Teacher Pension Plans’ Structure Criticized
At a time when millions of babyboomer teachers are nearing retirement, their decisions on when to leave the classroom are guided more by the early-retirement incentives built into state pension plans than by educational considerations, according to new research by a pair of economists.
Those pension formulas, devised by state legislatures, generally encourage teachers who are seeking to maximize their lifetime pension payouts to retire in their mid-50s—effectively penalizing them for teaching longer than that, argues an article appearing in the Winter 2008 issue of the magazine Education Next , published by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
The research—by Robert M. Costrell, an education reform and economics professor at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville and Michael Podgursky, an economics professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia—calls attention to the long-lasting consequences of what they view...
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