Blog: Pensions and Human Capital

A new study finds that teachers live the longest of all public employees. That's great news for them, but can come with increased costs for state pension systems.
On teacher pensions, there’s a chasm between what’s promised and the outcomes for the overwhelming majority of teachers. The commonly held notion of a teacher working 30-35 years and retiring with a gold plated pension is largely fiction.
Teacher pension funds are complicated and can be difficult to understand. In fact, Arizona's teacher pension plan is particularly complicated. This post explains how the system works and explains how it affects teachers' retirement.
This post digs into worker retention data from Arkansas and notes that there are reasons to doubt how much pension plans affect worker retention rates.
Without looking at all forms of compensation or adjusting for cost of living, average teacher salary rankings don’t tell us all that much.
A new report finds that district spending on benefits has grown at a rate that far outpaces the district's overall spending on K-12. As a result, benefits take an increasingly large bite out of district education budgets.
To what extent do different rates of educational attainment among men and women contribute to the gender-based salary gap? Based on our analysis, the higher rate of educational attainment for women is insufficient to overcome other barriers to higher salaries.
One of the most common teacher salary questions is whether or not teachers get paid over the summer months. So, do they? It depends. Teacher payroll schedules vary district-to-district: some allow workers to spread their 10-month salary over 12 months, while others don’t give any paycheck during the summer months, requiring teachers to budget, or in some cases, get a second job.
Even with district wide salary schedules, women earn less than their male colleagues. Although there is no single explanation, in this piece I look at the impact of differences across grade levels.
A new study provides evidence that teachers are not particularly sensitive to changes in retirement benefits. If anything, updating teachers’ retirement options could even free up resources to raise base salaries, which may ultimately affect the teacher workforce more than retirement benefits ever can.