In 2007, the case could be made that Rhode Island had, dollar for dollar, the worst-performing public education system in the United States. Despite per-pupil expenditures ranking in the top 10 nationally, the state's 8th graders fared no better than 40th in reading and 33rd in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Only…

This paper offers three constructive recommendations that apply specifically to public school teachers, the largest group of state and local government employees, and one of special importance to the long-term economic competitiveness of the country. The recommendations embrace and protect existing defined-benefit pension plans, which are under…

Teacher benefits, once a sleepy question primarily of interest to actuaries, have become a flash point in the education debate. With individual states on the hook for tens or hundreds of millions in unfunded pension and health insurance obligations, state leaders are trying to determine the severity of the situation and the appropriate response.…

Recent research (Strunk and Reardon forthcoming) applies Partial Independence Item Response (PIIR) models to teacher bargaining agreements in California to calculate the latent restrictiveness of these contracts. Further research (Strunk and Grissom 2010; Strunk forthcoming) tests the external validity of these estimates. Given that much research…

Chicago teachers voted last week to suspend a 7-day-old strike, sending some 350,000 students back to the classroom and paving the way for the teaching force to vote on a tentative contract. But for many in the Windy City, the contract has raised another potentially tall hurdle: how the cash-strapped district will manage to pay for it. District…

Fueled by declining revenue from the housing crisis, skyrocketing energy costs, and an economy in general disarray, the public is pressuring school administrators to make broader and deeper cuts in their operating budgets. As the baby boomers retire, put their houses on the market, and downsize, one will see more downward price pressure on home…

While educators are eager to forget the financial woes of the past two years and return to the familiar routine of steady budget increases, the fiscal outlook for America's fourteen thousand school districts is bleak--not just for next year, but for a half decade or more. This calls for a new mindset among educators and an unfamiliar,…

To all the other fiscal travails facing this country's states and largest cities, now add their pension obligations, which are far greater than they may realize or are willing to admit. This paper focuses on the crisis in funding teachers' pensions, because education is often the largest program area in state budgets, making it an obvious target…

The Foundation for Educational Choice and the Manhattan Institute recently commissioned a new study to examine the emerging crisis of underfunding public teacher pension plans in the states. The implications for public policy will likely be severe in the coming years. Public funding for K-12 education, and the potential for new reforms hang in the…

While it is generally understood that defined benefit pension systems concentrate benefits on career teachers and impose costs on mobile teachers, there has been very little analysis of the magnitude of these effects. The authors develop a measure of implicit redistribution of pension wealth among teachers at varying ages of separation. Compared…

This paper addresses two questions: How well do teachers understand their current pension plans? And, what do they think about alternative plan structures? The data come from administrative records and a 2006 survey of teachers in Washington State. The results suggest Washington's teachers are fairly knowledgeable about their pensions, though new…

Like most other state and local government employees, teachers participate primarily in defined benefit pension plans whose benefits are largely based on final average salaries and length of service. Such pensions have been replaced in many private sector firms by defined contribution pensions. A number of questions have arisen about the…

In this article we focus on two questions: How well do teachers understand their current pension plans, and what do they think about alternative plan structures? The data come from administrative records and a 2006 survey of teachers in Washington State. The results suggest that Washington's teachers are fairly knowledgeable about their pensions,…

When it comes to public-sector pensions, writes lead author Michael B. Lafferty in this report, "A major public-policy (and public-finance) problem has been defined and measured, debated and deliberated, but not yet solved. Except where it has been." As recounted in "Halting a Runaway Train: Reforming Teacher Pensions for the 21st…

On August 24, 2010, the state of Rhode Island received some outstanding news. Its yearlong, bipartisan effort to develop new policies to spur educational improvement was about to pay off. The state, along with eight others and the District of Columbia, was named a winner of the U.S. Department of Education's Race to the Top grant competition. The…