Policy discussions about teacher quality and teacher "shortages" often focus on recruitment and retention of young teachers. However, attention has begun to focus on the incentive effects of teacher retirement benefit systems, particularly given their rising costs and the large unfunded liabilities. In this paper we analyze accrual of…

There is significant interest in reforming retirement plans for public school employees, particularly in light of current market conditions. This paper presents an overview of the various types of state regulation of public pension plans that affect possibilities for reform. Several states have legal protections that effectively prevent a state…

This paper examines late career mobility and retirement decisions for a cohort of mid-career Missouri public school teachers. Specifically, the paper follows a cohort of teachers whose combined age and experience totaled 45 or more years in fall 1991 through the 2005-06 school year. Like many public employee pensions, Missouri has a system that…

The vast majority of public employees--including teachers--are enrolled in defined-benefit pension plans. These plans are usually the product of state legislation that determines eligibility, benefit formulas, employer and employee contributions, and how payments will be calculated when an employee retires or leaves the system. Once an employee…

There is significant interest in reforming retirement plans for public school employees, particularly in light of current market conditions. This article presents an overview of the various types of state regulation of public pension plans that affect possibilities for reform. Nearly all of the various approaches to public pension plan protection…

The purpose of this paper is to characterize the choice made by retired professional school personnel in Pennsylvania to return to work in public education. This paper builds on earlier studies of the market for teachers and administrators in Pennsylvania. In this paper we describe retiring teachers, administrators and coordinators as…

This article reports that across the country, retired superintendents are finding fulfillment as mentors, either formally or informally, spontaneously or planned. Some are paid, but most are volunteers who remember their first year running a school district and want to ease the transition for others. Some want to focus on leadership development.…

The purpose of this policy analysis was to examine the Missouri Public School Retirement System (PSRS). The team investigated the under-funding of PSRS, relating to sustainability and the feasibility of the system's use of one lever, contribution rate, to stabilize the retirement system, and to meet actuary needs and governmental requirements. The…

There is great interest in understanding the potential of teacher incentives to improve student achievement. In fact, teacher incentives, either individual or collective, may improve student achievement if they succeed in aligning the public or social goals with the goals of the teacher. However, an approach in which reward is based on outputs can…

Pensions have long been an important part of compensation for teachers in public schools. However, the incentive structures of teacher pension systems are not widely understood, even though they can have powerful effects on the composition of the teaching force and on public finance. In their research, the authors have found that teacher pension…

The Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS) is a follow-up of a sample of the elementary and secondary school teachers who participated in the previous year's Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). The TFS sample includes teachers who leave teaching in the year after the SASS data collection and those who continue to teach. The objective of TFS is to provide…

Researchers have focused their attention on the subject of special education teacher attrition for many years. While these researchers have made valuable findings, the need to abate the staggering numbers of special education teachers who leave the field still exists. Districts desiring to retain their teachers must place greater emphasis on the…

Over 50% of the nation's teachers and principals are Baby Boomers. During the next four years the nation could lose a third of its most accomplished educators to retirement. The wave of departures will peak during the 2010-11 school year, when over 100,000 veteran teachers could leave. In less than a decade more than half of today's teachers--1.7…

This study seeks to empirically ground the debate over mathematics and science teacher shortages and evaluate the extent to which there is, or is not, sufficient supply of teachers in these fields. The authors' analyses of nationally representative data from multiple sources show that math and science are the fields most difficult to staff, but…

We use detailed data from New York City to estimate how the characteristics of school principals relate to school performance, as measured by students' standardized exam scores and other outcomes. We find little evidence of any relationship between school performance and principal education and pre-principal work experience, although we do find…