In 2018 before Los Angeles teachers conceived of their strike this year, educators in Arizona, Kentucky, Oklahoma and West Virginia walked off their jobs for a time because of long-running disputes with state officials that came to a flash point.
The Courier Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, was focused on minute-by-minute machinations of the Republican governor and GOP-majority legislature. But this series of walkouts by the state’s teachers represented more than political maneuvering when viewed through a national lens.
Unlike educators in the other walkout states, Kentucky teachers were mostly happy with their pay. They maintained that they had made sacrifices for their retirement and that lawmakers were shortchanging their pension plans.
Local reports assumed that readers knew this, not the best presumption. Readers from outside the state had no clue about this complex issue.
My job, on deadline, was to learn enough about the various states’ disagreements myself to insert that context.
I also felt it was important to show how Kentucky’s pension problems fit into the big picture in ways that readers could understand. One way I did this was to create a chart in Infogram, a Web-based data visualization and graphics platform, that allowed me to quickly input relevant information about other states that I found in a Standard & Poor’s survey.
(A bonus: The list of states with the best and worst pension obligations, at top, showed at least two other states’ looming crises. And sure enough, New Jersey will be grappling with pension and retiree health-care liabilities in the 2019 legislative session, The Star-Ledger in Newark reported in December. The Chicago Tribune cited the state’s pension problems as one reason Illinois lost population in 2018 for the fifth year in a row.)
