Revisiting the Three Rs of Teacher Retirement: Recruitment, Retention and Retirement
This issue brief analyzes the effectiveness of pensions on teacher retention and productivity. It finds that pensions play a critical role in recruiting and retaining highly productive teachers.
As a result, pensions help increase schools’ effectiveness, which benefits students. Additionally, DB pensions save school districts money by reducing expensive teacher turnover costs. These findings are contained in a new research brief, Revisiting the Three Rs of Teacher Retirement Systems: Recruitment, Retention and Retirement.
The new research brief finds that:
Teacher effectiveness increases with experience. Thus, the more retention that we see among midcareer teachers, the more that the average productivity within a school will increase.
The cost of teacher turnover is quite high, both in terms of financial cost and loss of productivity to the school district.
Defined benefit pension plans help to recruit high quality teachers, and to retain highly productive teachers longer, as compared with defined contribution (DC) accounts.
In 2009, DB pensions helped to retain an additional 30,000 teachers nationwide. Because longer tenured teachers are more effective teachers, the increased retention that DB pensions bring increases the overall quality of public education.
Because the cost of teacher turnover is substantial, the retention effects of DB pension plans also save school districts money. In 2009, DB pensions saved school districts between $131 million and $284 million nationally in teacher turnover costs.
Florida’s Property Tax Initiative and the Unexpected Connection to Retirement Security
Property-tax relief could help homeowners facing rising costs—but what could it mean for the services they rely on and the retirement benefits of the public employees who provide them?
Recorded before a live audience at the Florida Public Pension Trustees Association conference, this Special Edition of Retirement in America examines Florida’s proposed property-tax changes, known as Amendment 3. The conversation looks beyond next year’s tax bill to consider how reduced revenues could affect staffing, emergency response, infrastructure, local control and public pension funding over time.
Watch this Special Edition Episode, Florida’s Property Tax Initiative and the Unexpected Connection to Retirement Security, below.
Workforce Turnover and Retention in the Public Sector: Insights from Public Pension Plans
This report examines how retention changes over public employees’ careers and varies across public workforces and retirement systems. The analysis draws on actuarial turnover assumptions and other information collected from 136 state-administered public pension plans representing 203 plan-employee groups and 12.8 million active members.
