Teacher vacancies have been a long-standing issue in U.S. public schools, only made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. Vacancies tend to be concentrated in high-poverty, high-minority schools and hard-to-staff subjects like special education and STEM. States have implemented various policies to decrease turnover, including offering teachers bonuses…

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…

Defined benefit (DB) pension plans incentivize "salary spiking," where sharp increases in pay are leveraged into significantly higher levels of retirement compensation. While egregious instances of salary spiking occasionally make headlines, there is little guidance on the definition of salary-spiking behavior or understanding of its…

Public school teachers retire much earlier than comparable professionals. Pension rule changes affecting new teachers can be used to close this gap in the long run, but any effects will not be observed for decades and the implications for workforce quality are unclear. This paper considers targeted incentive policies designed to deter retirement…

Background: Despite being an important component of teacher compensation, government-sponsored teacher pensions are only 72 percent funded on average and have total unfunded liabilities exceeding $600 billion nationally (McGee, 2019; Novy-Marx & Rauh, 2011; "Public Plans Data," 2020). Annual per pupil teacher retirement costs account…

Background/Context: High teacher turnover has directed a great deal of scholarly attention toward the connection between teacher retention and teacher working conditions. Prior work has identified a set of key working conditions associated with teacher retention, including supportive school leadership, school safety, a collaborative professional…

P-12 and higher education finance policies and resources impact human resources administration. By examining education finance policy analyses covering 50 states written from 2013 to 2019, we illuminate human resource trends and challenges that emerged during this time. The purpose of this document analysis was to synthesize and share emerging…

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has added more stress to an already high-stress profession: American public school teacher. The authors of this report share the results of a new survey of nearly 1,000 former public school teachers and reveal how important stress has been--even more so than pay--to teachers' decisions to leave the…

Nearly half of U.S. schools are facing COVID-related staff shortages that threaten the efforts to shape programming and invest in resources to solve students' unfinished learning. Without enough teachers and support staff, students won't receive rigorous instruction, won't have access to targeted intensive tutoring to address their unfinished…