It has been almost ten years since the American Council on Education (ACE) began to raise awareness of the importance of workplace flexibility in faculty careers and to encourage colleges and universities to support faculty in better integrating their professional and personal lives. With the generous support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, ACE…

Recent media reports of teacher shortages across the country are confirmed by the analysis of several national datasets reported in this brief. Shortages are particularly severe in special education, mathematics, science, and bilingual/English learner education, and in locations with lower wages and poorer working conditions. Shortages are…

Veteran educators are being encouraged to take early retirement in order to create jobs for less-experienced, lower-paid novices. Veteran educators are not alone: early retirement promotions have become the norm for aging workers in America. Consequently, there is a brain-drain of skilled workers at the national, state, and local levels. The early…

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…

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…

Policymakers are beginning to take note of the fiscal problems in teacher retirement systems. States have recently taken action by raising retirement ages, lowering benefit payments, and reducing cost-of-living adjustments. These are small steps toward shoring up the system to help ensure that it remains sustainable in the future. But the problems…

With the average age of faculty members going up and the number of students expected to go down, many colleges are encouraging professors to retire. That is not a universal urge--in some regions of the country, like the Southwest, colleges anticipate rising enrollments, and in some disciplines, like nursing, skilled faculty members are in short…

Plunges in the stock market have taken a toll on the fortunes of the nation's pension funds for retired teachers and other public employees, with retirement systems nationwide reporting losses in the billions of dollars in recent weeks. The losses have worsened already-high unfunded obligations for plans that have promised more than $2 trillion in…

Most of us have had at least one amazing teacher who has inspired, influenced, or encouraged us to do better, aim higher, or just be more confident. However, most of us have also had at least one teacher who has not met our expectations. In "Teachers Matter", education researcher Marcus A. Winters, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute,…

Baby boomers, who make up a majority of the U.S. teaching force, are inching closer to retirement. Couple that with the downturn in the economy, and renewed worries about pension-fund liabilities are cropping up across the nation. Yet as policymakers focus on ways to make teachers' pension plans sustainable over the long haul, some economists and…

This article reports on the University of North Carolina's "phased-retirement" plan, which lets professors formally ease their way into retirement. The challenges of personnel planning in the North Carolina system, made tougher when higher education was stripped of a mandatory retirement age 14 years ago, have lessened because the…

As districts face another year of budget gaps, hundreds of thousands of teachers have been warned that, come the end of the school year, their jobs may be gone. In a policy now termed "LIFO" or "last in, first out," most districts make layoff decisions based on seniority and not on job performance or effectiveness. Using…

Even as they grapple with budget pressures from a sagging national economy, states are being forced to make tough decisions on how they will cope with an even more severe longterm fiscal concern: a projected price tag pushing $3 trillion to pay the pensions and health insurance of retired teachers and other government employees. Those commitments…

In many parts of the United States, there is a growing shortage of music teachers to take the place of the retiring teachers. This is most evident in rural areas. If music teachers are not available to fill openings, music positions are sometimes combined, spreading music teachers too thin and requiring them to possess multiple music…

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…