the First Amendment annual survey — do not see those core freedoms as “going too far in the rights they protect.” And as the late founder of the Institute’s First Amendment Center, John Seigenthaler, observed: “First Amendment freedoms are never secured but are always in the process of being made secure.”

Keep that last thought in mind, in 2016. Happy New Year.

Gene Policinski is chief operating officer of the Newseum Institute and senior vice president of the Institute’s First Amendment Center. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter: @genefac