The teaching profession has been under attack for several
years now by the Jindal/White administration. Thousands of excellent teachers
have retired before they had planned to because of the punitive, impractical,
evaluation system, the insanity of constant standardized testing and test
teaching and the inappropriateness of Common Core for many of our students.
Now it looks like the enemies of public education on BESE,
in the LDOE and the various school privatization forces are itching to
dismantle the teacher retirement system. (See this article in the Advocate and
read the comment by former school board president Noel Hammatt) Even though the
constitution stipulates that the legislature is responsible for the funding of
the retirement systems, for years now the legislature has passed on much of the
unfunded liability it created to local school boards. The local school boards have
no say in curtailing excessive benefits granted by the legislature to
privileged individuals such as overpaid college presidents and former
legislators who get jobs in the retirement systems near the end of their
careers just to milk the retirement systems of excessive benefits. Yet the
legislature is now passing on these extra costs to school boards and other
non-state agencies. Last year school boards were forced to pay almost one third
of their payroll for benefits that should cost about 8% of payroll. That’s
because school boards are being required to pay for abuses the legislature
approved for fat cats.
But the situation is even worse. At the same time the legislature was
assessing local school boards an outrageous penalty for unfunded liability,
they were exempting all charter schools from having to pay anything toward the
unfunded liability by giving them the option to exempt their employees from the
retirement system. This gives these privately run for-profit groups a 25% gift,
which they can use to pay their managers exorbitant salaries or return a bigger
profit to shareholders. In 2008-09 Charles “Mickey” Landry was paid $186,000
for being principal of a charter school in New Orleans. He is probably getting a lot more now. The
Choice Foundation can easily afford such a salary because they save about
$12,500 in retirement contributions for every teacher they hire. Meanwhile for
every new teacher that is pulled out of the retirement system, the unfunded
liability burden gets greater on our local school boards. They don’t have the
option (and they don't want) to pull out of the retirement system.
If the drain on the retirement system continues as
privatization grows, at some point our anti-public school BESE will propose a
reduction in retirement benefits for public school teachers. LABI and CABL have been itching for years to see teacher retirement benefits reduced (Just like the Group Benefits overhaul). This is the
opposite of what we should be doing if we want to build a dedicated effective, professional teacher force in Louisiana.
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