wait, you honestly believe that teachers are overpaid? yeah, a profession where you start off at $35,000/year (in some spots like Buffalo as low as 29k/year), where you are often forced to get your masters in order to keep your job after 5 years, and you have upwards of 35 kids in a classroom. Fact of the matter is that there are not enough teaching jobs that pay enough where the numbers of the kids isn't too high. Not too mention you have in some areas a culture against education, where the teacher is the bad guy.
Teachers get paid among the worst amounts of cash for the education required for their career. Ideally, a teacher should start off at about 40-45k/yr. have classrooms with average size of 17-24 kids, and a great amount of support from the school's administration and the community. Unfortunately for a good amount of the country, all 3 of these ideals are far from the reality.
WNY'ers can complain about their high education taxes, but the kids are generally intelligent enough to get into colleges at a higher rate than the rest of the country, and can go basically anywhere to get a job, except upstate New York. WNY'ers really need to get after the cronies that bleed money like a sieve in Erie County gov't without doing a damn thing.