Teacher vacancies have been a long-standing issue in U.S. public schools, only made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. Vacancies tend to be concentrated in high-poverty, high-minority schools and hard-to-staff subjects like special education and STEM. States have implemented various policies to decrease turnover, including offering teachers bonuses…

Adequately preparing for retirement requires planning and knowledge about available savings and investment options. Teachers participate in a complex set of plan designs, and many do not participate in Social Security. While teachers represent a large part of the public workforce, relatively little is known regarding their knowledge and…

Defined benefit (DB) pension plans incentivize "salary spiking," where sharp increases in pay are leveraged into significantly higher levels of retirement compensation. While egregious instances of salary spiking occasionally make headlines, there is little guidance on the definition of salary-spiking behavior or understanding of its…

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…

Over the last two decades, twenty-two states have moved away from traditional defined benefit (DB) pension systems and toward pension plan structures like the defined contribution (DC) plans now prevalent in the private sector. Others are considering such a reform as it is seen as a means of limiting future pension funding risk. It is important to…

Adequately saving for retirement requires both planning and knowledge about available retirement savings options. Teachers participate in a complex set of different plan designs and benefit tiers, and many do not participate in Social Security. While teachers represent a large part of the public workforce, relatively little is known regarding…

This study explored the experiences of retired faculty members in higher education through semi-structured interviews. As a qualitative study, researchers conducted interviews with retired faculty members regarding their joyful moments, challenges, and strategies for overcoming obstacles in academia. The study also examined the advice retired…

Background: Despite being an important component of teacher compensation, government-sponsored teacher pensions are only 72 percent funded on average and have total unfunded liabilities exceeding $600 billion nationally (McGee, 2019; Novy-Marx & Rauh, 2011; "Public Plans Data," 2020). Annual per pupil teacher retirement costs account…

Aging, an often-neglected aspect of diversity in universities, is an important issue, as the rate of people working who are 75 and older is growing faster than the rate for any other age group. The present sequential explanatory mixed-method study explored 129 older online faculty's attitudes and opinions on work and retirement in an online survey…

Medical education has reported a shortage of anatomy educators since the 1960s. While the faculty pipeline has recently been explored, insights into retirement intentions, a key driver of faculty turnover, have yet to be investigated. With the mean age of anatomists rising, knowledge of retirement intentions among current educators is essential to…

How much do teachers value compensation that is deferred until retirement? This question is important because the vast majority of public school teachers are covered by defined benefit (DB) pension plans that "backload" a large share of compensation to retirement relative to the compensation structure in the private sector. There is…

In this brief, we examine an important but obscure form of state spending on K-12 education-state subsidies of school district pension costs. In 2018, this exceeded $19 billion across 23 states. To put that amount into perspective, 2018 federal spending on Title I programs was $15.8 billion. This revenue stream is often ignored in analyses of…

In 2019, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) began exploratory data collection for the School Pension Survey (SPS). The SPS is a new data collection of elementary/secondary school teacher pension data collected at the school district level. The SPS was developed primarily in response to public demand for data on teacher and other…

Every year, several teachers retire from the education sector in Rivers State and these teaching retirees still have a lot they can contribute to the education system but can only deliver lifelong educational services when life after retirement is patterned to what is obtainable during active service. The study investigated teaching retirees' life…

Defined benefit (DB) pension systems determine the size of pension payments using an employee's "final average salary". Thus, employees enrolled in DB pension systems face an incentive to "salary spike" -- strategically increase late career pensionable compensation -- to increase their retirement income. This is an important…