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Heritage
Foundation
Morning
Bell: Revealing What States Are Hiding
By Amy Payne
March 26, 2013
How
much are we spending on education?
Actually, far more than we know—because as it turns out, states are
hiding some
of the teachers’ benefits.
In
a new paper, Heritage expert Jason Richwine
reveals that “Proper accounting would reveal tens of billions of
dollars in
extra teacher pension costs, equivalent to somewhere around $1,000 in
unreported spending per student.”
That’s
right—the real cost of education is far
higher than we’ve been told, but it’s not because of extra classroom
resources
or newer facilities. It’s because of teachers’ pensions.
Richwine
explains:
This
undercounting occurs because the National
Center for Education Statistics (NCES) allows states to define teacher
pension
costs as whatever school districts happen to contribute to their
pension funds
each year, rather than the amount needed to pay for future pension
benefits.
This
is not just an accounting problem—it’s a
matter of transparency about the real cost of teacher pensions.
Governments
routinely contribute less than is needed to cover future pension
benefits, but
those benefits are guaranteed. That means taxpayers must cover the full
costs,
sooner or later.
Because
pension benefits are guaranteed by
state law and often by state constitutions, underfunding pension plans
today
does not reduce benefits or save money in the long term. It simply
delays
paying for steadily accruing benefits, forcing future taxpayers to deal
with
the growing problem…
Read
the rest of the article and get the full
report at Heritage Foundation
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