The ugly truth is that teachers aren’t given enough for what they do. They’re literally teaching the future of America. It seems like things are always being taken away from them. One of the things that teachers don’t tend to see in modern teaching is a decent pension upon retirement. Now, a former Texas teacher is speaking up about what she saw when she was a teacher. She also explains how she quit teaching recently. That’s why she isn’t worried about the pension she could have received.
Brittany (@brittany.kathryn) posted a TikTok video where she quotes somebody asking her, “You quit teaching?! What about your pension?!” Brittany says that her parents always told her she needs to keep being a teacher so she could retire and get a pension. However, Brittany quickly discovered that things aren’t always what they seem for teachers. In a meeting with the people taking care of her prospective pension, she learned a lot of upsetting things. They called pensions “mailbox money” there. This means you can rely on it every month, but it won’t “pay all of your bills.” This told Brittany that she would have to find more work after she retired from teaching.
Brittany asked, “What career actually does that?” She was so confused by this. In the end, she eventually left teaching. Her new job, she says, has a 401k and they match her retirement payments. She said if she chooses to stay with her current company, she gets to retire early. If she chooses to go with another company, she can transfer her 401k. Brittany said that every teacher she knows with a pension can barely afford to live. Why is it that our country’s educators are just scraping by after they’ve done their due diligence?
One commenter shared in reply to Brittany’s video, “I truly feel bad for people going into teaching at this age. For people with 20 years in the pension, pretty darn good. They are asking teachers to do more and more with less money and less benefits.” Another person shared their own personal experience. They said, “My husband and I retired from teaching in AK in ’23. He was 56, I was 53. We clear $9k/mo and we don’t pay a penny for health insurance. Those pensions, sadly, don’t exist for teachers in the state anymore… we just got in when decent pensions existed.” This is such unfortunate news for the future of America and what we deem acceptable for our educators. It needs to change.
