Thirty-five years ago a survey of educators found that the biggest obstacle to learning in public schools was talking in the classroom. Today the challenges are astronomically larger.

This year, in thousands of classrooms across Long Island, the best crop of professional educators in the country are fighting an uphill action to help young people learn and succeed. Mostly they succeed. When they do, we're all winners.

Many parents secretly know that they don't communicate well with their children and teenagers. How can mom and dad compete with Britanny, MTV, super-hyped sports, sexual advertising, endless television, the lure of peers and friends and everything else pulling and pushing kids from family influence? Now imagine teaching 20 sleepy teenagers complex mathematics or poetry or European history at 7:45 a.m. on a Monday morning. For most of us, just learning the names of over 100 students a year would be challenge enough. But teachers do it, and here on Long Island they tend to do it very well.

They do it at a time when many of their students do not have happy mom and dad homes. Parents work longer hours than ever and come home exhausted. Schools and teachers are called on to be not just curriculum educators but social educators, social arbiters and social referees.

And because teachers help students to get their education so well here on Long Island, our property values have flourished. People buy homes in sprawled communities where the only possible attraction is the reputation of the public schools.

Teaching used to carry a kind of badge of poverty with it. It wasn't until the 1980s, after 20 years of work by teachers associations and community-minded residents, that teacher salaries began to rise to respectable levels. The average teacher, who has a master's degree and has worked more than a decade, earns some $67,000 on Long Island. A small handful who have doctoral degrees or a master's degree with 60 credits and decades in the classroom are now breaking the $100,000 per year mark. Our one daily newspaper screamed the news on its front page as if something up and bit all of us.

Many of the young people our teachers are grooming are going to go to law school or Wall Street and earn $100,000 their first year out. For licensed professionals with master's degrees, teachers are still not well paid. They should be paid well enough to be able to live on Long Island, and $67,000 is a good start.

If we paid for our schools through better taxes, based on the ability to pay, and not our anachronistic property tax which cannot respond to inflation or rises in costs, the bill for good teachers would be fairer for everyone. Meanwhile, let's remember that the teachers are on our side.