Michigan Teacher upset because she can't retire at 47 as she had hoped....

And people wonder why we are 25th in the world in education....

This "teacher" is responsible for educating children and shows her contempt not just for her position as an educator but her total contempt for all others in her state. She wants what she is "entitled" to and doesn't care how it effects anyone else.

She is the tip of the iceberg as we will see thousands more like her who will look for the majority to do without because they were promised lifetime everything on that taxpayers by other government idiots.

To believe that anyone could be this out of touch with reality is mindboggling...


Teacher Upset She Can't Retire at 47
MEA member says reform bill calling for teachers to contribute minimally to retirement is unfairBy Tom Gantert April 18, 2012
www.michigancapitolconfidential.com

Terri List says she would tell her students not to become a teacher in Michigan.

Why?

One of the reasons is because the Saginaw Township Community School District English teacher won’t be able to retire at age 47 as she has hoped.

List was highlighted by the Michigan Education Association as one of the critics of Senate Bill 1040, which would require public school employees to contribute at least 5 percent of their compensation to their retirement plan.

The MEA reported on its website: "Saginaw Township teacher Terry (sic) List had hoped to retire in the next three years when she was 47 years old. That wouldn’t be possible under SB 1040. List would have to work another 16 years to be eligible for health benefits."

“By the time I’m 60, I would have put in 43 years of service, earning a salary at the top of the pay scale. How does that save the district money? You could hire two people for the cost of one and encourage young people to join the profession. Right now, I would not recommend to my pupils to become a teacher in Michigan.”

List didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.

According to the school’s most recent teacher’s contract, List earns between $70,000 and $80,000 a year depending upon her level of education. Factor in expected pay raises over the next 15 years and it’s likely List would make more than $90,000 by the time she retires, said Michael Van Beek, education policy director at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

Van Beek estimated List’s pension would be $60,000 a year in retirement and it would increase 3 percent a year and she would get health benefits when she retired at age 60. Van Beek also said that it is likely that List bought “years of service” because she said she would have 43 years of service by age 60. Van Beek said that practice is basically extinct in the private sector.

Leon Drolet, chairman of the Michigan Taxpayers Alliance, called List’s comments “amazing.”

“Wow. They have reached the politicians’ level of entitlement,” Drolet said. “She thinks she is entitled to retire at 47? Holy smokes. I don’t know what more to say to that. A government employee thinking that 47 is a reasonable expectation to retire shows just how deep inside their own bubble they live, insulated from the real world.”

Charles Owens, president of the Michigan chapter of the National Federation of Independent Business, said tongue-in-cheek that List was “spot on” in her complaint.

“If you want to retire if you are 47, apparently teaching is not the place to go,” Owens said. “The least Terri could do is provide a list of places other people could go so they can retire when they are 47.”

The Myth of the underpaid public school teacher

The party-line in political circles from DEMS and Unions is we need to spend more on public education. Teachers are underpaid and we need more money for education.

Bull.

We spend more per student in the US than any other country and get less back as our students rank 25th in the world, behind countries like Hungary and Poland. Poland! Where they were under the Soviet system up until about 25 years ago.

The Unions and the cohorts in political circles like to use the image of an overworked teacher for political gain. In reality, teachers are important but no less important than other workers. Yes, they educate children and that is important but so is the doctor, grocery workers who provide you with fresh food etc., etc. Teachers have a rigged system of tenure which leaves them isolated from performance review or scrutiny. Our education system is failing but the game goes on.

It is time we made education better, and that does not start with more $$$ for a group of workers who enjoy better wages & benefits than any other sector in today's economy. We pay too much for the poor return we get and it starts with putting the educators (Adminstrators too) under a microscope. There has to be a better way of educating our children and stopping wasteful spending.


Public School Teachers Aren't Underpaid
Our research suggests that on average—counting salaries, benefits and job security—teachers receive about 52% more than they could in private business
By ANDREW G. BIGGS And JASON RICHWINE - Wall Street Journal

A common story line in American education policy is that public school teachers are underpaid—"desperately underpaid," according to Education Secretary Arne Duncan in a recent speech. As former first lady Laura Bush put it: "Salaries are too low. We all know that. We need to figure out a way to pay teachers more."

Good teachers are crucial to a strong economy and a healthy civil society, and they should be paid at a level commensurate with their skills. But the evidence shows that public school teachers' total compensation amounts to roughly $1.50 for every $1 that their skills could garner in a private sector job.

How could that be? First, consider salaries. Public school teachers do receive salaries 19.3% lower than similarly-educated private workers, according to our analysis of Census Bureau data. However, a majority of public school teachers were education majors in college, and more than two in three received their highest degree (typically a master's) in an education-related field. A salary comparison that controls only for years spent in school makes no distinction between degrees in education and those in biology, mathematics, history or other demanding fields.

Education is widely regarded by researchers and college students alike as one of the easiest fields of study, and one that features substantially higher average grades than most other college majors. On objective tests of cognitive ability such as the SAT, ACT, GRE (Graduate Record Examination) and Armed Forces Qualification Test, teachers score only around the 40th percentile of college graduates. If we compare teachers and non-teachers with similar AFQT scores, the teacher salary penalty disappears.

While salaries are about even, fringe benefits push teacher compensation well ahead of comparable employees in the private economy. The trouble is that many of these benefits are hidden, meaning that lawmakers, taxpayers and even teachers themselves are sometimes unaware of them.

Data on employee benefits from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), for example, do not include retiree health coverage, which for teachers is worth about an additional 10% of their salaries. Because of differing accounting rules between the public and private sectors, BLS data also make teachers' defined-benefit pensions appear only slightly more generous than the typical 401(k) plan found in the private sector.

In reality, a teacher who retired after 30 years of service with an annual salary of $40,000 might receive guaranteed annual pension benefits of about $20,330. Under a typical private 401(k) plan, a guaranteed annual benefit might be only around $4,450 (assuming the money is invested in U.S. Treasurys and the employee buys an annuity).

BLS data on paid leave for teachers count vacation days only during the school year, omitting summer and long holiday breaks. A valid pay comparison should include this extra time off, in which teachers can enjoy longer vacations or earn additional income.

Properly counted, a typical public school teacher with a salary of $51,000 would receive another $51,480 in present or future fringe benefits. A worker in private business with the same salary would receive around $22,185 in fringe benefits.

Finally, despite recent layoffs, teachers still have greater job security than workers in private businesses. While employment in education declined by 2.9% between September 2008 and July 2011, according to BLS data, overall private-sector employment declined by 4.4%. Moreover, from 2005 through 2010 the unemployment rate for public school teachers averaged 2.1%, versus 4.1% for private school teachers and 3.8% for occupations that some consider comparable, such as computer programmers and insurance underwriters.

Job security protects against the loss of compensation suffered by the unemployed, and it also protects a position in which total wages and benefits are on average above market levels. This job security is surely valuable.

Consider that one-fifth of the highest-performing public school teachers in Washington, D.C., recently declined to give up even part of their job security in exchange for base salary increases of up to $20,000. According to our model—which factors in the probability of becoming unemployed, the average duration of unemployment, the level of unemployment insurance benefits, and the risk aversion of public employees—job security is worth about an estimated extra 9% of compensation.

One important caveat: Our research is in terms of averages. The best public school teachers—especially those teaching difficult subjects such as math and science—may well be underpaid compared to counterparts in the private sector.

Nevertheless, most public school teachers would not earn more in private employment. According to our analysis of the Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation, the average person who moves into teaching receives a pay increase of almost 9%, while the average teacher who leaves for the private economy must take a pay cut of over 3%.

This is the opposite of what we would expect if teachers were underpaid. It also helps explain why more people seek teaching jobs—as measured through the number of teaching graduates and applications for teaching positions—than can possibly find them.

In short, combining salaries, fringe benefits and job security, we have calculated that public school teachers receive around 52% more in average compensation than they could earn in the private sector.

The compensation premium is especially relevant today, as states and localities struggle with budget deficits. Restraining the growth of teacher compensation—in particular, pension and retiree health benefits that outstrip what comparable private-sector workers receive—could help balance budgets and perhaps restore school resources lost to rising labor costs. Broader pay reform should give school administrators greater flexibility to reward the best or most-needed teachers with high salaries and benefits, while encouraging the least effective ones to improve or to leave the profession.

Effective reform, however, requires knowing all the facts about teacher pay. Policy makers and the public should not accept at face value that the typical teacher earns far less than he or she would in the private sector. The evidence points to a very different conclusion.

Mr. Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Mr. Richwine, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, are authors of the new paper, "Assessing the Compensation of Public School Teachers" (aei.org/paper/100259).

Like Pigs at the feeding trough - Educators line themselves up for taxpayer-funded benefits of $100,000 a year or more

The fact that the number of $100K pensions has skyrocketed is a key indication that the people setting themselves up for these outrageously high retirements have no care for anyone else but themselves. Greedy Bastards who claim to have worked for this waste of taxpayers money. The educators only paid in 11% of their pay in and in return collect the other 89% from the taxpayers......Nice return when you get 800% back on your investment.

They claim that they are entitled to it because they worked hard over their careers...the many taxpayers who will be footing the bill for these blowhards worked hard also, they just didn't have a HACK based & written law mandating a major ripoff of the taxpayers assisting them.

These HACKS can make up all the reasons they want to justify this ripoff of the taxpayers. It is still an affront to all those who have to pay the way for these ripoff artists who have used the law to feather their own nest with a " I got mine" selfish attitude.

Educator’s pensions skyrocket
Expert: ‘Urgent need for reform’
By Chris Cassidy - Boston Herald
Monday, July 25, 2011

The number of retired Bay State public school employees raking in six-figure pensions has skyrocketed — more than doubling in just four years — contributing to a booming retirement bonanza that could plunge the Bay State into a deep financial crisis unless lawmakers move quickly to fix the system, experts told the Herald.

The latest pension records indicate 140 educators, most of them administrators, are enjoying retired life with taxpayer-funded benefits of $100,000 a year or more — up from 93 in 2009 and 55 in 2007, a Herald investigation found.

Topping the list is retired Randolph Superintendent Arthur Melia, with an annual pension of $147,492.

“I always strived to be No. 1 at everything, you know?” Melia told the Herald. “This was part of the law and part of what I earned over 32 years.”

Former Concord Superintendent Brenda Finn ($145,724) and retired Whittier Vocational Superintendent Karen Sarkisian ($142,913) round out the top three.

The June 30 figures from the Massachusetts Teachers Retirement System also showed educators’ pensions last fiscal year totaled $2.1 billion, up $300 million in two years.

“This is a serious problem, and there’s an urgent need for reform,” said Michael Widmer of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. “Just as companies have found they can’t afford defined pension plans because they’re too rich, governments are finding the same problems.”

“This is the tip of the pension iceberg,” said David Tuerck of the Beacon Hill Institute. “Sooner or later Massachusetts will reach a crisis point, where we find ourselves unable to maintain normal functions of government and are unable to pay for these pensions because of resistance of taxpayers to further tax increases.”

Critics point to the state’s generous formula that gives public retirees 80 percent of their three highest consecutive earning years. They warn the state is putting off the day of reckoning.

“They need to act fast,” said Jim Stergios of the Pioneer Institute. “This is something that’s not going away, and it’s going to eat up other services we’re trying to afford”

Gov. Deval Patrick introduced a pension reform bill in January that would push back retirement ages and base pensions on a retiree’s five highest years of service. A legislative subcommittee held a hearing in March and is considering other ideas, including putting a maximum cap on pensions, and expects to present a bill in early fall, state Rep. John Scibak said.

“The real thing I’m striving for is a system perceived both by state employees and the general public as fair and equitable,” said Scibak, who chairs the Public Service Committee.

The rising pensions are a result of a superintendent shortage and the grueling nature of the 24/7 job, which have driven up salaries, said Tom Scott of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents.

“There is a big problem with finding qualified people . . . even in this job market,” Scott said.

Paul Toner of the Massachusetts Teachers Association said strong pensions keep teachers from leaving the profession and that teachers now pay a higher percentage of their salary — 11 percent — into the system.

“A good pension is a major retention tool,” Toner said.

“When I run out of fights to have, I’ll stop fighting,” - NJ Gov. Chris Christie

A pretty good write up about what makes Chris Christie the rising star that he is in poltics....surprising it comes from the NY Times....

How Chris Christie Did His Homework
By MATT BAI / NY TIMES
Published: February 24, 2011

Like a stand-up comedian working out-of-the-way clubs, Chris Christie travels the townships and boroughs of New Jersey­, places like Hackettstown and Raritan and Scotch Plains, sharpening his riffs about the state’s public employees, whom he largely blames for plunging New Jersey into a fiscal death spiral. In one well-worn routine, for instance, the governor reminds his audiences that, until he passed a recent law that changed the system, most teachers in the state didn’t pay a dime for their health care coverage, the cost of which was borne by taxpayers.

And so, Christie goes on, forced to cut more than $1 billion in local aid in order to balance the budget, he asked the teachers not only to accept a pay freeze for a year but also to begin contributing 1.5 percent of their salaries toward health care. The dominant teachers’ union in the state responded by spending millions of dollars in television and radio ads to attack him.

“The argument you heard most vociferously from the teachers’ union,” Christie says, “was that this was the greatest assault on public education in the history of New Jersey.” Here the fleshy governor lumbers a few steps toward the audience and lowers his voice for effect. “Now, do you really think that your child is now stressed out and unable to learn because they know that their poor teacher has to pay 1½ percent of their salary for their health care benefits? Have any of your children come home — any of them — and said, ‘Mom.’ ” Pause. “ ‘Dad.’ ” Another pause. “ ‘Please. Stop the madness.’ ”

By this point the audience is starting to titter, but Christie remains steadfastly somber in his role as the beseeching student. “ ‘Just pay for my teacher’s health benefits,’ ” he pleads, “ ‘and I’ll get A’s, I swear. But I just cannot take the stress that’s being presented by a 1½ percent contribution to health benefits.’ ” As the crowd breaks into appreciative guffaws, Christie waits a theatrical moment, then slams his point home. “Now, you’re all laughing, right?” he says. “But this is the crap I have to hear.”

Acid monologues like this have made Christie, only a little more than a year into his governorship, one of the most intriguing political figures in America. Hundreds of thousands of YouTube viewers linger on scenes from Christie’s town-hall meetings, like the one in which he takes apart a teacher for her histrionics. (“If what you want to do is put on a show and giggle every time I talk, then I have no interest in answering your question.”) Newly elected governors — not just Republicans, Christie says, but also Democrats — call to seek his counsel on how to confront their own staggering budget deficits and intractable unions. At a recent gathering of Republican governors, Christie attracted a throng of supporters and journalists as he strode through the halls of the Hilton San Diego Bayfront Hotel like Bono at Davos.

While Christie has flatly ruled out a presidential run in 2012, there is enough conjecture about the possibility that I felt moved to ask him a few weeks ago if he found it exhausting to have to constantly answer the same question. “Listen, if you’re going to say you’re exhausted by that, you’re really taking yourself too seriously,” Christie told me, then broke into his imitation of a politician who is taking himself too seriously. “ ‘Oh, Matt, please, stop asking me about whether I should be president of the United States! The leader of the free world! Please stop! I’m exhausted by the question!’ I mean, come on. If I get to that point, just slap me around, because that’s really presumptuous. What it is to me is astonishing, not exhausting.”

There is, in fact, something astonishing about the ascent of Chris Christie, who is about as slick as sandpaper and who now admits that even he didn’t think he would beat Jon Corzine, the Democrat he unseated in 2009. Some critics have posited that Christie’s success in office represents merely the triumph of self-certainty over complexity, the yearning among voters for leaders who talk bluntly and with conviction. Yet it’s hard to see Christie getting so much traction if he were out there castigating, say, immigrants or Wall Street bankers. What makes Christie compelling to so many people isn’t simply plain talk or swagger, but also the fact that he has found the ideal adversary for this moment of economic vertigo. Ronald Reagan had his “welfare queens,” Rudy Giuliani had his criminals and “squeegee men,” and now Chris Christie has his sprawling and powerful public-sector unions — teachers, cops and firefighters who Christie says are driving up local taxes beyond what the citizenry can afford, while also demanding the kind of lifetime security that most private-sector workers have already lost.

It may just be that Christie has stumbled onto the public-policy issue of our time, which is how to bring the exploding costs of the public workforce in line with reality. (According to a report issued last year by the Pew Center on the States, as of 2008 there was a $1 trillion gap, conservatively speaking, between what the states have promised in pensions and benefits for their retirees and what they have on hand to pay for them.) Then again, he may simply be the latest in a long line of politicians to give an uneasy public the scapegoat it demands. Depending on your vantage point, Chris Christie is a truth-teller or a demagogue, or maybe even a little of both.

To say that New Jersey has a budget problem wouldn’t really be accurate. The state has at least three major budget problems related to the costs of the public workforce, all of which contribute to a shortfall that the state’s legislative accounting office projects to be almost $11 billion this year — an amount that’s more than a third of the state’s total budget. And in order to understand what’s happening in statehouses all over the country, and what Christie is trying to do about it in New Jersey, it helps to have some sense of how these problems tie together.

First, there’s the local aid. New Jersey sends 40 percent of its annual budget to an overlapping tangle of 566 municipalities and 600-plus school districts, in order to help them slow the mutantlike growth of local property taxes, which are among the highest in the country. Each of these little hamlets and districts negotiates its own labor contract with the police and firefighters, sanitation workers and, most consequentially, teachers, which means the contracts established by the most affluent communities end up setting a statewide standard — a process that drives up everyone else’s costs to a level that the local governments simply can’t sustain by themselves.

Second, in the long term, New Jersey doesn’t have nearly enough money on hand to cover its pension obligations to teachers and other state workers. At no time in the last 17 years has New Jersey fully met its annual obligation to the pension fund, and in many of those years, the state paid nothing at all. (That didn’t stop one governor, Donald DiFrancesco, a Republican, from increasing payouts by 9 percent and lowering the retirement age before he left office, which would be kind of like Bernie Madoff writing you a $1 million check before heading off to jail.) Even had the state been contributing faithfully to the fund as it was supposed to, however, there would still be trouble ahead. That’s because New Jerseyans, who are glass-half-full kind of people, have assumed an improbably healthy return of 8.25 percent annually on the state pension fund. The actual return over the last 10 years averaged only 2.6 percent.

Finally, the state will pay close to $3 billion this year in health care premiums for public employees (including retired teachers), and that number is rising fast. New Jersey has set aside exactly zero dollars to cover it. All told, in pensions and health care benefits, New Jersey’s “unfunded liability” — that is, the amount the actuaries say it would need to find in order to meet its obligations for the next 30 years — has now passed the $100 billion mark.

There was little in Christie’s uninspiring campaign to make anyone think he would address these issues with more tenacity than the governors who preceded him. A U.S. attorney whose only overtly political experience entailed serving on the Morris County Board of Chosen Freeholders (seriously, they still call it that), Christie had only a fraction of Corzine’s public exposure or personal fortune. About the only thing he had going for him was that Corzine was pervasively unpopular. And so rather than come up with a lot of actual ideas, which Corzine would then be free to oversimplify and distort in a barrage of television ads, Christie simply offered up a bunch of conservative platitudes and tried to make the campaign a referendum on the Democratic governor. (When we talked during the campaign, Christie could articulate little by way of an agenda, except to say that he would “get in there and make it work.”) Even a lot of Republicans thought Christie was underwhelming as a campaigner.

In the end, Christie won by about four points on Election Night in 2009, with little notion of what he was going to do next. When I asked him if there was any one moment of clarity that put him on the path from cautious candidate to union-bashing conservative hero, Christie pointed to a meeting about a month into the transition, when his aides came to him brandishing an analysis of the state’s cash flow produced by Goldman Sachs. They advised the governor-elect that, without some serious action, the state could fail to meet payroll by the end of March. After scrutinizing the budget, Christie told me, his team came to the conclusion that the only way to get control of local taxes and state spending was to go after the pension and health care benefits that the public-sector unions held sacrosanct. From that point on, it seems, Christie has conducted his governorship as if he were still a grandstanding prosecutor, taking powerful unions on perp walks with evident enthusiasm.

The centerpiece of Christie’s frenzied agenda, which passed the Democratic-­controlled Legislature last July, is a strict cap on local property taxes, which will be allowed to rise no more than 2 percent every year. When combined with a reduction in state aid, what this means, practically speaking, is that New Jersey’s townships and cities will have to hold the line when negotiating municipal labor contracts if they want to remain solvent, because they can’t rely on either their residents or the state for more money.

To help them do that, Christie has put forward 33 measures that are part of what he calls his “toolkit” for reform. These include, for instance, a proposal that would allow localities to opt out of the civil-service system altogether, giving them more control over hiring and firing local officials, and another that would limit the cash payouts that retiring workers can take for their unused sick days. On the pension front, if Christie has his way with the Legislature, most union members would contribute more to their plans than they have up to now, and all of them would retire later and receive lower benefit payments.

The crux of Christie’s argument is that public-sector contracts have to reflect what has happened in the private sector, where guaranteed pensions and free health care are becoming relics. It’s not surprising that this stand has ingratiated Christie to conservatives in Washington; advocacy groups and activists on the right have carried out a long campaign to discredit the ever-shrinking labor movement in the private sector, and what Christie has done, essentially, is to blast his way into the final frontier, taking on the public-sector unions that have come to wield enormous political power. More surprising is how the governor’s proposals are finding sympathy from less-partisan budget experts, if only because they don’t see obvious alternatives. “I’ve tried to look at this objectively, and I just don’t know of any other option,” says Richard Keevey, who served as budget director for a Democratic governor, Jim Florio, and a Republican governor, Tom Kean. “You couldn’t tax your way out of this.”

Union leaders, on the other hand, are howling. The heads of the police and firefighters’ unions say that Christie’s cuts to local aid have already cost the state several hundred firemen and police officers, and they warn that his 2 percent cap on property taxes will have dire effects on public safety, as more towns and cities try to shave their payrolls to conform with the cap. “I don’t think they’re going to get it until the body bags pile up,” Anthony Wieners, president of the police union, warns darkly.

Leaders of the teachers’ union, meanwhile, are apoplectic about Christie’s proposed changes to their pension plan, which they say will penalize educators for the irresponsibility of politicians. After all, they point out, it wasn’t the unions who chose not to fund the pension year in and year out, and yet it’s their members who will have to recalibrate their retirements if the benefits are cut.

When I made this same point to Christie, he simply shook his head. What’s done is done, he told me, and it’s time for someone to tell these workers the truth, which is that the state is simply never going to have the money to make good on its commitments. “Listen, if they want to travel in the Michael J. Fox time machine and change time, I guess we could try that,” he said. “We could get the DeLorean out and try to go back there. But I think realistically that that was just a movie and make-believe. So we’ve got to live with what we’ve got.”

Chris Christie is fat. You can use nicer words if you want — rotund, portly, big-boned — but it is what it is, and the governor will be the first to tell you so. And because he’s fat, a lot of people, consciously or not, tend to assume certain things about Christie — that he’s undisciplined and impulsive, graceless and bullying. (Corzine’s most brutal campaign ad accused Christie of “throwing his weight around.”) At times, Christie seems to exploit this persona. He likes to present himself as the proverbial bull in the china shop, the ungainly, somewhat boorish guy who lacks the artifice to keep from saying whatever obvious truth pops into his head. “I don’t think you elected me because of my charm and good looks,” Christie likes to say, just to show he’s in on the joke.

And yet, to portray Christie in this cartoonish way, as so many critics do, is to vastly underestimate his skill as a politician. The most sophisticated communicators of the modern era hammer at a consistent argument about their moment and the response it demands, and they choose carefully constructed metaphors to make the choices ahead seem obvious — think of Ronald Reagan’s morning in America, or Bill Clinton’s bridge to the 21st century. And Christie’s communications strategy is about as sophisticated as any you will find in American politics right now.

Take Christie’s choice of a somewhat mundane image, the “toolkit,” as a unifying frame for his proposals. As a metaphor, the toolkit works on two levels, depending on the audience. You can visualize it either in the sense of screwdrivers and hammers or, if you work in an office all day, you might envision it more as a software suite. Either way, the toolkit symbolizes flexibility and local control. It’s a way of saying that Christie isn’t putting unwieldy restrictions on towns and cities, as the cops and firefighters charge — he’s just empowering those towns and cities with a variety of implements and gadgets with which to attack their budget problems themselves.

In sustaining his assault on the public-employee unions, Christie knows he has to make his subject comprehensible. One reason that leaders in a state like New Jersey haven’t been able to get a handle on pension and benefit costs, despite years of dire warnings from good-government advocates, is that the subject is agonizingly dull and all but impossible to explain. There are myriad plans for all the different public-employee unions, various contribution formulas for each one and actuarial projections that require an advanced degree to unravel.

Christie, it turns out, has a preternatural gift for making the complex seem deceptively simple. Last month I saw him hold forth at a town-hall meeting in Chesilhurst, a South Jersey borough of about 1,600. Chesilhurst is about half African-American, and I sensed more curiosity than enthusiasm among the racially mixed crowd as it flowed into the little community-center gymnasium. An unusually large number of folding chairs were empty. About 20 minutes after the program was supposed to start, there came over the loudspeakers the kind of melodramatic instrumental that might introduce a local newscast, or maybe an Atlantic City magic show, and in came Christie, taking his position in the center of the crowd. The theme of the week was pension-and-benefits reform, and in his introductory remarks, Christie explained the inefficiency in the state’s health care costs not by wielding a stack of damning statistics, as some politicians might, but by relating a story.

When he was a federal prosecutor, Christie told the audience, he got to choose from about 100 health-insurance plans, ranging from cheap to quite expensive. But as soon as he became governor, the “benefits lady” told him he had only three state plans from which to choose, Goldilocks-style; one was great, one was modestly generous and one was rather miserly. And any of the three would cost him exactly 1.5 percent of his salary.

“ ‘You’re telling me,’ ” Christie said he told the woman, feigning befuddlement, “ ‘that no matter which one I pick, the good one or the O.K. one or the bad one, I’m going to pay 1½ percent of my salary?’ And she said, ‘Yes.’

“And I said, ‘Then everyone picks the really good one, right?’ And she said, ‘Ninety-six percent of state employees pick the really good one.’

“Which led me to have two reactions,” Christie told the crowd. “First, bring those other 4 percent to me! Because when I have to start laying people off, they’re the first ones!” His audience burst into near hysterics. “And the second reaction was, of course I would choose the best plan,” Christie said, “and so would you.

“Now listen, I don’t think this is groundbreaking stuff,” Christie added. “I don’t think this means that instead of being governor, you know, I should be at NASA, working on the space shuttle. I’m no genius. Just seems to me that if you give people an option to get something for nothing, they’ll take it.” Scanning the nodding faces around me, it seemed there wasn’t a person in the gymnasium, at that point, who wouldn’t have voted to make state workers and teachers pay more for the better plan.

Another thing Christie understands about political messaging, especially when your adversaries are out there portraying you as callous, is that it has to be grounded in the personal. “If you’re asking people to do some really difficult things, which I am asking them to do,” Christie told me, “then I think they feel more comfortable doing those things if they know you.”

And so the 48-year-old Christie makes a point of sharing intimate details of his life and times — that he uses an asthma inhaler, that he has struggled with dieting and exercise since his days as a high-school catcher came to an end, that his mother told him on her deathbed that he should go back to work because nothing between them had been left unsaid. That last one, which elicited audible gasps of sympathy from the audience in Chesilhurst, is his way of saying that he wants to leave nothing unsaid between him and the voters, either, even if they both occasionally get hurt.

“My mother said to me all the time, ‘Christopher, you’re going to have choices in your life between being loved and being respected,’ ” Christie told his rapt audience, strains of emotion creeping into his voice. “ ‘And you should choose respected. Because if you’re respected, love can come.’ She said, ‘But seeking love without also being respected — well that love doesn’t last.’ ” It was as if some weird brain-switching experiment had taken place, and somewhere, at that very moment, Oprah was giving a talk about state budgets and tax policy.

There’s one more piece of political narrative that Christie seems to grasp, which is that every story has both a protagonist and an antagonist, someone who stands for change and someone who plays the foil. Christie never had to look far to cast his ideal antagonists. They sit just across the street and one block down from the State House, in the building occupied by New Jersey’s major teachers’ union.

WITH 200,000 MEMBERS and more than $100 million in dues, the New Jersey Education Association is easily the most powerful union in New Jersey and one of the more powerful local unions in the country. In Trenton, the union’s organizing might — and its willingness to use that might to intimidate candidates and lawmakers — has sunk a small shipyard of promising careers. So it’s not hard to see why the twilight struggle between Chris Christie and “the bully of State Street,” as he likes to refer to the teachers’ union, has transfixed New Jersey’s political observers for the last year. It’s as mesmerizing as an episode of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey,” only harder to watch, mostly because Christie can be so unrelentingly brutal.

“We have similar personalities,” Stephen Sweeney, the Democratic president of the state Senate, told me recently, when ruminating on Christie’s style. “The difference between he and I is, I have an off switch and he doesn’t. You know, if I knock you down, I’ll pick you up, brush the dirt off your back, try to build a relationship and go forward. He knocks you down, like with the teachers, and he’ll stomp on you, kick on you until he can kill you.”

The war between Christie and the union has two fronts, so closely interrelated that it’s hard to separate them. First there’s the fight over budgeting issues like pensions and benefits. And then there’s the “year of education reform,” as Christie has proclaimed 2011, in which he intends to push his case for merit pay, charter schools and the abolition of teacher tenure — all of which are, of course, anathema to the union.

At times in this epic clash, it can be hard to know where personal animus leaves off and political gamesmanship kicks in. All that’s clear is that Christie seems to be winning at every turn. Last April, for instance, Christie claimed to be infuriated by a joke memo circulated by the president of the Bergen County chapter of the union. “Dear Lord,” it read in part, “this year you have taken away my favorite actor, Patrick Swayze, my favorite actress, Farrah Fawcett, my favorite singer, Michael Jackson, and my favorite salesman, Billy Mays. I just wanted to let you know that Chris Christie is my favorite governor.”

In a 15-minute meeting, the union’s president, Barbara Keshishian, apologized to Christie for the memo, but she refused to fire the Bergen County president, which further infuriated the governor. If his chief of staff had sent out such an e-mail, Christie told her, he would have been fired immediately. “That conversation embodies the elitism and the double standard that the teachers’ union thinks applies to them,” Christie told me last month, recounting the confrontation. We were sitting in the restaurant of the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, where state troopers and aides with cellphones buzzed around the empty dining room. Christie was in town to headline a dinner for the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce. “And you know what? I can’t entirely blame them for it, because politicians have treated them differently than everybody else, because they’ve been scared of them. And so part of the blame goes on the political culture of New Jersey that has helped to enable this elitist, double-standard attitude.”

The death-wish incident instantly became lore in Trenton and proved politically advantageous to the governor. It gave him a pretense to break off all communication with the union; he has refused to meet personally with Keshishian or her deputies since. And he has repeatedly used the ill-advised memo to portray himself as the courageous victim of unhinged union activists. At least once a week, it seems, he reminds some audience that the union once “wished for my death,” as if he were Robert Kennedy staring down the Teamsters.

Perhaps the most consequential episode between Christie and the union, at least as far as public perception was concerned, had to do with the pay freeze. Almost as soon as the scope of the budget problem became clear, the governor called on teachers, who received scheduled raises during the recession, to accept a one-year freeze. He reminded the teachers that a lot of private-sector workers felt lucky if they could keep their current salaries, and he said a voluntary freeze would enable the union to avoid widespread teacher layoffs in cash-poor school districts. Most local chapters of the union ignored him. Ultimately some 10,000 union members — teachers and support staff — saw their jobs eliminated. Christie hasn’t stopped talking about it since.

The union maintains that Christie’s plea was mere gimmickry, because the layoffs would have happened even if its local chapters acceded to the demand for a freeze. But even if this is true, it would seem to reflect a staggering lack of political calculation. Had the teachers agreed to take the short-term hit by acquiescing to a temporary freeze, it would have been worlds harder for Christie to then run around the state demanding longer-term concessions on pensions and benefits. And when the layoffs did materialize, the governor would most likely have shouldered most of the blame. Instead, the whole affair seemed to prove Christie’s point about the union’s self-involvement, and it enabled him to blame the teachers themselves for the layoffs.

During our conversation at the Hay-Adams, I suggested to Christie that the teachers had given him a valuable political gift by refusing to compromise. “I don’t look at it as a gift to me,” he replied. “I look at it as a huge mistake by them, and also a window into who they are.

“Let’s assume that they’re smart, because I think they are,” he went on. “So then, why don’t you do it? Because they believe they are entitled to it. They believe they are special and different and that they shouldn’t have to share the sacrifice. And that’s, I think, what’s ultimately driving public opinion against them.”

One afternoon last month, at the modern, airy headquarters of the N.J.E.A., I sat with Barbara Keshishian, the union’s president, and Vincent Giordano, its executive director, and listened as they tried to puzzle out why it was that Christie seemed so determined to humiliate them.

“Frankly, I for one don’t say we’re always 100 percent right on every single issue, and certainly neither is the administration across the street,” said Giordano, a bald and goateed organizer who has been at the union for 40 years. “The difference is the tone and the mean-­spiritedness of the way he talks about us. He has made us basically the whipping boy for anything that goes wrong in New Jersey and the country and in Bangladesh if there’s an earthquake. It seems that we’re just the cause of all the problems in our society today.

“I don’t know what he’s got buried down there inside of him that causes him to be this totally driven,” Giordano said. “I don’t think he’s really supportive of a public-education system. If he was, he might send his kids to public school, which he doesn’t.” (Christie and his wife, Mary Pat, a bond trader, have four children, ages 7 to 17, and all attend Catholic schools.) “I think he’s not very enamored with public services in general. Public employees, public education, public pension systems — somehow he’s allergic to the word ‘public.’ Somebody ought to get him some kind of medication that gets him off of that allergy he has to anything that’s public.”

The two union leaders made several points in defense of their stances against pension reform and the pay freeze. They pointed out that despite all Christie’s talk of shared sacrifice, he refused to renew a tax on millionaires in New Jersey that would have raised about $800 million this year — not enough to solve the state’s fiscal problems, certainly, but enough to restore most of the school aid that was slashed from the budget. They noted that they already made concessions on teachers’ pensions in 2007 and 2008, when they agreed to increase contributions by 10 percent and to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. They mentioned that the average salary of a New Jersey teacher is about $67,000, and the average pension is between $35,000 and $40,000. “Try living on that in the state of New Jersey,” Giordano said. “I don’t see why we’ve suddenly been identified as fat cats.”

In the union’s view, Christie is simply trying to exploit the downward spiral of the American labor movement. First, greedy companies, claiming pressures from the new global market, began rolling back the pensions and benefits that private-sector unions negotiated over a period of decades. And now, instead of trying to find a way to restore those hard-earned benefits for all workers, politicians like Christie are using corporate America’s bad behavior as an excuse to take benefits away from the last set of union members who managed to cling to them — those in the public sector. Christie is pitting one set of middle-class workers against the other, perhaps in the hope that private-sector unions will ultimately turn on their brethren in the public workforce, or that the public unions will turn on one another. And the end result will be that everyone loses.

All of this seems to add up to a reasonable counterargument to Christie’s main indictments against the teachers’ union, and so I asked Keshishian and Giordano why they thought they were having such a problem making their case to the public. After all, according to a Quinnipiac University poll conducted this month, most voters in New Jersey still admire teachers themselves, but only 27 percent have a favorable view of the union, while 44 percent say their view is unfavorable. By contrast, Christie’s job approval has been consistently hovering above the 50 percent mark.

“He is the governor!” Keshishian said, her voice rising. “People listen to him! You know, he could be in a crowd of people, and they’re going to interview the governor! And people, I guess, believe that what the governor says is the truth.” Keshishian taught high-school math for 29 years, but her grasp on civics sounded a bit shaky. It doesn’t seem especially likely that Christie is breaking through because he is a politician and therefore people take to heart his every word.

What the union’s leadership seems not to have considered is that public sentiment around budgets and public employees has shifted in a fundamental way. For decades, as Keshishian and Giordano were rising up through the union, it probably made sense to adopt a strategy of “no surrender,” to dig in and outlast the occasional politician who might dare to threaten the union’s hard-earned gains. But over the last 10 years or so, most American workers have come to expect less by way of benefits and security from their employers. And with political consensus building toward some kind of public-school reform, teachers’ unions in particular have lost credibility with the public. Forty-­six percent of voters in a poll conducted by Stanford and the Associated Press last September said teachers’ unions deserved either “a great deal” or “a lot” of blame for the problems of public schools.

And so, when the union draws a hard line against changes to its pay and benefit structure, you can see why it might strike some sizable segment of voters as being a little anachronistic, like mimeographing homework assignments or sharpening a pencil by hand. In a Pew Research Center poll this month, 47 percent of respondents said their states should cut pension plans for government employees, which made it the most popular option on the table.

Some unions are more attuned than others to this gradual changing of the climate. The American Federation of Teachers, for example, which is by far the smaller of the two major teachers’ unions nationally, has consciously tried to position itself as a more pragmatic union and has proposed a lot of its own classroom reforms in a campaign to get out in front of public opinion. In Newark, New Jersey’s largest city, A.F.T. organizers have signaled that they will work with Christie on changes to the pension and health care system, in addition to negotiating on issues like merit pay. “Better to be seated at the table than to be on the menu” is how Joseph Del Grosso, the union’s leader in Newark, explained the strategy to me.

But the larger and mightier N.J.E.A. has made the decision to hunker down and fight all comers. And because of that, its leaders run the risk of confirming the public’s darkest suspicions about them, whether they have salient points to make or not. “They may have dug themselves a hole that will be very difficult to dig themselves out of,” Del Grosso says of his competitor. “They are on the menu.”

And so this is why Christie has gone out of his way to anoint the teachers’ union as the most sinister force in the galaxy — not because he has some long-buried torment with a teacher to work through, but because the union does a very capable job of representing for him everything about the public sector that voters don’t like. He knows there is a risk in using this strategy: he has to make sure his war on the union doesn’t ultimately come to seem like a war on individual teachers, which is why he tries constantly to draw a distinction between the union and its members. (“I love teachers — I just can’t stand your union,” is one of Christie’s signature lines.) For now, though, even some of labor’s strongest advocates will tell you that Christie has the teachers and other public-sector unions backed up against a hard wall of political reality.

“My politics are union politics,” Sweeney, the Senate president, assured me when I visited him in his State House office. He reminded me that he is not only the state’s top elected Democrat, but also a union ironworker. And yet, he said, “what I think that public-sector employees have to do is look at what’s going on around them, look at all the pain around them, and understand that no one hates them, but they want them to sacrifice like everyone else. It’s that simple.”

THE POLITICAL DYNAMIC in New Jersey tells you a lot about what’s driving similar conversations all over the country. Last year alone, 18 states either raised the pension-contribution levels for public employees or reduced benefits for their retirees, according to Susan Urahn, the managing director of the Pew Center for the States. Three states — South Dakota, Colorado and Minnesota — decided to eliminate cost-of-living raises for state workers who have already retired. (As a result, all three states are now ensnared in court challenges over whether they can alter benefits for current retirees — cases that could have a huge impact on state budgets, depending on how far states are ultimately allowed to go in rolling back already-promised benefits.) Illinois raised its retirement age to 67, and Vermont, Michigan and Utah introduced “hybrid” retirement plans that are a step away from the defined-benefit pension plans that were the standard for much of the 20th century.

Now a new class of governors from both parties is promising to revisit union contracts in order to put their states on firmer fiscal ground. In Wisconsin, Scott Walker, an aggressive new Republican governor, just proposed legislation that would limit the rights of public workers to collectively bargain. “You can’t have one group who are the haves,” Walker told me recently, meaning government workers, “and one group, the private-sector workers, who are the have-nots.” Walker’s move led to protests in Madison, drawing President Obama into the debate and raising the prospect of French-style labor uprisings among public workers across America.

In part, the viral movement against public-sector unions is a result of political necessity. In states all over the country, balancing the budget has become an annual exercise in Copperfield-like illusion. Over the past decade, governors have exhausted all the easy options for eradicating, or at least hiding, deficits — building casinos and adding new fees, issuing bonds and securitizing tobacco revenue. Now, facing a painfully slow recovery and the end of stimulus spending from Washington, governors from both parties are finding that there are simply no more gimmicks left to exploit. They have to deal with what has long been an unspoken reality — that state governments have made a mountain of promises they can’t keep.

It’s also true, though, that what used to be unspeakable, politically, simply isn’t anymore. It’s not as if the problem of public pensions suddenly got so much worse than it was before (the shortfalls have been building steadily for years, after all), nor is this new crop of governors somehow genetically bolder than their predecessors. If politicians of both parties are suddenly willing to go after the pensions and health care plans of teachers and cops and firefighters, it’s probably not only because they’re out of budgeting options, but also because suddenly they see it as politically advantageous. In other words, not only are public employees’ contracts no longer untouchable for any politician who wants to stay in office, but it turns out that the opposite is true; taking the fight to the unions is a good way to bolster your credentials as a gutsy reformer with voters who have been losing faith for years in public schools and government bureaucracies.

This, more than anything else, is the lesson that Chris Christie has impressed on his contemporaries. The question now, and what a lot of these other governors are watching to see, is whether Christie can convert his anti-union riffs into a revised social contract for public servants. While he has enacted several pivotal pieces of his agenda, Christie has yet to pass more than a handful of the measures in his toolkit. This year will mark a major test of his staying power. The question a lot of political observers are asking, in New Jersey and nationally, is whether Christie’s argument will begin to lose its resonance as voters inevitably grow weary of the hostility and the rhetorical smack downs. Sooner or later, most people tend to tire of the boorish guy at the party, even if he’s entertaining, and even if he has a point.

Christie waves away such concerns. “When I run out of fights to have, I’ll stop fighting,” he told me. Until then, you will find him out on the town-hall circuit, play-acting, berating and emoting his way toward some kind of public reckoning, leaving nothing unsaid.

Matt Bai, a staff writer, covers national politics for the magazine.

In the real world, unlike for Wisconsin Teachers & Legislators, people who lie about missing work get a pink slip....

Thoughtful analysis on the Wisconsin issue....

It comes down to this - Agree or disagree, teachers skipping school and legislators leaving the state to avoid doing their jobs is ethically wrong. If you want to debate an issue, do so in the legislature. If you want to protest, do so on your own time, not when you should be teaching in the schools or doing your state job. Any private employee who acted this way would likely be fired and/or replaced. But because they work for the state/municipal system, they are allowed to acted insubordinate to the taxpayers.

Teachers & Legislators, get back to the work you are being paid for and stop the acting out. It is embarrassing that these "public employees" are not taking care of their customers, only themselves....and it has been going on for far too long.

An “Assault on Unions?” It’s About Time
By Susan Brown February 22nd, 2011

Thuggish, “community organizing” politics showed up in Wisconsin after Commander-in-Chief, President Obama, deployed his Organizing for America (OFA) troops to inject protestors into the Wisconsin budget debate Obama describes as an “assault on unions.” Obama is a smart man, so why would he choose to federalize a state issue and define Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to reduce the state’s deficit, preserve jobs and prevent dramatic pay cuts as an “assault?”

After all, Gov. Walker simply asked union members to chip in a moderate percentage of their above average salary to contribute to their very generous and above the average pension and healthcare plans. The proposed increase could be partially recouped by another part of the proposal to make union participation and dues – optional – saving teachers upwards of $1100 annually.

Rather than intelligently considering the facts and having an intelligent debate, those charged with the honor of teaching our children responded like high school freshmen by calling in “sick” and closing down the Madison school system to join in a protest instigated by political arm of the Grande Community Organizer himself – President Obama. In the real world, where the parents of the Wisconsin public school system children live, people who lie about missing work only to show up on their bosses doorstep to protest get a pink slip, not a pat on the back.

In the meantime, Wisconsin Democrat legislators revealed their lack of intestinal fortitude when they left the state. They bailed to prevent the three-fifths quorum requirement necessary for continuance of Walker’s proposed legislation.

The sad part about all this is the “to hell with the children” attitude displayed by the Wisconsin educators, union members and the Obama administration. The children are the ones who pay the price for this ridiculously mindless political power stunt.

It really boils down to money and power. Former American Federation of Teachers president, the late Albert Shanker, said it best when he said, “When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.”

Recently, Wisconsin Education Association Council President Mary Bell reiterated the same self-serving attitude when she said, “This is not about protecting our pay and our benefits. It is about protecting our right to collectively bargain.”

Walker’s proposal would effectively make union membership optional, and as such, would slowly act as a way to dissolve some of the power teachers unions have collected for themselves over the years. No longer would taxpayer money be funneled directly into union boss pockets – leading to less political clout and less manipulation of the American electoral process.

America needs to be about the business of creating jobs. The traditional need for unions has long since passed and the longer they linger the more unions will be like a cancer on the workers in this country and the businesses they support.

The Bush administration understood that danger and demanded accountability by forcing unions to be more transparent by itemizing expenditures on an LM-2 report form. This accountability led to the indictment of 1004 union officials and the conviction of a little over 900 – for crimes including fraud, embezzlement of members’ dues and $93 million in court-ordered restitutions leading to the resignation of some of Service Employees International Union top employees.

Any level of transparency the Bush administration achieved was reversed when, in 2009, the Purveyor of Transparency himself rescinded the Bush LM-2 form rules and ostensibly padded union fat cat wallets.

This move away from transparency served to peel back layers of hope and change to reveal a very union-friendly core. And federalizing the Wisconsin budget debate made Obama look like a national union boss rather than an American president.

You say Governor Walker’s proposed legislation is an “assault on unions,” Mr. President? Many Americans say, “It’s about time.”

—–

©2011 Susan Stamper Brown. Susan is a motivational speaker and military advocate and can be reached at susan@susanstamperbrown.com her website www.susanstamperbrown.com

Why Teacher Pensions Don't Work - " we simply kick the can down the road by underfunding pension obligations..."

Pension promises made to Teachers were built on a foundation of Hope - Hope that there would be enough money in the future to pay off on the promises.....Now, we are dealing with promises that can't be paid out by those stuck with the bill in the present.

The promises made by those in charge back-in-the-day were done with "good intentions" and we all know that the "Road to Hell" is paid with those same good intentions....I am sorry about what will have to happen but there are just as many private sector workers who lost their pensions when Big Business ran into the same issue....

As much as Teachers do great work, they are no more valuable than all the other workers who lost pensions they counted on and do not hold any kind of privileged standing that should protect them from what all the rest of us will have to deal with in the new economy. Life sux and SHITE happens...Teachers will be learning a lesson that private sector employees learned about 10-15 years ago.


Why Teacher Pensions Don't Work
Defined-benefit systems aren't merely Ponzi schemes. They discourage talented teachers who would prefer front-loaded compensation..

Text By JOEL KLEIN - Wall Street Journal


We live in a funny world. Bernie Madoff pretended he was getting 8% returns on his clients' investments—and he's in jail for running a Ponzi scheme. But in the public sector that kind of make-believe is common. As former chancellor of the New York City public schools, I learned that one of the options the city pension plan offered teachers and administrators guaranteed an 8.25% return, regardless of what the investments actually earned in the market. In fact, throughout the country public-employee pension plans have been massively underfunded, often pretending, like Madoff, that they'd get 8% returns forever, even if they didn't get them in reality.

Whether the investment returns are there or not, defined-benefit pensions require the government to pay retirees a predetermined amount for life. For example, today a teacher in New York City can retire with an annual pension of $60,000 (or more) that is exempt from state and municipal taxes. In short, lots of obligation; little set aside to meet it.

While irresponsible, this kind of behavior makes good political sense. After all, people run for office in the short run, and money spent now—rather than put aside in a pension reserve—is more likely to garner votes. As one legislator recently told me, "When budgets are tight, as they often are, we simply kick the can down the road by underfunding pension obligations." But as with Madoff, inevitably a day of reckoning arrives. For many states and municipalities, that day is now.

But this time it won't be private investors who get hurt. Instead, children currently in our schools, as well as future students, will be high among those paying the price. To cover the underfunded pension obligations to teachers and other public employees, cities and states have little choice but to divert money from what would otherwise be their operating budgets. And since schools make up a big part of those operating budgets, education will get significantly shortchanged as we make up for past underfunding.

This problem won't go away soon. There are lots of current retirees who must be paid, lots of people now working who have earned some part of their pensions, and, in many states, it is legally dubious whether current workers can have their pensions adjusted even prospectively. Consequently, no matter how you slice it, today's and tomorrow's students will long be subsidizing retired teachers who never taught them.

You would think that such a costly program, even if underfunded, would at least make sense. But while defined-benefit pensions sound good in theory—retirees should have security for their later years—they actually create incentives that impede hiring and keeping the best teachers.

To begin with, these pension systems make the total compensation package much too back-loaded: Pay in the early years is needlessly low, so we lose good people who don't find the generous benefits at the end worth the lifetime commitment.

Today in New York City, for example, the average annual per-teacher compensation is more than $110,000. The salary portion is $71,000, and the pension portion is $23,000. (The rest is for health insurance, FICA and other benefits.) A mix that was more typical of what exists in the private sector would help us attract more qualified people into teaching—and keep them there during the first five years, when we traditionally lose a third or more.

Here is an example of what that means. New York City's starting salary for teachers is $45,000, and the increases in the early years are low. If instead we started teachers at $52,000 or $55,000, gave them bigger increases in the early years, and paid for it by reducing their pensions, we would attract and keep better teachers.

At one point when I was chancellor, based on discussions with many new and prospective teachers, I proposed that we offer each new hire a choice between the current salary and benefit package and an alternative based on a higher entry salary and lower pension benefits. No one would lose anything: new hires that wanted the lifetime pension benefit could still have it, while those who preferred the proposed alternative obviously would be better off.

Nevertheless, the teachers union rejected the offer, calling it "anti-union."

On the other hand, because employees typically get a significant lifetime pension only after working 25 or 30 years, there comes a point at which almost no one leaves the system. In New York, few teachers leave after 10 years. Quite a few of these senior teachers admit they're burned out, or would want to try something else, but they stay simply because they cannot afford to forego the pension. Given that these teachers are already tenured, moreover, it's virtually impossible to remove them. This is not a good way to get the teachers that children need in our classrooms.

Defined-benefit pensions helped bring the once-vibrant U.S. auto industry to its knees. The promised benefits just proved too costly. In that industry, such pensions are mostly a thing of the past. Global competition eventually demanded as much.

Alas, the same kind of pensions are now hollowing out public education. Because there's essentially no competition in education, however, the effect has until very recently been hidden from public view. Today incoming governors—Democrats and Republicans—faced with this dismal equation are looking for a way to undo the damage and get out from under these unsustainable promises.

It won't be easy.

Mr. Klein, former chancellor of New York City's public schools, is the CEO of News Corporation's educational division