The COVID-related financial market decline and economic recession have raised new concerns regarding the financial sustainability of retirement plans for state and local government employees, the largest group of whom is public school teachers. Using data from the Public Plans Database and the National Income and Product Accounts, I analyze…

While the retirement security landscape has changed drastically for most workers over the last twenty years, traditional defined benefit (DB) pension plans remain the overwhelming norm for K-12 teachers. Because DB plans pay off fully with a fixed income after retirement only if a teacher stays in the profession for decades and yield little or…

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…

The tension at the heart of pension politics is the incentive to satisfy today's claimants in the here and now at the expense of long-term concerns. Teacher pensions, in particular, pose two challenges. The first is that political incentives invite irresponsible fiscal stewardship, as public officials make outsized short-term commitments to…

This article examines the pattern of incentives for work versus retirement in six state teacher pension systems. We do this by examining the annual accrual of pension wealth from an additional year of work over a teacher's career. Accrual of wealth is highly nonlinear and heavily loaded at arbitrary years that would normally be considered…

Most public elementary and high school teachers are covered by health insurance provided by their employer while they are employed. In most cases, these health plans are managed at the state level. At retirement, teachers with sufficient years of service are allowed to remain in the health plan. Retiree health plans for teachers vary widely across…

The authors analyze the Arkansas teacher pension plan and empirically gauge the behavioral response to incentives embedded in that plan and to possible reforms. The pattern of pension wealth accrual creates sharp incentives to work until eligible for early or normal retirement, often in one's early fifties, and to separate shortly thereafter. We…

This year's "Quality Counts" report, the 15th edition of this annual report produced through the joint efforts of the "Education Week" newsroom and the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, arrives at a time of continued fiscal anxiety and education policy ferment in the wake of what has been widely described as the…

After years of non-stop increases--national k-12 per-pupil spending is up by "one-third" in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1995--schools now face the near-certainty of repeated annual budget cuts for the first time since the Great Depression. In some states and districts, reductions will be dramatic--well into the double digits. And…

Offers editorial opinion and excerpts from letters discussing pension requirements for teachers in the Soviet Union. Criticizes the policy of requiring teachers to put in a strictly enforced number of years of service to become eligible to receive a pension. (DK)

The retirement behavior of Pennsylvania public school teachers in 1997-98 and 1998-99, a period when state early retirement incentives were temporarily increased, is modeled using a choice framework that emphasizes both pecuniary and nonpecuniary factors of the retirement decision under a defined benefit retirement plan. We find each to have large…

This report contains seven essays on current issues in higher education and a 1995-96 faculty salary report. "Faculty Salaries, 1995-96" (John B. Lee) provides an overview of faculty salaries, while "Faculty Workload and Productivity: Ethnic and Gender Disparities (Henry L. Allen) examines the ethnic and gender differences in…