The St. Pete Times blog, The Gradebook, is reporting on the National Council on Teacher Quality release of state-level reports on teacher policy (see the NCTQ Florida brief here). Ron Matus focused on one page of the brief, about teacher pensions, which is a little surprising given that (a) the rest of the brief's content is far more interesting and (b) most of the NCTQ recommendations are unrelated to the current Florida debates over pensions. To put it briefly, NCTQ is following the portion of the education wonkish literature suggesting that pension policies accommodate teacher mobility with shorter vesting periods, pension structures that are closer to cash-balance policies, and a few other structural issues. There is a short passage that refers to the instability of many state pension funds, and plugged into that passage is the Florida-specific content, which is that… the Florida Retirement System is among the best-funded state pensions around. There's also a real goof on the estimate of public obligations for a sample teacher, given that the model is based on a pension pegged to the top three years of earnings rather than Florida's system of pegging it to the top five years of earnings (let alone whether NCTQ used Florida's multiplier of 1.6% of salary per year of service or another state's).
Apart from the embarrassing mail-merges noted above, here are the gaps I can spot immediately between the NCTQ page on Florida's pensions and the politics of Florida's public pensions:
- The legislature is likely to increase rather than decrease the vesting period, to reduce the number of employees eligible for pensions.
- The legislature has never mentioned cash-balance plans (which would benefit teachers who move), and certainly nothing is going to appear regarding the purchase of years of service for teachers who come from other states. The only bill language I have seen thus far focuses on the details of multipliers and base, from the details it is targeting enriched pensions for public-safety employees such as police, sheriffs' deputies, firefighters, etc.
- The other target of changes in pension laws I can infer is almost entirely about the operational budget for the state next year, with some side concern about municipal obligations.
The benefit of cookie-cooker "state-specific" reports is that an advocacy group such as NCTQ can provide material that makes a reporter's job easier: "Here's what said about us." I think the PR benefit in this case is being outweighed by the political irrelevance for Florida of the NCTQ's generic game plan on pensions. The likely consequence of any news coverage is going to serve as an echo chamber for preexisting agenda items that are largely orthogonal to the NCTQ's concerns.
Update: The Orlando Sentinel blog has also noted the NCTQ brief and focused on the main issues I expected reporters to.