Employability skills are important for employment access, success, and excellence, regardless of disability status. Importantly, employability skills are essential to the employment success of individuals with intellectual disabilities. Unfortunately, there are differences between the employability skills valued by employers, and the employability…

Using a qualitative, multiple case study research approach, the personal stories of eight K-12 educators who retired within the past six years were gathered and analyzed. The goal of the study was to understand how educators struggle, or do not struggle, with the life changing event of bringing closure to a career after spending decades in the…

Rising costs of public employee pension plans are a source of fiscal stress in many cities and states and have led to calls for reform. To assess the economic consequences of plan changes it is important to have reliable statistical models of employee retirement behavior. The authors estimate a structural model of teacher retirement using…

The Teachers' Retirement System of the State of Illinois is one of the worst-funded public pensions in the nation. In 2013, it held enough assets to cover only 41 percent of its future obligations (Buck Consultants, 2014). This shortfall has led to several reforms, mostly involving benefit cuts that have undermined retirement income security for…

Several studies have argued that teacher pensions are a raw deal for most teachers and should be replaced with account-style plans. This report examines research that most teachers working today are building a secure retirement. According to the author, the myth that most teachers get a raw deal while a lucky few receive generous pensions is based…

Leaders across the state of Minnesota and nation proclaim to want to diversify the educator workforce. However, the reality nationwide is that less than 20% of teachers who teach a student population that is at least 51% students of color are teachers of color (Ingersoll et al., 2018). What follows are a number of research briefs organized around…

On January 10, 2019, Governor Newsom released his Budget Proposal for the 2019-2020 fiscal year, which includes around $60 billion in state funds for K-12 schools. The budget bill and implementation bills will be deliberated and modified in each house in the upcoming months after which they are expected to incorporate significant revisions that…

With the elimination of mandatory retirement, the average age of college and university faculty members has increased. While this has raised some concerns, relatively little research has tried to measure the impact of this aging on productivity inside the classroom. Using data from the RateMyProfessors.com website for a large sample of instructors…

This research study is a phenomenological exploration of academics from one Canadian university who either are participating in a phased retirement program or have delayed their retirement beyond the normal retirement age of 65. It is based on face-to-face interviews with 24 professors, male and female, between the ages of 55 and 69, from an array…

On February 24, 2017, all of the authors of the state-of-the-state manuscripts published in the "Journal of Education Finance" met in Cincinnati, Ohio, to participate in a roundtable discussion focused on recent legislative actions in 38 states. A majority of those papers were revised to reflect a final report on legislative actions…

Public school districts are facing twin challenges: maintaining a labor supply of qualified teachers while shoring up the deteriorating system that compensates them. Keeping public-school teachers' pensions plans flush is expensive, and it accounts for a growing share of education spending. In some states, public charter schools provide an…

This study, conducted by the Office of Shared Accountability (OSA) in Maryland's Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), aims to describe the characteristics of the teaching staff in MCPS, as well as to examine differences across levels and types of schools. The analysis is mainly descriptive and intends ultimately to inform policies and…

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…

Most public school teachers in the United States are enrolled in defined benefit (DB) pension plans. Using administrative micro data from four states, combined with national pension funding data, we show these plans have accumulated substantial unfunded liabilities -- effectively debt -- owing to previous plan operations. On average across 49…

After Ava McCall retired from university teaching in June, 2015, she spent the 2015-2016 school year volunteering in a fourth-grade classroom helping to teach Wisconsin history. Her volunteer work was similar to other retired teachers in the local school district who returned to mentor new teachers, volunteer in classrooms, and serve as substitute…