Stephen Sawchuk reports in Education Week on a study finding that most teachers will not stay on the job long enough to collect a pension.

He writes:

“The report from Bellwether Education Partners, a Washington-based consulting group, contends that states’ current defined-benefit pension policies, which pay out according to a fixed formula, are not well aligned with a profession that has grown rapidly younger and more mobile. And that could put teachers at serious financial risk later on in their lives.

“For the paper, analysts Chad Aldeman and Andrew Rotherham used “withdrawal” tables—state estimates on teacher-turnover rates—to estimate the percentage of teachers who will earn a pension in every state. They drew on each state’s assumptions for female teachers aged 25 who began teaching after Aug. 1, 2013. (Keep in mind that the state formulas are different for male teachers or those of other ages, and these stats would look different for them.)

“Based on those assumptions, only 45 percent teachers in the median state will qualify for payouts, a process that typically takes 5 years. And only 20 percent will reach the normal retirement age of 58.

“That’s a lot of money left on the table. Many teachers won’t even meet the vesting requirements. And for those that don’t, states typically allow teachers to take only the contributions they made into the pension plan if they leave the profession, or move to another state. ”

Of course, many states are trying to ditch defined benefit pensions altogether.

And it must be noted that one of the implicit goals of the current “reform” movement is to encourage teacher turnover, specifically to reduce future pension costs. That’s not good for the teaching profession or for children or for education, but it helps cut costs.

Rupert Murdoch definitely does not like David Sirota.

Sirota is the journalist who broke the story about the Arnold Foundation funding PBS’ pension series. Arnold thinks all those greedy pensioners are bankrupting the country. Can’t have that!

Murdoch rushed to denounce Sirota and defend his fellow billionaire.

What is it with these billionaires? It is ok for them to live in luxury, right? Why do they want to cut the pensions of people who just want a decent retirement?

This may be the most important article you read this week or month or year.

Crack investigative journalist David Sirota, who blew open the story of the financing of the PBS series on pensions, now demonstrates the five rules of what he calls “native advertising.”

In this case, the same John Arnold Foundation that underwrote the PBS series with $3.5 million, underwrote a report by the Brookings Institution on the need to rein in pensions of public sector workers.

Sirota demonstrates that this is far from accurate, that there are other views, but that Brookings did not present a balanced account. It added to the echo chamber of those who want to cut pensions but ignore huge tax cuts for corporations.

Most telling is the David vs. Goliath claim, where the rich corporate sector presents itself as the little guy against the powerful unions.

He writes:

“Rule 4: Portray the native advertiser as an underdog and its work as heroic, all while ignoring facts to portray the native advertiser’s opponents as an evil Goliath

“The best native advertising flips the script. It casts the monied native advertiser as the earnest underdog David and the native advertiser’s disadvantaged opponent as the big bad Goliath. The Arnold-funded Brookings paper does exactly this.

“For instance, the paper asserts that “public employee unions are one of the most—if not the most—powerful political actors in state politics.” Readers are expected to believe that this makes unions the omnipotent villain that needs to be thwarted by poor powerless corporations, even though that’s the opposite of what the data show.

“According to the National Institute on Money in State Politics, unions have spent a combined $1.7 billion on state politics since 2000. That’s a lot – but it is dwarfed by the $8.1 billion spent on state politics by the business sector in that same period. Those numbers are hardly surprising or secret – they track the same rough ratio that exists at the federal level.”

Intrepid and fearless journalist David Sirota broke open the scandal of PBS accepting $3.5 million from the foundation of a billionaire with a strong interest in “reforming” (away) the pensions of public sector workers.

Here Sirota reviews how the story unfolded, how PBS and WNET stone-walled, how the Arnold foundation attempted to distance itself from its funder, and how social media changed everything. A decade ago, no one would have connected the dots. If they had, their article would have been published, dismissed, and forgotten after quick denials. With social media, the spotlight of public scrutiny is brighter.

Thank you, David Sirota. You are the public’s protector and omsbudsman.

Investigative Journalist David Sirota wrote a brilliant series of articles about PBS taking $3.5 million about pension reform from the foundation of billionaire JohnArnold, a former Enron trader. After stonewalling, PBS decided there was a perception of conflict of interest since Arnold has been a prominent figure in the public debate about public pensions. And PBS returned the money.

Here is an analysis of the imbroglio by Felix Salmon of Reuters. It is an open secret that PBS has become heavily dependent on corporate funding, as Salmon notes here:

“There’s a whole world of subtext in that phrase, “we thought we were following the guidelines” — a lot of which my former boss Jim Ledbetter teased out in his 1997 book Made Possible By…: The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States. The big problem is that public broadcasting has become dependent on corporate financing — and has become very good at coming up with programming which represents corporate interests.” I was reminded of a conversation I had with a high-level executive of Maryland Public Broadcasting a year ago; she said to me, “We no longer can do investigative journalism, we go where we find corporate sponsors.”

Sirota’s original pieces were “The Wolf of Sesame Street” and “How PBS is Becoming The Plutocratic Broadcasting Service.”

PBS is returning $3.5 million to former Enron trader John Arnold, in response to stories by investigative journalist David Sirota about a likely conflict of interest. Arnold was underwriting a series on pension reform, and Sirota warned that PBS was abandoning its impartiality because of Arnold’s strong views.

David Sirota, a crack investigative journalist, has written an expose of the financing behind the PBS series on pension reform.

Sirota calls it:” The Wolf of Sesame Street: Revealing the secret corruption inside PBS’s news division.”

You may be surprised to learn the secret. You may be disturbed to learn who is paying the bills.

Sirota’s hard-hitting article prompted an immediate response from the PR firm for “the Wolf of Sesame Street.” Read it.

In today’s world, language often means the opposite of what it says. We must deconstruct everything we read.

A “reformer” is someone who wants not to “reform” public schools but to replace them with privately managed schools, sometimes operated for-profit or by non-educators making exorbitant salaries.

“Pension reform” these days means someone has a plan to get rid of your pension if you are a public-sector worker.

“Turnaround” means that someone in D.C. decided that everyone in your school should be fired.

If someone wants to eliminate your job, you can be sure they will describe it as “reform.”