Oregon's Tier One Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) covered members prior to January 1, 1996. This "Issue Brief" documents the generosity of the money match provision under Oregon's Tier One plan relative to the Tier One defined-benefit formula, and relative to other plans in Oregon and Washington and to representative plans…

Pension legacy costs can restrict the amount of resources available for current public education, potentially making it more difficult to attract and retain high-quality teachers. Oregon provides a useful case study in pension legacy costs because many school districts in the state are now reallocating General Fund expenditures to cover sizeable…

This paper studies the pension preferences of Washington State public school teachers by examining two periods of time during which teachers were able to choose between enrolling in a traditional defined benefit plan and a hybrid plan with defined benefit and defined contribution components. Our findings suggest that a large share of teachers are…

This report presents selected findings from the Public School Principal Status Data File of the 2016-17 Principal Follow-up Survey (PFS). The PFS is a nationally representative sample survey of public K-12 schools in the 50 states and District of Columbia and was initiated to inform discussions and decisions regarding principal attrition and…

Since 2002, public school teachers in Florida have been permitted to choose between a defined benefit (DB) and a defined contribution (DC) retirement plan. We exploit this unique policy environment to study new teachers' revealed preferences over pension plan structures. Roughly 30 percent of teachers hired between 2003 and 2008 selected the DC…

In Pennsylvania as in many other states, employee pension costs are a significant source of financial pressure for school districts (Zeehandelaar and Northern 2013, Pennsylvania Public Employees' Retirement Commission 2013). In order to gain greater insight into the nature of Pennsylvania school districts' financial burden related to pension…

"The SEA of the Future" is an education publication series examining how state education agencies can shift from a compliance to a performance-oriented organization through strategic planning and performance management tools to meet growing demands to support education reform while improving productivity. This volume, the second in the…

The purpose of this article was to present the results of a study that analyzed Pennsylvania local school boards' taxing authority, pre- and post-enactment of Special Session Act 1, "The Taxpayer Relief Act," in 2006, in terms of its percent share of school districts' total budget in order to better understand the impact of the new…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

Uses question-and-answer format to discuss whether employer contributions to 403(b)(7) custodial mutual-fund accounts subject employer to the reporting and disclosure requirements of Title I of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). Also discusses the self-correction of excess contributions to a 403(b) program per the Internal…

This paper is the National Council on Teacher Quality's (NCTQ) fourth annual review of state laws, rules and regulations that govern the teaching profession. This year's "Yearbook" takes a different approach than the past editions, as it is designed as a companion to the 2009 "State Teacher Policy Yearbook", NCTQ's most recent…

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…