The ongoing crisis in teacher pension funding has led states to consider various reforms in plan design to replace the traditional benefit formulas, based on years of service and final average salary (FAS). One such design is a cash balance (CB) plan, long deployed in the private sector, and increasingly considered, but rarely yet adopted, for…

How are teacher pension benefits funded? Under traditional plans, the full cost of career teachers' benefits far exceeds the contributions designated for them. The gap between the two has three pieces, which may (with some license) be mnemonically tagged the three R's of pension funding: "redistribution," "return," and…

The growing fiscal cost of K-12 teacher pension plans and pension-induced labor market distortions have led to calls for teacher pension reforms. Dynamic structural econometric models are a useful way to analyze the fiscal and staffing consequences of current and alternative retirement plans. This article lays out the benefits of the structural…

In 2019, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) began exploratory data collection for the School Pension Survey (SPS). The SPS is a new data collection of elementary/secondary school teacher pension data collected at the school district level. The SPS was developed primarily in response to public demand for data on teacher and other…

How are teacher pension benefits funded? Under traditional plans, the full cost of a career teacher's benefits far exceeds the contributions designated for them. The gap between the two has three pieces, which may (with some license) be mnemonically tagged the three R's of pension funding: "Redistribution, Return, and Risk." First, some…

The 2022-2023 AASA Superintendent Salary & Benefits Study marks the ninth consecutive edition of this study. The 2022-2023 version employed a slightly revised and updated survey instrument. The survey tracked the demographics, salary, benefits, and other elements of the employment agreements of school superintendents throughout the country.…

The 2021-22 AASA Superintendent Salary & Benefits Study marks the ninth consecutive edition of this study. The 2021-2022 version employed a slightly revised and updated survey instrument. The survey tracks the demographics, salary, benefits, and other elements of the employment agreements of school superintendents throughout the country. The…

The 2020-21 AASA Superintendent Salary & Benefits Study marks the ninth consecutive edition of this study. The 2020-2021 version employed a slightly revised and updated survey instrument. The survey tracks the demographics, salary, benefits, and other elements of the employment agreements of school superintendents throughout the country. The…

Public school districts are facing twin challenges: maintaining a labor supply of qualified teachers while shoring up the deteriorating system that compensates them. Keeping public-school teachers' pensions plans flush is expensive, and it accounts for a growing share of education spending. In some states, public charter schools provide an…

The 2019-20 AASA Superintendent Salary & Benefits Study marks the eighth edition of this study, employing an annually revised and updated survey instrument. This survey tracks the demographics, salary, benefits, and other elements of the employment agreements of school superintendents throughout the country. This year's study is based on more…

The 2018-19 AASA Superintendent Salary & Benefits Study marks the seventh edition of this study, employing a revised survey instrument. This survey tracks the demographics, salary, benefits and other elements of the employment contracts of school superintendents throughout the country. This year's study is based on 1,433 responses…

The 2017-18 AASA Superintendent Salary & Benefits Study marks the sixth edition of this study, employing a revised survey instrument. This survey tracks the demographics, salary, benefits, and other elements of the employment contracts of school superintendents throughout the country. This year's study is based on 1,172 responses…

State-specific licensing policies and pension plans create mobility costs for educators who cross state lines. We empirically test whether these costs affect production in schools--a hypothesis that follows directly from economic theory on labor frictions--using geo-coded data from the lower-48 states. We find that achievement is lower in…