Blog: Mobility and Portability

Teacher retention rates may not have changed much, but two trends are shaping the way we think about it.
Shirley Ben-Ami was a teacher for nearly 35 years. She taught fourteen and half years in the New York City Public Schools and spent the last 20 years in Montgomery County, Maryland. In the following interview Ms. Ben-Ami talks about her experiences in the classroom and when it was time for her to retire.
Rising costs and arbitrary incentives are harming Nevada's ability to attract and retain a high-quality teacher workforce.
While nearly all of us could benefit from a brush-up on retirement saving practices, teacher-specific advice is hard to come by. To better understand how best to tackle the unique challenges educators face, I connected with NerdWallet's Arielle O'Shea.
As state and local policymakers seek to expand pre-k opportunities and improve support for early childhood teachers, they must also ensure educators are given a viable path to save for retirement.
By comparing groups of workers as they hit the same career milestones, we can get a more accurate portrait of how worker mobility has changed over time.
Teaching is a difficult profession, and not everyone can do it well, or wants to do it for an entire lifetime. But everyone deserves a secure retirement, and the state shouldn't put teachers at risk anymore.
The majority of teacher pension plans actually incentivize employees to exit at a predetermined age, quietly penalizing those who continue to work. This deters experienced educators from continuing in the classroom, and recent data suggests it may have negative effects on students, too.
As a part of her Initiative on Technology & Innovation, Clinton proposes that the government ensure that employee benefits are “flexible, portable, and comprehensive.” She argues that strong benefits that workers can take with them whenever they move and that can be customized to meet their specific needs are essential to a 21st century workforce. Clinton's proposals would go a long way to ensure teacher pensions provide educators with better benefits.
Oregon offered its teachers one of the most generous pension plans ever devised, and it still wasn't able to boost teacher retention.