At a time when the National Education Association is calling for teachers to take more responsibility for improving their profession, the "Protect Our Jobs" ballot proposal would wipe out teacher reform laws, some of which were supported by former Gov. Jennifer Granholm and the Michigan Education Association.

For example, for years school districts determined which teachers would be laid off by seniority alone. The Ann Arbor Public Schools went so far as to use the randomness of Social Security numbers as a tie breaker if teachers had the same qualifications.

Teacher reform laws forced school districts to use a teacher's effectiveness when determining which teachers stay and which ones are let go.

Yet, if the "Protect Our Jobs" initiative is passed, union contracts would have higher authority than state laws. Some contracts are filled with cumbersome provisions that make it difficult to get rid of bad teachers.

One school district, for example, had a contract that required a 13-step process to remove ineffective tenured teachers. Even then-MEA President Iris Salters acknowledged changes needed to be made.

"No one wants or can afford ineffective teachers. That's why the MEA's plan calls for streamlining the process for fair dismissal of ineffective tenured teachers, making it less costly and less time-consuming," Salters said in January 2011.

Patrick Wright, senior legal counsel for the Mackinac Center, said teacher reform laws would be made irrelevant.

"Union contracts would take precedence over the laws," Wright said.

Earlier this month, NEA President Dennis Van Roekel said, "It's not enough to say that most teachers are good. If there is even one classroom with a teacher who isn’t prepared or qualified, we can’t accept that."

The MEA released a statement in 2011 saying it supported some of the GOP's attempts at education reform.

Some of the teacher reform was completed under Democrat Gov. Granholm, who passed laws that, for example, required teachers to have an annual performance review and created categories for which teachers were rated. Under most union contracts, the teacher reviews were once every three years and if they were not completed, the default was a "satisfactory evaluation."

Dan Lijana, spokesman for "Protect Our Jobs" ballot initiative, and Doug Pratt of the MEA didn't return emails seeking comment.

Michigan’s school pension system is unlikely to be fully funded while operating under the state's current assumptions about pension funding, according to a new memo from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

Unless these issues are addressed, the state will not set aside enough money to pay for teachers and other school employees' pensions as they are earned, the Texas-based foundation said in the memo it authored for legislators.

The memo highlights the state's investment analysis, showing that there's only a 49 percent chance that the state will meet the 8 percent assumption used to discount most of its pension assets. The state uses a more conservative 7 percent estimate for contributions set aside for new employees in the system — those hired after July 1, 2010.

Even with the lower return assumption, the plan is still risky, according to the memo. Using some conservative assumptions about pension funding, the annual employer costs would be 3.19 percent of payroll higher if pension assets grow at only 6 percent while simultaneously assumed to grow at 7 percent. That discrepancy would translate into a $303 million annual-cost increase when applied to all current member payrolls.

The memo explains that under this scenario, state retirement office estimates of savings from retaining a slimmed-down defined benefit pension system (as proposed by the state House) instead of providing defined-contribution plans to new employees would not pan out. In other words, taxpayers would be better protected with the defined-contribution conversion.

The Arnold Foundation memo also addresses policymakers' concerns that accounting rules may require large upfront cash contributions when converting to a defined-contribution plan. It cites the Government Accounting Standards Board revisions released last month to reiterate that funding policies are entirely in the hands of legislators.

"While there has been a close relationship between how governments fund pensions and how they account for and report information about them until now, the new guidance establishes a decided shift from the funding-based approach to an accounting-based approach," GASB wrote in its recent rules revision. "The board crafted its new statements with the fundamental belief that funding is squarely a policy decision for elected officials to make as part of the government budget approval process."

Policymakers sometimes are concerned that implementing a different funding policy will impact the state's bonding rate. But the memo shows that closing a state's pension system typically results in improvements in a government's credit ratings. Alaska, for example, started converting to a defined-contribution retirement system in 2005 and used a back-loaded payment schedule for paying down its unfunded pension liabilities. In other words, it did not choose to pay millions in so-called "transition costs" for several years. Reports from credit-rating agencies rated the pension changes positively.

The Memo addresses the question, Does the plan offered to new school employees offer a reasonable level of cost and risk compared to those available in state plans? The complete memo is available here: Arnold Foundation Response to Questions from the Michigan Legislature