Blog: Mobility and Portability

Traditional pension benefits aren’t portable. When a teacher moves to a new state, her previous service years don’t automatically rollover for free. Instead, she starts back at zero.
There’s very little evidence that current education policies are driving teacher turnover rates. The rise in teacher turnover rates in the 1990s and 2000s can be traced to changing demographics of the teacher workforce.
Charter schools should think about how to provide retirement benefits that more closely match their workforce.
It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to prioritize one year of teaching over another. But that's exactly what teacher pensions do.
The majority of California's teachers would be better off in a cash balance plan than the state’s current pension plan.
President Obama struck at the heart of retirement issues in his final State of the Union address: workers need portable benefits.
Districts should be investing the majority of their retention efforts on early-career teachers.
Contributions made into teacher plans are related but not directly tied to what teachers actually receive in benefits. That matters a lot.
A new report from Vanguard suggests that women are better at saving for retirement than men.
We have had a number of military families write to us about their need for portable retirement benefits.