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…

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 ongoing crisis in teacher pension funding has led states to consider various reforms in plan design to replace the traditional benefit formulas, based on years of service and final average salary (FAS). One such design is a cash balance (CB) plan, long deployed in the private sector, and increasingly considered, but rarely yet adopted, for…

Public school teachers retire much earlier than comparable professionals. Pension rule changes affecting new teachers can be used to close this gap in the long run, but any effects will not be observed for decades and the implications for workforce quality are unclear. This paper considers targeted incentive policies designed to deter retirement…

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…

For the last two decades, Ohio has given its new public school teachers choices among retirement plans. Early in their employment, they are handed a form that allows them to opt for a traditional pension plan, a 401(k)-style defined-contribution (DC) plan, or a plan that combines elements of each. If they make no affirmative decision at all--that…

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…

In "Are Texas Teacher Retirement Benefits Adequate?," authors Chad Aldeman and Anthony Randazzo analyze the Teachers' Retirement System (TRS) of Texas and find it is not serving all of its members well. Most members will leave their teaching service in Texas with inadequate retirement benefits, and the unfunded liabilities the system has…

In response to financial pressures, the New York State Assembly has created new, less-generous retirement plans for teachers. Teachers and other education employees are enrolled in one of two plans, the Teachers' Retirement System of the City of New York (TRS) and the New York State Teachers' Retirement System (NYSTRS). How far have the benefits…

How are teacher pension benefits funded? Under traditional plans, the full cost of career teachers' benefits far exceeds the contributions designated for them. The gap between the two has three pieces, which may (with some license) be mnemonically tagged the three R's of pension funding: "redistribution," "return," and…

When the Carnegie Foundation was established in 1905, universities in Canada and Newfoundland were eligible for grants, on strict conditions that were seen by some as "colonial," "continentalist," or "imperial" intrusions on autonomy; for example, a Carnegie plan to create a federation of Maritime universities. This…

I use a detailed panel of data and a unique modeling specification to explore how public schoolteachers respond to the incentives embedded in North Carolina's retirement system. Like most public-sector retirement plans, North Carolina's teacher pension implicitly encourages teachers to continue working until they are eligible for their pension…

Understanding how the District of Columbia (DC) funds District of Columbia Public School (DCPS) students and DC public charter school students is essential to ensuring all students receive the support they need as COVID-19 pandemic-era federal funds expire. The recent rise in the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula (UPSFF) and the boost in the…

The fiscal crisis facing the economy has led to withdrawal of the state from major sectors of the economy including education. With the advent of the liberalized economic policy the private sector has been playing a pivotal role in the economic development. Higher education ceases to be the 'merit good' and the universities are encouraged to…

Years of irresponsible budgeting practices have left the Teachers' Retirement System of Louisiana (TRSL) almost $12 billion in debt. Without significant reforms, Louisiana's pension problems are likely to get worse, with further negative consequences for workers and schools. This report shows that schools participating in the TRSL already must…