We've invited a range of panelists—from union leaders to economists to teacher voice organizations—to participate in an online forum on teacher pensions. We’ve collected their responses and have posted them here, in their own words, on a rolling basis this week.
Today's guest post comes from Elizabeth Evans, the founding CEO & board member of the VIVA Project, which works to dramatically increase classroom teachers’ participation in important policy decisions about public education. Elizabeth is a recognized national leader for building unconventional alliances and bringing innovative approaches to solving difficult public policy problems.
A “crisis” is sometimes in the eyes of the beholder.
If you are paid to manage a public pension fund, you’re not feeling much of a crisis. If you are elected to be accountable for public pensions, you are not feeling much of a crisis. If you are a state or municipal executive facing growing pressure on your annual operating budget, political pressure to hold the line on new revenue and an aging, growing or otherwise active workforce, you’re feeling a fiscal crisis. Too often, rather than tackle broader fiscal priorities head on, it might be convenient to call it a “pension crisis”.
In the face of this dynamic if you are a public employee, teachers included, you are likely a little, or more than a little, nervous about your pension management.
The public pension crisis has a lot to do with the broader broken compact between Americans and their government over fiscal priorities. Yet again, it’s a place where public school teachers are the leading edge of the great debate about what it means to be an American.
In conversations with teachers in Texas, Ohio, New York, and Iowa during the last week, I’ve discovered that a few things about the state of public teachers pensions. At VIVA, we’ve yet to take a head-on look at teacher pensions. That said, compensation is certainly a critical issue for the mission-driven educators who participate in a VIVA Idea Exchange.
Teachers definitely factor in their retirement planning as part of their job decisions. A teacher from New York made it clear that without a pension, he would leave teaching. A teacher in Texas, where most teachers do not have defined retirement benefit programs, reports many of her peers are working full time after retirement because they do not have adequate benefits to cover their basic living costs.
Ultimately, it’s up to us, the public, to decide how much we value public education and the professional staff we trust to educate our children. When we drive good teachers out of the profession because of poor financial security, we’re directly affecting students. All the teachers I spoke to recognize that their long-term financial security is vulnerable to the political and fiscal storms currently swirling through our government.
For example, a teacher in Iowa, a state with strong fiscal health and a substantial surplus, recently discovered that her pension contributions were recently raised to cover a multi-billion dollar shortfall in the state’s teacher pension fund. Now she’s wondering what the status of the fund will be when she’s ready for retirement (albeit a long way off). A teacher in Ohio put the teacher workforce demographic trends in more dramatic terms when he expressed hope that there would be public school teachers to support him when he’s ready to retire!
What can we do to assuage teachers’ concerns? We need to make sure our public interests align with our public investments. I mean this in both the general and specific sense. First, we need to repair our approach to governance and re-stitch our social compact with government employees. The current disdain too many people have for the existence of government - and by extension any and all government employees - is destructive and misguided. In addition, we need to broaden accountability for investment decisions and outcomes of public funds just as we are for teaching and learning. How about opening up accountability for public teacher pension fund management to much larger numbers of teachers? Several of the teachers I spoke to would like to have more options about where their money is invested. At minimum, they want more information about where teachers’ pensions are investing and how investment decisions are made.
At VIVA, we’ve proven that crowd sourcing technology can create new avenues for productive mass collaboration and demonstrate the public will for effective, achievable public policy improvements. Why not use technology to create innovations that allow public employees, and us taxpayers in general, to have more and better information about how our public pension funds are being managed? Let’s create new ways for investment managers to know what the beneficiaries of these funds need. The increased transparency could also create early warning systems that would prevent pension underfunding or avert widespread failures to provide retirement funds to our public school teachers.
At the same time, we need to let’s look beyond the pension issues and into the deeper challenges in our public budgeting process. We’ll need to re-build our public compact in order to achieve any of these goals.