"While average inflation-adjusted teacher salaries have been relatively stagnant since 1990, benefits costs have risen from 16.8 percent of expenditures in 1990 to 23 percent of today's much larger expenditure base.... Almost every state increased teachers' retirement benefits in the booming 1990s. But the additional promises were not accompanied by responsible funding plans. Overfunded at the turn of the millennium, by 2003, teacher pension plans were collectively short by $235 billion. By 2009, pension debt had more than doubled, to $584 billion."

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