No, I don't want retired teachers to give anything up. It is not right to ask a person who is 60/65 and already retired to give it all up. However, someone who is 30 has time to save and needs to give up the same retirement plan that the current retirees have.
Where do you draw a line like that? I'm 45 and have paid in a considerable amount of money toward a teacher pension -- would you throw me in with the 30-something teachers, or do my 19 years qualify me to stay in the pension fund? Legally, there is no question. Promises were made to me 19 years go when I began teacher, and they can't renege on those now. BUT the people who were hired
after me came in under slightly less generous pension rules, and IF I were to have a break in employment I'd come back in under those rules too.
Here's the real issue . . . From a financial standpoint, teaching has always been a trade off: Teachers make small paychecks (after 19 years I'm at the 45K mark -- less than I was making two years ago), but those who stayed in for a full 30 years got a moderately nice pension for the rest of their lives (I expect my pension will be just under 2K/month). This worked back in the 50s, 60s, 70s, maybe even the 80s. Why? Because MANY women taught for a few years, and then when they had kids they quit. For good.
Many of those women never reached the five-year mark, so they were never vested and will never receive a penny from the pension fund (and the state gets to keep what they paid in for the few years they worked). In those days, women weren't so concerned about their own retirement: The expectation was that their husbands would earn a good salary, and he'd take care of retirement. Up until a few years ago it was true that 3 out of 5 teachers never finished 5 years of teaching, the biggest turn-over being in elementary education.
NOW it's expected that women will work most of their lives, and since most teachers are female, that has affected the pension world. More and more teachers are reaching the 30-year mark and earning those pensions. SO in the past the state was collecting from a bunch of young teachers, and then paying out only to a few . . . and today those young teachers aren't abandoning their few years of pension-input, and more are making it to the 30-year mark.
Also, don't overlook the fact that in the states where the pensions are still stable (my state's #2 in the US in terms of teacher pension stability), the teachers are paying INTO the retirement fund -- it's not a gift on top of our salaries -- AND the legislators have kept their grubby fingers out of that particular pot.
Maybe we'll return to the days when parents were solely responsible for the education of their children (pre public school movement). Do it yourself (home schooling), hire a tutor, send to private school. The "Good Old Days". Interesting to speculate where that would take us. Education for the masses would be a thing of the past. Could save a lot of tax dollars.
Interesting question. My personal opinion: 20 years from now education'll look different than it does today. Public school'll always be here. We as a society have such a desire to take care of everyone, even people who don't care a bit about themselves or their futures. We're not going to stop offering education to these people.
But I do see quality slipping, and I suspect that more and more people WHO CAN will pull their kids out for alternative educational options. So we're going to see a greater disparity between the "haves" and the "have nots". We're also going to see big differences between the "haves" -- some are going to be vastly superior to today's best students, and others'll have all the flash but no real substance behind their educations.
The really lovely, experienced teachers are jumping ship in droves. It just isn't worth the risk for them to try to stay, only to be laid off. So they are retiring, taking the resignation incentive, leaving voluntarily instead of waiting for the ax to fall. It makes me sad.
There aren't a lot of people in my age bracket teaching, but we've had a signficant change in our emotions towards our jobs this year. By and large, those of us who weren't any good have already left, and we've been the leaders and backbone of the school for a while now. And in the last two years we've had our salaries slashed, our class sizes increased, and our out-of-class job requirements increased. We're not close enough to retirement to take early retirement (25 years is still a decent pension), but we're not as decicated as we once were. We've been broken.
We had more teachers cut at our school than the high schools with 2,000 kids. Some schools have no projected increase in attendance rates, but were given 12 new teacher spots
