Earlier this month I talked about teacher pensions on a panel at the annual summit of the Policy Innovators in Education (PIE-Network). In anticipation of the conference, I spent some time pondering my best arguments for why education advocates should invest their time and political capital in pensions, as opposed to everything else they might want to work on (like Common Core, teacher prep, charter schools, school funding, etc).
Although I do a lot of work on pensions, this is an ongoing internal debate for me personally, because I care deeply about these other things as well. So why do I, and why should education advocates, invest in pension reform? This is my argument, in a short PowerPoint form:
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