Giving in to NY teachers unions — at a high cost

In 2012, leaders in Albany pushed through one of the most consequential public pension reforms in New York's history, raising the retirement age for newly hired public employees to 63, increasing their contribution rates and putting the state on a path to saving an estimated $80 billion over 30 years.

Fourteen years later that hard-won fiscal discipline has been quietly dismantled, thanks to the singular influence of New York's teachers unions.

As we show in a 2026 report, those unions are among the country's most powerful, ranking fourth nationally for resources and membership and sixth for perceived influence. Despite a gradual decline in membership almost everywhere else, 97% of the Empire State's public schoolteachers remain union members. And, unlike most states, New York requires public employers to bargain collectively with unions.

Voices that once threatened union power, such as New York City's famously high-performing charter schools, have been increasingly stifled by unions and their allies.

Then there's the pensions issue, led by this year's changes to Tier 6 and Tier 5. The 2026-27 state budget lowers the age at which teachers can retire with full benefits from 63 to 58 for those who have spent three decades in the classroom, and cuts the contributions that other government workers make toward their pensions. The first-year price tag of more than $550 million, combined with the costs of related reforms in 2022 and 2024, brings the annual cost to roughly $1 billion. And by law, most of that burden will fall on employers — which for public schoolteachers means school districts.

To foot the bill, districts can either raise taxes — an unpleasant prospect in one of the highest-taxed states — or allow pensions to consume an even larger share of their local education budget, which is already strained by new class-size limits. In other words, a lower retirement age is likely to mean fewer tutors, teaching assistants and counselors, more equipment that is badly out of date, and more schools where art, music and extracurricular offerings are paltry or nonexistent.

That's not good for kids. And because they depend on public schools for these services, disadvantaged students will probably be most affected. But since the 2012 reforms were enacted, New York's teachers unions have been dead set on rolling them back. That they've finally done so says less about the evolution of unions (which have always put teachers before students) than it does about the Democratic Party (which hasn't). It was only a decade ago that President Barack Obama openly challenged union power by promoting charters, rigorous teacher evaluations and test-based accountability.

Since then, the country has become ever more polarized, with blue and red states each pursuing increasingly pure versions of their most avid partisans' visions. In the case of Republicans, the result has been a sharp increase in exclusionary policies and the rejection of basic democratic norms. In the case of Democrats, the result has been an increase in the popularity of democratic socialism and ever-closer alignment with unions.

The blue state model is increasingly difficult to distinguish from a union wish list. Too many liberals have lost their bearings when it comes to fiscal discipline, the purposes of interest groups, and the importance of K-12 education.

If Democrats continue to acquiesce to union demands, the losers will be ordinary kids.

This guest essay reflects the views of David Griffith, who is national research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a national education think tank.