Last week, I tuned into a webinar for parents anguished about the strike at the San Francisco Unified School District. Speaker after speaker expressed frustration: at the district, at the union, at the seemingly impossible math of paying teachers what they deserve while closing a $100 million budget deficit.
No one mentioned the real reason SFUSD doesn’t pay its teachers more. District spending on pensions and other retirement costs has grown at nearly five times the rate of school revenues, squeezing out funds needed for teachers’ salaries.
Since 2006, the district’s total revenue has risen 123%, from $537 million to $1.2 billion. But pension spending has surged 538%, from $31 million to $198 million, and spending on retiree health benefits has jumped 450%, from $8 million to $44 million. Together, those two line items consume nearly $250 million a year, money that flows not to working teachers but to retired employees…