For the sake of not undermining my broader arguments, I won't fixate on placing value judgments against elementary music teaching. The bigger point is that the existence and size of unfunded pension liabilities inherently demonstrates that the required contributions during pensioners' working years, both in terms of deductions from the worker's wages as well as the employer match (former taxpayers) were too low, which indicates the calculations that supported the contribution requirements back then had underlying assumptions that were too optimistic. This means that former workers and former taxpayers jointly did not pay enough back then.
Beyond that, the fact that current law requires pensions be paid in full continuously and without modification, no matter how poor the financial health of the pension fund, until the money is practically gone, this creates a policy situation that, by design, overwhelmingly favors current retirees no matter how detrimental we know it will eventually be for current and future taxpayers and other public sector workers.
Ultimately state and local pensions are going to force us to decide between two unconscionable options:
1) Bail them out with federal dollars, which would create the biggest governmental accounting moral hazard in history, because it would mean that those states which managed their pensions worst get the greatest relative benefit and those that managed them best get nothing but a big share of the cost of other states' irresponsibility. If this ever comes to pass, it should go hand-in-hand with federal abolition of state and local defined benefit pensions (i.e. roll all pension funds into SS and abolish state departments of retirement and benefits). This would be an imperative if we were to federally bail out pensions, because if states know the feds ultimately backstop pensions anyway, then managing pension funds prudently becomes stupid, and managing them stupidly becomes smart.
2) Let states go quasi-bankrupt (even though they legally can't), and force them to decide how much they are going to slash benefits vs. slash government services and payrolls vs. spike taxes. This would basically be a decision to intentionally end up in a state of chaos and statewide economic collapse for nothing but the short-term benefit of today's retirees. The economic devastation associated with these scenarios ruins countless lives. And for what? To "honor the promises that were made" by a dead politician 40 years ago that went underfunded because of actuarial miscalculations.