Teacher retirement

April 30, 2020May 8, 2020

How Will COVID-19 Affect the Teacher Labor Market?

In a new column at The 74, Lauren Dachille and I offer five predictions, and four suggestions, for school districts struggling with hiring uncertainty in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. We write:

Ultimately, while this crisis presents many challenges for districts, it may also provide an opportunity. Those places that are able to adapt to the changing teacher labor market now can have a lasting positive impact on student learning in years to come.

Read our predictions and suggestions in the full piece.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

March 6, 2020

New York Keeps Cutting Teacher Pension Benefits

New York City’s teacher pension costs have nearly quadrupled over the last 15 years. If it were a state, its teacher retirement costs would be the highest in the country. Once you include the contributions employees make to the pension plan, plus Social Security taxes, New York City is paying higher retirement rates than Chicago, which is itself an outlier. In percentage terms, the New York City and its employees are contributing more than 50 percent of salary toward retirement benefits.

And yet, as I note in a new report out this week, New York keeps cutting the benefits teachers actually receive.* Compared to prior generations, members hired after 2012 pay higher contribution rates than their predecessors did (aka they will earn less in take-home pay), they’ll have to serve longer to qualify for any retirement benefit at all, and they’ll receive lower pension benefits when they retire.

Due to the most recent round of cuts, I found that New York City’s latest benefit tier (Tier 6) would provide adequate retirement benefits only to teachers who serve for at least 23 consecutive years in the city’s public schools. Needless to say, most New York City teachers do not remain that long.

In an op-ed for the New York Daily News, I write:

Continuing to cut benefits for generation after generation of teachers is an unsustainable path. Instead, New York City leaders should look toward alternative models to keep costs in check while ensuring that all teachers are on a path to a secure retirement, no matter how long they serve.

Read the op-ed for the short version of how New York City got to this place, or read the full report for possible solutions.

*Note: While the plans are technically distinct and the funds are kept separate, the benefit rules I’m describing are essentially the same for New York City teachers as they are for teachers across the entire New York state.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

February 12, 2020February 12, 2020

Latest Edu-Reads

My Bellwether colleagues are launching an early childhood newsletter. You should sign up!

Here’s Nisha Smales on the complex pathways early childhood educators take into the classroom.

Rising teacher pension costs are eating into expenditures on teacher salaries. Primarily, this seems to be about reductions in staffing rather than outright cuts to individual salaries.

The 13th annual CALDER conference has some interesting new research papers. I’m especially partial to this Charles Clotfelter, Helen Ladd, and Mavzuna Turaeva study on between- and within-school segregation in North Carolina.

EdSource on dual enrollment gaps in California.

I’m (very!) late to it, but this Nat Malkus report on the evolution of career and technical education is fascinating. For example, check out Table 6 on the changes in CTE concentrators by gender.

“In Mississippi, nearly 33,000 students — almost all of them African American — attend a school district rated as failing, like Holmes. White students account for less than 5 percent of enrollment in these districts, according to a Hechinger Report analysis of state data.” That’s Bracey Harris taking a deep dive on academic segregation in Mississippi.

USA Today takes a look at private placements for public school students with a disability. They find, “In California, Massachusetts and New York, for instance, the share of white students in private placement exceeds the share in public special education by about 10 percentage points. And in both California and Massachusetts, low-income students with disabilities were only half as likely to receive a private placement as their wealthier special education peers.”

John Arnold has a reminder on the long-term trends in childhood poverty rates:

An untold story is we are making real progress on the war on poverty.
When factoring in govt benefits and EITC, America has cut poverty for children of color in half, and by 25 absolute % points, in one generation. pic.twitter.com/dbVDAwMoK8

— John Arnold (@JohnArnoldFndtn) February 11, 2020

“Hand-washing is one of the most important tools in public health. It can keep kids from getting the flu, prevent the spread of disease and keep infections at bay.” That’s from this old NPR story about a doctor who championed hand-washing before his time.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

January 6, 2020

Latest Edu-Reads

I’m biased, but I enjoyed Greg Richmond’s interview with Andy Rotherham. It’s short, but there are lots of good nuggets in there, including this one:

My friends who are doctors and nurses, nobody is attacking them for indifference to housing or education policy. Only in education policy is focusing on a single issue as one lever for change considered a problem.

Kate Rabinowitz and Laura Meckler take a look at teacher diversity for The Washington Post. The article also includes interactive graphics that allow you to look up how teacher diversity compares to student diversity in your local school district.

“Instructions to suppress stereotypes often have the opposite effect, and prejudice reduction programs are much more effective when people are already open-minded, altruistic, and concerned about their prejudices to begin with.” That’s from Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic reviewing the academic literature on implicit bias training.

Katrina Boone on how and why, “Native parents and activists saw school choice as a way to pursue justice and cultural revitalization.”

Which states have the best (and worst) teacher retirement plans? I take a look at one simple way to answer that question.

Washington schools chief Chris Reykdal is trying to address disparities in access to college-level coursework by pushing for a bill that would require school districts, colleges, and universities to cover the cost of dual credit for high school students.

Gentrification is a growing problem in all of our urban cities, right? Well, no. Here’s Will Stancil correcting the record:

Research has also tended to show that no matter how you measure gentrification in the urban core, it’s almost always more common to find neighborhoods afflicted by intensifying poverty. Out of the fifty biggest American regions, forty-four have core cities where the population in poverty has grown faster than the overall population since 2000. The only exceptions are New York City, Los Angeles, D.C., New Orleans, Atlanta, and Providence.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

December 20, 2019

Holiday Edu-Reads

This Wall Street Journal story is worth your time. Financial companies buy their way into teachers lounges with offers of free food or other perks, only to sell teachers on expensive, fee-laded 403(b) plans. Meanwhile, state and national teachers unions are willing middlemen who get kickbacks from these deals. Lest you don’t trust the Wall Street Journal, here’s a similar story from The New York Times and many more horror stories from the nonprofit 403bwise.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is this ProPublica story from New Jersey, where health plans for school employees cover the full cost of out-of-network expenses. The results are what you might expect:

In recent months, teachers across New Jersey have been protesting, even striking, for higher wages and more affordable benefits. Meanwhile, a state analysis shows, the glut of out-of-network payments has consumed hundreds of millions of dollars in the past four years. That’s money that experts say could have helped fund the teachers’ demands. And New Jersey residents are also pitching in to pay the bills: Homeowners in the towns where the schools are located are chipping in through higher property taxes.

Health care costs can be controlled with more aggressive oversight. Here’s a story about a Boston union and how they did it:

It required union members to make a trade-off that many, at first, found unpalatable — giving up access to some of the city’s best known, and most expensive, hospitals.

In return, however, workers not only kept their insurance premiums under control, they saved so much money that housekeepers like Rajae Nouira saw their hourly pay increase from $16.98 to $23.60 in five years, a 39% jump.

Evan Coughenour is not Catholic, but he has a growing appreciation for Catholic schools.

Tresha Ward has some tips for principals on how to lead autonomous schools, and how that’s different than leading any other school.

Elizabeth Ross and Kelli Lakis look at licensure rules for teachers crossing state lines.

The FAFSA is about to be simplified, here’s Evie Blad on what that means for students and Lamar Alexander’s favorite prop.

Matt Chingos surveys the landscape on free college proposals and explains why, “A plan that simply pays whatever colleges are charging would bail out states like Vermont at the expense of states like Wyoming — and encourage states to raise tuition to capture more federal money.”

EdSource has a deep dive, with a cool map, into community college transfer rates in California. About 40 percent of community college students in California eventually transfer to the state’s university systems, but those rates vary widely based on geography.

Nat Malkus is worried about screen time for kids. As a parent, I wish my kids’ school would send them home with some homework this holiday season. Or at least extra library books. Instead, all I got was a reminder of my kids’ login for online learning platforms so they could spend their break with MORE screen time. No thanks…

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

December 15, 2019December 15, 2019

Latest Edu-Reads

I missed it earlier, but this paper by E. Jason Baron is an important addition to the school funding debate. In Wisconsin, districts have to hold separate bond referenda if they want to raise operational spending (for things like instruction and supports) or capital spending (for school facilities). This allowed Baron to conclude that bond referenda focused on operational spending led to higher teacher pay and higher retention rates, not to mention increases in test scores and postsecondary enrollment. In contrast, however, the referenda focused on facilities were unrelated to changes in student outcomes. As I warned when the latest NAEP results came out, not all school spending is equal. And just because we’re spending more money on education in general, that doesn’t mean it’s going toward the things that actually produce gains for students.

Here’s a conversation between Bonnie O’Keefe, Brandon Lewis, and Jenn Schiess on school performance frameworks and the Chalkbeat story on GreatSchools’ ratings.

A report from Morgan Polikoff and Jennifer Dean finds that the materials on lesson-sharing websites Teachers Pay Teachers, ReadThinkWrite, and Share My Lesson are often weak and pitched below grade-level of the targeted students.

The WSJ reports on an open secret in the 403(b) world: Teachers are being targeted by predatory financial companies, and their school district employers are at best willing collaborators in these schemes.

Can we improve the standardized testing process by providing better, more tailored information to parents and teachers? EdNavigator tried a cool experiment of mailing “packets” of information (plus McDonald’s gift cards!) to high-performing Louisiana students. Read about their results here.

College graduation rates rose 6.6 percentage points from the entering class of 2006 to entrants in 2013, according to new data from the National Student Clearinghouse.

Speaking of boosting college completions, check out this story from Erica Bruenlin at the Colorado Sun. About 35 percent of Colorado’s public high school juniors and seniors were enrolled in college-level courses in 2017-18, up from 19 percent in 2012. Moreover, about 2,700 high school students completed some form of postsecondary credential in 2018, up 37 percent from the year prior.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

December 9, 2019

Latest Edu-Reads

Check out FAFSA completion rates by poverty rate in your state, via this cool tool by Bill DeBaun for the National College Access Network. In my home state of Virginia, for example, students in the highest-poverty schools have FAFSA completion rates that are about 15 percentage points lower than in the lowest-poverty schools. That is, the students who could benefit from the FAFSA the most are the least likely to complete it. Check out how your state looks.

99 percent of public community colleges use standardized tests to determine which students are ready for college-level math, and 98 percent do so in reading and writing, finds a new survey by the Center for the Analysis of Postsecondary Readiness.

Mike Antonucci finds that the number of people working in education employed by local governments increased by 8.5 percent last year. That’s not all teachers, but the public education system as a whole is growing much faster than student enrollment.

Do teachers value all forms of compensation equally? I have an interview up today with Barbara Biasi, a Yale economist with a recent paper looking at what happened in the wake of Wisconsin’s Act 10. That bill cut teacher take-home pay (by increasing pension contributions) and made it illegal for districts to negotiate over salary schedules, leading districts to introduce new forms of performance pay. It also led to a wave of teacher retirements, but Biasi was able to exploit variation in the timing of the policy changes to analyze whether the salary or pension changes were most responsible. Perhaps not surprisingly, she found that even late-career teachers were much more sensitive to salary changes than they were to pension changes. While this was an instance where the state was trimming spending, it provides another piece of evidence that teachers value $1 in salary spending much more than they do $1 in benefit spending.

I also have a new column up today for The 74 about New York City’s teacher retirement plans. The city automatically enrolls all new teachers in a defined benefit pension plan with all the typical problems–it’s under-funded, back-loaded, and has a 10-year vesting requirement (which would be illegal in the private sector). Meanwhile, the city also offers teachers a voluntary retirement plan which could offer the city a path forward for a more fiscally responsible, portable benefit for workers.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

November 26, 2019

Thanksgiving Week Edu-Reads

Allison Crean-Davis interviews Diana Cournoyer, the Executive Director of the National Indian Education Association.

Bellwether was part of a group to win the contract for a National Comprehensive Center, with Westat (the lead grantee), RMC Research, and Academic Development. Read more about that work here.

Bellwether also has a new publication out via Pathway 2 Tomorrow highlighting our work on postsecondary access and success. Because higher education is primarily a regional issue, particularly for underserved students, there is a unique opportunity to bring together stakeholders from both the K-12 and postsecondary sides to amplify successes and address common challenges.

I’m behind in my reading, but this David Steiner piece on why rigorous curriculum stays on the shelf is worth your time. It’s hard to do it justice with just one quote, but this was my favorite passage:

…in the United States we have built a system that not only fails to support the sustained use of demanding curriculum—but actively produces powerful disincentives to its use. In what school of education are teachers prepared to teach powerful and demanding works of literature to students who are two or three grade levels below the level required to make real sense of those texts? (I know of none, but would like to be mistaken.) Is there a high-quality ELA curriculum that includes materials for teachers whose students are below grade level? In how many districts are principal evaluation tools supplemented by curriculum-specific rubrics? Beyond the quizzes and curriculum-embedded assessments, how many standalone interim assessments actually measure students’ knowledge of what their curriculum asks them to read? How many summative assessments do the same?

Doug Lemov has a good story about when hands-on learning works, and when it doesn’t.

Is Missouri’s teacher pension plan “good?” That depends on who’s asking the question.

Mike Antonucci contrasts two surveys, one suggesting that 9/10 teachers are planning to leave the profession immediately… and the other suggesting they’re planning to stay until retirement. Which is it? Rather than trying to parse out these survey responses, shouldn’t we just look at revealed preferences instead?

A reminder from Chalkbeat that “public” schools often screen their students: “To get into Columbia Secondary for sixth grade, the school considers state test scores, and students must take a school-created test, have good attendance records, and live or attend elementary school in the surrounding neighborhoods. (Across the city, about a quarter of middle schools similarly set their own competitive entrance criteria.)”

Speaking of charters, kudos to Erica Green and Eliza Shapiro for digging into the racial politics around charters and Democrats. I also appreciated that the authors mostly quoted parents and school leaders and stayed away from pontificating pundits. But, wow, this talking point from Elizabeth Warren’s team is totally off:

In addition to following the same state and federal accountability laws that every other school follows, charters also must compete for students, provide their own facilities, and face the risk of being shut down for poor performance. Do traditional public schools really want to compete on those terms?

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

November 21, 2019November 21, 2019

Latest Edu-Reads

Mike Antonucci asks, if teachers unions are bargaining “for the common good,” what are the elected mayors and school boards on the other side of the table bargaining for?

A new paper finds that, “Social Security is the most equal form of retirement wealth and the most important source for most minority households,” and yet 40 percent of public school employees lack Social Security benefits.

“Just like an unpaid credit card balance that grows over time, the longer states delay paying off [their pension debt], the bigger the debt price tag becomes, consuming an ever-greater share of the finite pool of public dollars available for teachers and students.” Marguerite Roza quantifies the extent of that debt for California, Illinois, Louisiana, South Carolina, Texas, and Vermont.

Julie Squire ~~takes the high ground~~ is glad to welcome Cory Booker back into the charter school tent (where he had been for most of his career!).

Speaking of zingers, Mike Petrilli notes that Montgomery County leaders talk a good game on equity, and yet the district, “doesn’t offer a single extra penny to teachers assigned to the district’s toughest schools — those serving large proportions of kids living in poverty who often come to school with unmet needs and below grade-level proficiency.”

Here’s an interesting report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on household debt and credit. Two big takeaways: At least in the last 15 years, student loan debt delinquency rates are higher and much less volatile than other types of debt:

Two, delinquency rates are tied to age. Per the first graph, that’s largely tied to student loans, but older Americans have the lowest delinquency rates while the youngest adults have much higher rates of default:

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman