For several weeks in February 2011, she was one of tens of thousands of demonstrators who packed the Wisconsin state capitol to protest against legislation that aimed to shut down collective bargaining for public employees. One night, caught amid a swell of activists belting the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome,” she suddenly noticed that she was standing a few feet from Jesse Jackson, who had traveled to Madison to spur resistance to the Republican-led bill.

To Bazan, a social studies teacher in the nearby town of Deerfield, it seemed that she was living through one of the historic scenes she often described to her high school students. Though the GOP had won in the previous fall’s elections, capturing both chambers of the state legislature and electing the ambitious conservative Scott Walker as governor, the fight wasn’t over. Marching in solidarity with progressive heavyweights like Jackson, and with the eyes of the labor movement on Wisconsin, she and her colleagues could still prevail in the struggle to keep their hard-won rights. 

“You could see the Democratic legislators waving to us from the windows of their offices,” she recalled. “We really believed that we weren’t alone anymore, that these people were in it with us, and that it might force the legislature to back down.”

But Walker and his allies didn’t fold. 

Instead, after another month of political theatrics, they enacted , better known to history as Act 10. Its passage was a staggering setback for labor, stripping public-sector unions— with notable exceptions, such as police officers and firefighters — of virtually all bargaining powers. 

Before the crowds dispersed, the bill had already started to reshape the K–12 landscape in Wisconsin, both by shoring up district finances and straitjacketing unions’ political sway. While Walker ultimately lost the governorship in 2018, his signature accomplishment stands as a model for conservative governance in a purple state.

After a major judicial ruling last year, however, it is unclear whether Act 10 will stand at all for much longer. In December, a state circuit judge the law’s constraints on collective bargaining, declaring the exemptions for first responders a violation of Wisconsin’s equal protection doctrine. Even with pending an eventual appeal to the state Supreme Court, some political observers are weighing the potential of a massive shift in state policy.

Fourteen years under the Act 10 regime have cast ripples across much of Wisconsin. Overall teacher compensation has fallen substantially, to cash-strapped districts. Academic research has found that the weakening of workplace rights freed up school systems to change the way they structure pay, rewarding the best instructors while simultaneously lifting student achievement higher.

But as top performers found new opportunities, new divisions opened up among districts and even genders, with male employees often receiving higher salaries than their female coworkers. Solidarity continued to dissolve as formerly mighty unions lost members and prestige. And a lingering hurt still hangs over many Wisconsin teachers, who feel that the Republican triumph was built on their misery. 

Disheartened by what she described as an increasingly hardline stance from her school board, Bazan soon moved to another district. “They have a union on paper, but it has no power,” she said.

The restoration of their power would be a cause for immense celebration, even as most experts agree that some of the changes to education spending and teacher influence likely cannot be altered. Alan Borsuk, a senior fellow in public policy at Marquette University Law School, said that while teachers had largely “learned to live with” the changes to their bottom line, the blow to their esteem remained.

“In some ways, the biggest impact of Act 10 was what it did, intangibly, to the teaching field,” he said. “So much hostility to teachers came out during that time, and the damage to teacher morale continues to this day. It just hasn’t been a cheerful profession for a lot of people.”

***

The shock delivered to teachers resulted primarily from a rollback of union strength that could only be called historic. As the first state to allow public employees to organize, bargain, and strike, a revolution in workers’ rights a half-century before Act 10; in its wake, that mass movement suffered its worst defeat in a half-century.

After the expiration of the collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) that were in effect when the law was signed, unions were forbidden to negotiate over fringe benefits or working conditions. Though they retained the right to negotiate salaries, they could not secure raises that outpaced inflation in a given year. Further, teachers would be required to make to their own pensions and benefits, overturning generous perks that had been won at the bargaining table years earlier. Finally, organizing itself was made harder by for unions to hold recertification votes each year to remain active. 

Kim Kohlhaas was then in her 15th year as an elementary educator in Superior,, a lakefront city near the border with Minnesota. She described the time she spent there before the adoption of Act 10 as a “dream job,” but the impact of the change made itself felt within months.

“Our contract was 28 pages long,” said Kohlhaas, who now serves as the head of the American Federation of Teachers’ Wisconsin affiliate. “It became one page, and that was just recognizing that we existed.”

No longer obliged to deal with unions like the AFT over regular salary increases, school districts were responding to their newfound freedom exactly as Walker had intended. Some kept their existing salary schedules more or less intact, with merit pay schemes that who attained additional professional credentials or earned high grades in the state’s teacher rating metric. 

The effects, detailed in a series of studies conducted by Yale economist Barbara Biasi, have largely been promising. 

In , Biasi compared Wisconsin districts that moved toward a flexible pay model with those that continued setting compensation on the basis of seniority, as had largely been the practice before Act 10. Collecting both statewide salary records and data on teacher value added (a measure of effectiveness that reflects students’ improvement in standardized test scores), she found that highly successful teachers in “seniority-pay” districts tended to find new positions in communities offering some form of merit pay, meaningfully increasing both average teacher quality and student scores in those places. 

According to Biasi’s estimates, the value-added of those job-movers was 60% higher than their counterparts who chose to leave their districts after the adoption of flexible pay structures. In addition, some proportion of relatively lower-performing teachers simply stopped teaching in public schools, whether to leave the profession entirely or to work in private institutions.

In circulated this spring, Biasi extended her findings up to 2016, five years after Republicans pushed the reform through. In the years prior to 2011, she found, seniority was practically the only factor determining teacher pay: A professional over 57 years old earned, on average, 88% more than one who was 24 years old. But after the pre-Act 10 contracts expired, those career veterans earned slightly less than they previously had, only making 73% more than their most junior colleagues.

As the gap between older and younger educators flattened, student achievement — especially for children from low-income families — saw a significant bump throughout the state, with standardized test scores climbing higher statewide each additional year after Act 10 was passed. 

Biasi observed that no district has switched to a fully pay-for-performance system, in part because superintendents and principals do not typically have access to value-added statistics themselves. Instead, they were taking advantage of the autonomy around pay to favor employees whom they saw as working harder and more capably to boost learning. 

“They’re just using this flexibility to retain teachers that they consider to be better, or at a higher risk of departing for a nearby district, or who are in positions that are particularly difficult to staff,” she said.

***

Academic improvements like those revealed in Biasi’s research would be welcome anywhere. But even among its Republican supporters, Act 10 was not principally sold as a policy to improve schools.

Instead, it was seen as a way of heading off fiscal calamity. Like many states during the Great Recession, Wisconsin faced a large revenue shortfall in early 2011. When he took office, Walker vowed to close the structural deficit, that local governments “don’t have anything to offer.” Either Act 10 would be approved by lawmakers, or thousands of state employees had to be laid off. 

Nearly a decade and a half later, the budgetary picture is much brighter, with the state . After a dip during the financial crisis, Wisconsin has finished in the black every year since, with its total debt recently falling to its lowest level since the Clinton presidency.

In particular, conservatives tout an employee pension fund that was fortified over the long term by the contribution requirements included in Act 10. According to from the nonprofit Equable Institute, the funding ratio for Wisconsin’s retirement programs exceeds 100%, ranking the sixth-best of any system in the country. The Pew Charitable Trusts has that the state effectively balances while also insulating retirees from inflation. 

Borsuk, a frequent critic of state Republicans who is married to a retired teacher, said the financial case for the law was “clear and compelling,” especially when contrasted with of neighboring Illinois, where state employee pension funds are ranked among the most over-extended in the nation. 

“It saves school districts a huge amount of money, and some of them were facing fairly dire circumstances in 2009 and 2010,” he argued. “Teachers had to pay more to support their benefits, but to be honest, they got used to that, and life went on.”

Yet many schools and districts aren’t as sanguine. Wisconsin’s annual spending per K–12 student, which was 11% higher than the national average when Act 10 was being debated, just a decade later. Between 2002 and 2020, the state’s K–12 spending grew at the third-slowest rate anywhere in the country. After adjusting for inflation, the median teacher’s take-home pay fell from $68,949 in 2011 to $59,250 in 2023, according to .

That trend resulted partially from an exodus of older teachers in the first few years after the law went into effect — that the exit rate rose from 5% to 9% in its immediate aftermath — and their replacement with lower-paid novices. Headcounts , but Kohlhaas described a period of heightened churn that saw schools’ relationships with families frayed as familiar and well-liked staffers left for other districts.

“The first couple of years after Act 10, the retirement parties were not celebrations,” she said. “The teachers, the secretaries, the nurses, the bus drivers, the paraprofessionals — usually the first faces that students see in the morning — were changing every year, or sometimes mid-year.”

***

In a job market that was quickly becoming much more fluid, union membership also began to lose its appeal. School staff were increasingly on the move between districts, and the benefits of belonging to an organization with a severely narrowed scope of action were not always clear.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the proportion of union members in Wisconsin’s workforce , from 14.2% to 7.4%, between 2010 and 2023 (since that figure includes workers from all sectors, the drop for government employees is likely much steeper). A from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a right-leaning think tank, showed that the total number of unions holding annual recertification votes across the state declined from 540 in 2014 to 369 in 2018. 

The largest teachers’ union in the state, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, experienced of manpower and organizing heft. A conducted by a pair of researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that WEAC was forced to restructure and cut its staffing by about two-thirds. The retrenchment was made necessary by a freefall in the collection of dues, the payment of which was made voluntary by Act 10.

The loss of paid organizers could be offset, in part, by the efforts of teacher volunteers. But the union had no ready replacement for the millions of dollars in government relations funds that had suddenly evaporated; WEAC went from being one of the biggest lobbying forces in Madison to a second-tier player virtually overnight. 

Spillovers into elections were inevitable. In , Yale’s Biasi studied the effect of Act 10 on political donations during gubernatorial races in 2012 and 2014. Across all Wisconsin school districts, she calculated that the reform depressed contributions to the Democratic Party by 33.1 per 1,000 people, and by over 50 per 1,000 teachers. Scott Walker’s vote share increased by about 2 percentage points as a result. 

Unions “essentially stopped donating money to Democratic political campaigns after the reform because there was a huge drop in revenues coming in.” Biasi said. “Membership went down, and so they just became increasingly less influential actors post-Act 10.”

Gender politics were inflamed as well. Once collective bargaining was invalidated, individual teachers were left to negotiate their salaries by themselves — typically at the start of their work in a new school. But while these interactions occurred at the individual level, a significant pattern made itself felt over the course of several years: Male teachers were making more than female colleagues of similar age, effectiveness, and experience.

that, two years after the expiration of CBAs that had been in effect when Act 10 was signed, salaries for male staff were .4% higher than those for comparable female staff, a gap that grew to 1% after another three years. That estimate would be the equivalent of $540 per year, mostly attributable to women being over pay . While hardly lavish, the disparity could be seen as adding insult to the injury already sustained by .

***

Whether those wounds will be mended anytime soon is difficult to say. 

After the ruling issued in December, the fate of Act 10 will not be decided until an appeal is heard by the state Supreme Court. In all likelihood, much of 2025 will pass before a final ruling is delivered — most likely not until in April. The court’s liberal faction holds a 4-3 majority after Democrats to flip a Republican-held seat in 2023. This spring’s contest is also drawing national attention, with White House advisor Elon Musk contributing $1 million to support the Republican candidate.

Foes of the law were hopeful even before conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn announced in January that from hearing the case (Hagedorn had previously defended Act 10 in his capacity as Gov. Walker’s counsel). But some believe that even the wholesale rejection of the law wouldn’t restore to labor the primacy it formerly enjoyed.

Borsuk remarked that, with the expiration of federal pandemic aid last fall, local districts would be hard-pressed to grant generous new contracts to reinvigorated unions. Cities and towns have already had to dig deep to finance increases in school spending, of property tax hikes last fall to keep up with expenses. 

“School districts in Wisconsin are under an enormous amount of financial pressure in every part of the state,” he said. “There’ll be some change, but it’s not like the golden era can return; there isn’t much gold.”

But to Bazan, the prospect of an overturned Act 10 is too promising to dismiss. More than simple financial rewards, she said, she looked forward to regaining “a voice outside the classroom.” 

“A world without Act 10 is one where teachers get back the respect that we lost 14 years ago,” she said. “When we lost that seat at the table, we lost a lot of that respect as well.”

But instead of solving this problem, the House of Representatives may soon a bill that would repeal two provisions designed to preserve fairness in the Social Security formula. If passed, the measure would provide a financial windfall to retirees like former teachers and school superintendents who already have a healthy pension to fall back on. And it would taxpayers $196 billion over the next 10 years.

The rules are complicated, so an example might help. Imagine a hypothetical California teacher. Like most educators in states like Ohio, Texas and Massachusetts, and over of police officers and firefighters, California teachers don’t participate in Social Security. Our hypothetical teacher doesn’t pay the 6.2% Social Security payroll tax on income, and her school district doesn’t pay the employer portion, either.

Instead, these workers rely solely on their state-provided pension benefits. That deal works out well for people who are willing to stick around for the 20 or 30 years needed to vest in the system, but will not. 

Let’s say our California teacher lasts 25 years. She won’t qualify for a Social Security benefit, but her state pension will pay . Depending on her age, she could live for as many years in retirement as she taught, meaning her pension benefit could easily pay out more than $1 million by the time she dies.

But say our hypothetical teacher doesn’t completely retire. Let’s assume she works for 10 more years as a yoga instructor. She earns less than she did as a teacher, and both she and her yoga studio must pay payroll taxes on her earnings.

Now, she’s eligible for Social Security on top of her teacher pension. When she goes to file for benefits, the Social Security Administration asks if she has a government pension and, if so, how much it is worth.

If it didn’t ask, the Social Security Administration would assume the former teacher was only a relatively low-paid yoga instructor, not a pensioner. Because Social Security is progressive and replaces a higher percentage of earnings for lower-income workers, she could potentially qualify for the same benefit as someone with much more limited means — and no pension to fall back on.

Beginning in the 1970s and ’80s, Congress decided this wasn’t fair. In response, it created the Windfall Elimination Provision for workers who split their careers in and out of Social Security. A separate provision, the Government Pension Offset, applies to spouses in households with split coverage.

Congress also put in place protections ensuring that not all employees with split coverage face a penalty. For example, the someone’s Social Security benefit by more than half of their government pension.

This rule, in effect, protects the vast majority of workers with split coverage. When the Social Security Administration in 2019, it found 19.6 million retirees who had worked a portion of their careers in state and local government positions without Social Security coverage. But thanks to this rule, 18 million of them (92%) faced no penalty at all. 

That left about 1.6 million retirees who did face a penalty. Like our hypothetical teacher, these people might be surprised — and angry — when they file for Social Security and discover their benefits will be reduced. But remember, these are people who already qualify for a substantial pension from their years of government service. They aren’t billionaires, but they aren’t exactly impoverished, either. It wouldn’t be fair to give them the same Social Security benefits as a low-income worker without a pension. 

Legislation to repeal the two provisions has in the Senate, and House members have already filed to get their version out of committee and onto the floor for a vote. Given a busy congressional schedule, an article from the Federal News Network suggests that couldn’t happen before November. 

But repealing the two provisions would be a costly, unfair mistake. And there’s a better option: Make Social Security coverage mandatory for all. That would simplify the program for everyone and remove the need for the two provisions.

Unions representing and other affected by the windfall provisions are behind the recent push to repeal them. At the same time, these groups efforts to make Social Security coverage mandatory in the public sector, as it is for all private-sector employees. 

But extending Social Security coverage to all state and local government employees would help the workers who need it the most. Research by and has found that many employees who lack coverage, especially lower-income workers, would be better off if they participated in Social Security than they are relying solely on their state pension plan.

If Congress wants to help teachers and other public workers, it should extend mandatory Social Security benefits to the public sector. No more split Social Security coverage, no more windfall provision or offset. Full Social Security participation — including taxes and benefits — for all.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed a bill into law Thursday allowing retired teachers to return to classrooms for up to two years without giving up their pensions in a bid to address the state’s shortage of educators.

will allow districts to hire teachers and other staff during the 2023-2024 school year as long as they have been retired for at least 180 days. Districts can hire retired educators for a single year and extend their contracts for one more year.

Retired teachers would receive their pension allowance and a salary during the duration of their contract. Murphy signed a similar law last year.

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New Jersey’s shortage of teachers is long-standing and has historically been most severe in special education, science, and instruction for non-native English speakers.

“You’ve always seen a need to try and secure more people into those spaces, and of course that was compounded with COVID,” said Sen. Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex), the bill’s prime sponsor. “A lot of retirees who perhaps would have stayed in districts longer, for personal reasons, went off.”

The state reported shortages of bilingual education, ESL, world language, math, and science teachers in all grade levels and preschool to the U.S. Department of Education for the 2023-2024 school year.

The despite a recent law requiring the state Department of Education to issue annual reports on teacher staffing. The deadline for the department to release this year’s report passed months ago.

After Murphy signed the law last year allowing retired teachers to return to school, delays in forwarding program rules to districts prevented some from hiring retirees in time for the 2022-2023 school year.

Lawmakers are weighing other methods to tackle the shortages, including one that could end, or at least suspend, .

“This is only one answer. We should be truly focused on eliminating the residency requirement. If not forever, at least on a temporary basis,” Ruiz said. “We are missing the opportunity of hiring human power that will help districts that are in shortages that they now cannot even entertain.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com. Follow New Jersey Monitor on and .

That’s a big claim, so let’s walk through some numbers. 

First up is the cost side. Next year, Chicago will contribute toward the city’s teacher pension plan. A large portion of that money will come from the state, and another $550 million will come from a dedicated property tax levy the state authorized in 2018. 

And yet, all this money is not enough. The chart below comes from the from the Boston College Center for Retirement Research. As the chart shows, Chicago’s pension contributions have risen substantially over time (the blue bars), but not once in the last 20 years has it contributed as much as what its actuaries recommended (the red bars). In , that gap amounted to about $350 million. 

These gaps have added up over time. The result is that the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund is in worse financial health than it was a decade ago, despite the ramp-up in contributions and a very strong decade of investment returns.  

A few statewide teacher pension plans — notably the rest of Illinois, Kentucky and Connecticut — are in similarly dire financial straits. But Chicago is different because it’s a city. It’s dependent on city taxpayers to fill any budget gaps. 

There are a few other cities that, like Chicago, offer their own teacher pension plans rather than participating in a statewide system. New York City, Kansas City and St. Louis are notable examples, with challenges similar to Chicago’s. What brings Chicago to the bottom of the heap is on the benefits side.

Facing their own state pension problems, in 2010, Illinois legislators created what’s called . Its new rules applied to Chicago as well as state employees. The state raised the age at which new employees could retire from 55 or 60 to 67, added a new cap on the maximum benefit an employee could earn and reduced cost-of-living adjustments for retirees. 

The new Tier 2 also imposed a longer vesting period for new workers: Employees hired on or after Jan. 1, 2011 would need to serve for at least 10 years before qualifying for any retirement benefits at all. 

How many Chicago Public School employees make it to 10 years of service with the district? Not many. The pension plan conducts regular “experience” studies based on its own data, and it estimates that 30% of new employees will leave the district in the first year and less than 1 in 3 will make it 10 years. 

In other words, the majority of Chicago employees in Tier 2 won’t qualify for any pension from the system. 

Of course, some long-term employees will still qualify. But on average, the city estimates it’s not spending any money at all on Tier 2 member benefits. 

This may sound incredible, given the cost figures cited above, but it’s all spelled out on page 23 of the pension fund’s . For Tier 2 members, the total “normal cost” of benefits is 8.99% of salary. But each member contributes 9%. In other words, Tier 2 members are putting in more toward their benefits than they’ll get back. They’re getting negative 0.1% in retirement benefits.

Oh, and Chicago teachers are part of the nationwide who also don’t get Social Security. Someone could teach for nine years in Chicago and have no retirement benefit at all, outside of any personal savings.

This would be illegal in the private sector, where requires that employees qualify for retirement benefits after no more than five years. There’s no such protection for public-sector workers. Similarly, Congress attempted to guarantee minimum benefits for public-sector employees without Social Security coverage, but a allows Chicago to offer these meager benefits to workers without any consequences. 

I don’t envy Mayor-elect Johnson. The latest actuarial valuation report also notes that contributions would need to increase if the city’s payroll declines as student enrollments . These are not problems of Johnson’s making, and they can’t be easily solved from the mayor’s office. But they are now his problems to deal with.