
California teacher pension debt overwhelms school budgets - prostoalex
https://calmatters.org/articles/california-teacher-pension-debt/
======
claydavisss
Fortunately for the teachers, Californians have a very short memory.

All the teachers need to do is survive for the four-to-five years it takes
Californians to forget what they have voted for. Then they can roll out a
Proposition or local bond measure scolding voters for not funding education.
Techies and other knowledge workers in particular respond very well to this
kind of prodding which is why these measures pass reliably every four to five
years but tend to fail if done too frequently. The unwise teachers in my town,
Los Gatos, recently tried to shake down voters before the buildings promised
by the previous bond measure were constructed.

The same is done with transit funding...I can't remember how many times a
Measure or Proposition has passed that has promised to "finally" address
transit funding...until four years pass and it is time to "finally" address it
again.

~~~
gisely
Do you really think of teachers as a community of people who try to perpetrate
scams on the general public? I'm trying to count on one hand all the teachers
I know who are sitting fat the money they bilked from the voters, but I'm just
not getting very far. Perhaps a more plausible explanation is that education
funding measures reoccur repeatedly because public education is chronically
underfunded as a standard budget item?

~~~
anoncoward111
I'm sorry, but my mom made $125,000 pre tax as a teacher every year in NY and
retired with a very similar pension payable to her and her husband until
death.

I am their son. I am college educated, I make $50,000 per year on average and
I've been laid off 3 times over my 6 years of post college employment. I have
never been offered a 401k, which is a particularly ineffective retirement tool
anyway.

How are teachers underfunded again? Maybe in certain underfunded
neighborhoods, but not all. And their employment is pretty secure.

~~~
e40
I don't have a problem with the salary. What I have a problem with:

1\. Pension spiking. Happens for teachers, though not as much as other public
employees.

2\. The pension should be funded from investments, not some optimistic guess
as to the return on those investments.

3\. It should be easier to fire a bad teacher. I realize this is hard, but
we've all heard the stories. In my excellent school district, you apparently
have to be caught sexting teenagers to get fired, even though a lot of people
had reported the offensive behavior, many times over many years. While most of
my son's teachers are excellent, a few of them shouldn't be anywhere near
students of any sort.

~~~
bilbo0s
"...It should be easier to fire a bad teacher.."

This is a problem with most public employees though. It's not necessarily
unique to teachers. Try to fire a bad cop for instance. Just won't happen. Or
a bad database analyst at your State's Department of Administration or
whatever. You just can't do it.

~~~
MrMember
A DMV employee slept several hours a day every day for years and wasn't fired.

[https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-
now/2018/07/24/ca...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-
now/2018/07/24/california-dmv-worker-slept-thousands-hours-job-report-
says/830618002/)

------
hirundo
> All Government employees should realize that the process of collective
> bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public
> service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to
> public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make
> it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the
> employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations.

\-- Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1937
[http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15445](http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15445)

~~~
analog31
Unfortunately, we haven't figured out how to make teaching career-worthy
without collective bargaining. Perhaps the best case study for non-union
teaching is the workforce of adjunct teachers at universities. Talk to some
adjuncts about their "careers." Disclosure: I was an adjunct for one semester
at a big ten university, many years ago.

~~~
scythe
>adjunct teachers at universities

There is a glut of adjunct candidates with a PhD and a postdoc who can't get
TT but there are relatively few with teaching degrees. The oversupply of
adjuncts happens because they are the unsuccessful seekers of a much better
job -- tenured professor -- but there is no similar situation for teachers.
The economic analogy therefore won't fit, because the supply of teachers will
respond to price signals more than the supply of adjuncts.

~~~
analog31
Indeed, but the requirement for a teaching degree is actively defended by the
union, and is on a tenuous footing. It's not required for private K-12
schools, where pay and benefits are in fact drastically lower. The government
of my state (Wisconsin) has moved to relax teacher licensing requirements for
public schools.

When I was an adjunct, I had no interest in getting onto the tenure track, or
in teaching as a career. I was simply new in town and needed a job.

------
Apes
California progressives have a sort of "feast the beast" strategy. Provide
massive benefits on loan. When those loans come due, raise taxes to pay for
them. Repeat until the government fails due to overconsumption.

Why can neither side just follow a sane general strategy of setting taxes and
choosing the best benefits to fit under the revenue generated?

~~~
e40
_California progressives have a sort of "feast the beast" strategy_

Why is this just a progressive thing?

~~~
leereeves
It's in contrast to the conservative strategy "starve the beast".

~~~
jewelthief91
IIRC conservatives don't have a great track record of following through with
this.

------
swifting
So long as public schools are treated as places that exist to provide
guaranteed jobs to members of the teachers' unions, do not be surprised to see
American students continuing to score lower on international tests than
students in countries that spend a lot less per pupil than we do.

\- Thomas Sowell

~~~
germinalphrase
What kind of “guaranteed job” are you talking about? As a teacher, I could be
let go without cause for my first three years and, subsequently, after two
poor performance reviews. Tenure merely requires the district to _attempt_ to
coach the teacher before firing them. I’ve seen teachers forced out of the
classroom simply because they don’t mesh with the personality of management.

Whatever horror stories about rubber rooms come out of NYC are not indicative
of the reality on the ground most places.

~~~
SaintGhurka
How long did it take to fire Mark Berndt? His behavior had been flagged for
decades but the school couldn't take action. Why did the school district
choose to pay him $40,000 to drop his appeal when he finally was fired?
Because even a case where a teacher was found to be feeding semen to
blindfolded students, the job protections were so strong that that the
district knew it was the cheapest and easiest way out to just pay him off.

I left California 3 years ago, so maybe this has changed, but at that time
there were countless stories about "teacher jails" where Los Angeles would
send teachers who should have been fired, but the process is so expensive and
fraught with appeals and obstructions that it was cheaper and easier to keep
them on the payroll - permanently. They would isolate them so they couldn't
have contact with students, but they'd go on paying them to go sit in empty
offices - for years.

The argument that tenure only adds requirements for coaching sort of
whitewashes over the practical challenges presented when a district needs to
let a teacher go.

~~~
dragonwriter
> How long did it take to fire Mark Berndt? His behavior had been flagged for
> decades but the school couldn't take action. Why did the school district
> choose to pay him $40,000 to drop his appeal when he finally was fired?

Because of management negligence (and worse) in dealing with, documenting, and
preserving documentation of earlier incidents, including the district at one
point systematically destroying records relating to sexual abuse at district
schools.

The problem was not the rules requiring documented cause for firing, the
problem was management repeatedly covering for him and other abusers,
including by destroying evidence.

Management misconduct doesn't justify giving more arbitrary power to
management. Though, of course, that's what management likes to argue for
whenever its own misdeeds are at issue.

~~~
SaintGhurka
But once it came out, once he was actually caught feeding semen to students,
it was STILL hard to fire him.

Sure, you can make a case that management failed to document his previous
behavior so they had to start over from zero and document, counsel, coach,
whatever the contract requires, but once he was actually busted for
ejaculating in kids food - how is it reasonable that they couldn't fire him on
the spot?

~~~
dragonwriter
> But once it came out, once he was actually caught feeding semen to students

He wasn't actually _caught_ (or even formally accused of by the district in
its dismissal charges) doing that. Everything that came out and was cited as
the basis for his dismissal was the result of a photo lab reporting pictures,
and in the charges for dismissal what is identified as being on the cookies is
“an unidentified milky-white substance”. Notably, none of the reports of
sexual abuse that students identified were made around the same time to school
officials, or even the reported sexual context of the events in the
photographs used as the basis for dismissal charges, were even referenced in
those (exceedingly nonspecific) charges.

The management failures continued into the suspension and firing process.

------
maerF0x0
When I read articles such as this, where there are previous commitments that
were not sufficiently backed by the committers, I cannot help but feel 1)
Government services are ponzi schemes and 2) It seems only just to plunder the
wealth of the those who made the commitments in order to hold them to their
words.

------
makerofspoons
A potential solution: make school year round, eliminate the unnecessary summer
learning loss, and have new teachers pay into social security and a 401k like
other workers do. No more separate system, students will perform better, and
frankly I think parents will appreciate having more frequent short student
vacations through the year rather than one large summer and winter chunk like
we do now that causes problems with childcare and nutrition for low-income
families. The big reason teachers don't get social security is because they do
not work year round so the payout would be a fraction of what teacher pensions
pay out - with year round school we no longer need to compensate in this way
to make teaching a viable career.

~~~
djrogers
That’s not remotely true. Even a full social security payout wouldn’t come
close to the public employee union pension plans - in California it probably
wouldn’t be 1/4 of it.

In CA, teacher can retire making ~100k/yr, and get 105% of that as a pension
for life. Do you really think one of the most polioactive lobbying groups in
the state would let that disappear?

[1]
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewbiggs/2015/08/28/californ...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewbiggs/2015/08/28/california-
teacher-retirement-benefits-are-hardly-modest-but-calstrs-doesnt-want-you-to-
know-that/)

~~~
makerofspoons
My idea would be that they would not rely entirely on Social Security, they
would be funding a 401K alongside some sort of reasonable match from the state
instead, much like the deal people in the private sector get.

~~~
dragonwriter
> they would be funding a 401K alongside some sort of reasonable match from
> the state instead, much like the deal people in the private sector get.

While it may be a surprise for people who have worked in high demand fields,
lots of workers in the private sector have no 401k offered, and of those that
do, lots don't have any employer matching offered.

------
apo
_Teachers don’t get social security, and unlike firefighters or police
officers, most retirees earn modest pensions of about $55,000 a year._

This seems like the most important sentence in the entire article.

Why are California teachers paying into a separate pension system rather than
Social Security like everyone else?

What would it take to decommission STRS for CA teachers?

~~~
djrogers
> unlike firefighters or police officers, most retirees earn modest pensions
> of about $55,000 a year.

That’s a very misleading statistic - it represents an average service time of
about 24 years, barely more than half of a career. Full-career retirees
average 105% of their final year’s pay in pension benefits, or about double
what’s quoted here.

[1]
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewbiggs/2015/08/28/californ...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewbiggs/2015/08/28/california-
teacher-retirement-benefits-are-hardly-modest-but-calstrs-doesnt-want-you-to-
know-that/#acc59ec6d3d2)

~~~
magicalist
> _That’s a very misleading statistic_

Is it?

It sounds like you're not arguing that "most retirees" don't get that amount,
but that they don't deserve the amount they get.

------
scythe
Proposition 13 affects this situation in two ways: it reduces tax revenue and
it drives up the price of land, both of which cost money for the school
system.

------
bdamm
Governments seem to be increasingly enamored with paying for shortfalls by
issuing debt instruments such as bonds, then when the bonds come due issuing
ever-larger bond packages to cover the previous bonds plus the new debt. When
does this cycle break down? Is it when nobody is able to buy bonds any more?
Especially at the federal level I really struggle to understand the bond
market, particularly with such low returns. Who are these willing participants
in poor returns with bonds?

~~~
FPGAhacker
Buyers like government bonds because they are low risk of default. At the
federal level, the risk is nearly zero. The yield of a bond is a reflection of
the demand (inversely proportional), which itself is a reflection of risk
(also inversely, so yield is proportional to risk).

The federal government funds itself through bond sales and taxes. They could
choose to do all of one or all of the other.

But they could just keep rolling over debt into more bond sales, in
perpetuity, since the dollar is just a concept, and not a voucher for anything
physical. There is essentially no risk, beyond the dollar itself becoming
worthless. So if you need to park a million dollars for a few weeks,
treasuries offer a nearly zero risk option.

So government could run completely off bond debt. It might even be fairer than
taxes... the poor usually don't have a million dollars they need to park.
Government funding would come from the rich.

The reason for taxes is power. You can use taxes to control and direct the
population.

Before the US federal government believed they had the right to make drugs
illegal, they controlled them through taxes. You had to buy a tax-stamp to
move marijuana, but the government would rarely sell any such stamps. The drug
itself was not illegal, but not having the stamp on it was. [1] Later they
just went ahead and declared it "controlled" and didn't bother with the stamp
shenanigans.

Also taxing removes the leverage that bond buyers have (which would be the
decision not to buy). China owns a lot of us treasuries, and routinely uses
that as a bargaining chip.

Ultimately the fed uses a mix. Bond sales for monthly adjustments in spending,
taxation to control the populace. And there are various economic theories on
which is better, but I doubt anyone with such pure motives actually controls
any policy.

[1]
[http://www.druglibrary.org/Schaffer/hemp/taxact/mjtaxact.htm](http://www.druglibrary.org/Schaffer/hemp/taxact/mjtaxact.htm)

------
Spooky23
Better title: Systemic Budget Mismanagement Comes Home to Roost.

------
winkeltripel
mirror:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20180809161052/https://calmatter...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180809161052/https://calmatters.org/articles/california-
teacher-pension-debt/)

------
andy-x
"Teachers don’t get social security, and unlike firefighters or police
officers, most retirees earn modest pensions of about $55,000 a year."

$55,000 is a modest pension? That is a lot more than social security is
paying. Maybe we should move teachers to SSA?

~~~
dragonwriter
> $55,000 is a modest pension?

Yes, it is, especially compare to public safety pensions it is compared to.

> That is a lot more than social security is paying.

Social security is a minimal safety-net pension designed to mitigate crushing
old age poverty (and it's barely adequate even to that task) in the event of
absence or failure of workplace-specific retirement plans, not a primary
retirement vehicle.

> Maybe we should move teachers to SSA?

You want the Social Security Administration to take over delivery of classroom
education from state and local agencies?

~~~
andy-x
Nope, I want to fix broken system. I'm not saying teachers should get SSA and
nothing else, like with many other businesses 403(b) should be available for
them. Point is that their future pension should be paid with their current
investment, not some future obligations.

------
nimish
Of course they do. As the article says, teachers don't get social security and
sacrifice current pay for future pay.

This is California's voters not wanting to pay for promises they made.

