Framing Teachers and Their Pensions: A Quantitative Content Analysis

• In Event: Racial Equity, Justice, and Democratic Education in the United States

Abstract

We draw on framing theory to critically examine how teacher pensions have become understood as a crisis-level policy problem. We first provide a descriptive analysis of system-level teacher pension data. Consistent with finance literature and education policy scholarship on neoliberalism, we identify troubling trends in how fund assets have been invested contributing to pension debt , increasingly by high-fee Wall Street money managers. We then provide a quantitative content analysis of newspaper articles about teacher pension debt. Despite the salience of investment decisions, 46% of articles did not explain any underlying cause for pension debt and very few referenced failure to meet investment targets (6%), fees to investment managers (1%), or underperformance relative to broader stock market (0%).

Authors

• Matthew G. Kelly, University of Washington

• Elizabeth Ann Cardamone, Pennsylvania State University