Teacher Pensions Blog

As we close out 2016, the major events of this year will likely shape the policy conversations around public retirement for years to come. We've collected a highlight reel of teacher pension posts to capture the year's developments. Our most popular posts of 2016 are below.
 
Resources
People are curious; our top source of incoming traffic are readers who want to know how public pension issues affect them and their communities. Our most-read content consistently features pension resources, fact sheets, and maps that break up pension data by state. 
 
Teacher-Focused
Current state pension plans do not provide the majority of the teaching workforce with a secure retirement. Newly hired teachers lack portable, fair, or secure retirement plans, while effective veterans can feel financial pressure to leave the classroom sooner than they'd like.
 
Retirement Writ Large
Finally, two of our most popular posts discussed the effect pensions have on broader retirement issues.
  • Let's Not Kid Ourselves. There Were No "Good Ol' Days" of Retirement Saving We're busting myths left and right in 2016. Here's one more -- there's a common, widespread belief that the shift from defined benefit pension plans to defined contribution plans in the private sector led to a decline in retirement savings. Not true, says Chad Aldeman, and mourning the death of pension plans is longing for a bygone era that never really existed. 
  • Could Donald Trump Make Social Security Great Again? What woud a 2016 wrap-up be without an election post? While we'll have to wait and see how President-Elect Trump ultimately approaches Social Security, expanding the program to cover all state and local government employees, including all teachers, would provide workers with a baseline of secure, nationally portable retirement benefits.
 
Still can't get enough? This post, Why Education Advocates Should Care About Pension Reform summarizes our push for bringing teacher pension reform to the forefront of the education policy conversation in 2017 and beyond. 
 
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