Teachers should be celebrating today after winning what amounts to a total capitulation by the Government on the issue of parity between civil servants and their profession.

Government had maintained that it was unfair to compare teachers, who work ten months of the year with civil servants, who work 12.

But in the end, all Government got the teachers to concede was to wait a year before jumping a grade.

Of course, this debate was somewhat misplaced to begin with; while teachers wanted parity, the debate should really be about what teachers are worth.

Several things are likely to happen now.

The first is that in about 12 months, the Government is going to have to find millions of dollars in taxpayers' money to pay teachers what they are already doing now. Some of that money will come from tax increases. The rest will come from spending cuts in other areas.

The second is that when the next round of pay negotiations for civil servants comes around, the Bermuda Public Service Union will push for either an extra two months holiday per year for its members, or for a pay increase to put them ahead of teachers again, at which point the cycle will start all over again.

The third point is that teachers have now established ? since it has not been contradicted by the Government ? that their duties begin and end in the classroom and do not include supervision of children during lunch breaks or, remarkably, invigilating exams.

And by taking this action over the last two weeks, they have demonstrated an utter and total disregard for the success of their students, the delay of Terra Nova assessment exams and in some cases, a shambles with regard to their GCSE exams.

This is not to say that teachers have it easy. They don't. It can be argued with some reason that you cannot pay them enough for what they do.

But the same argument can be made for many other professions as well. Somewhere along the line, fiscal sanity must come into play. And there also has to be some way to measure the performance of the schools.

Bermuda's Government schools now suffer from a major crisis of confidence. Parents who care about their children's education and can pay for private education are voting with their feet, and this has created two forms of segregation in the schools. One is racial, another is by wealth.

Nothing has been heard from the union, at least in public, about what it is prepared to do to restore confidence in public education.

Instead of talking about salaries, holidays and the rest, it would be worth, as some letter writers have suggested, establishing a separate pay scale for teachers. Another would be to tie performance to salary increases.

Finally, Government has to come up with a better way of negotiating with its unions. One of the claims of the Progressive Labour Party government was that it would be able to better negotiate with the unions than "pro-business" United Bermuda Party had.

The hollowness of that claim must be obvious to all by now. What the Government has done, with prison officers, teachers, blue collar workers and so on is to talk tough and then to collapse and give the unions what they want.