Chad Aldeman's blog

  • Teacher Pensions Offer Middle-Class Employees Middle-Class Retirement Benefits

    December 16, 2013
    Chad Aldeman
    In terms of teachers and other public school employees, the real challenge is recruiting and retaining the most accomplished professionals to help ensure the success of all our students and ultimately our nation.
    Funding
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  • Pensions and Generational Tensions

    December 16, 2013
    Chad Aldeman
    Where do we begin on the path to building a pension system that doesn’t further short-change Millennials?
    Mobility and Portability
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  • Is There a Teacher Pension Crisis?

    December 13, 2013
    Chad Aldeman

    Welcome to teacherpensions.org, a new site designed to compile analysis and commentary on teacher pensions, provide information to help educators understand the impact of various pension proposals on their own finances, and use social media tools to help engage educators in the national conversation about teacher pensions. We intend the site to serve as a point of entry into the national conversation about teacher retirement sustainability and design and serve a variety of audiences, including teachers, policymakers, the media, and thought leaders.

    We at teacherpensions.org have our own perspectives on the pension issue, but we respect that there are different ways of looking at this issue. To hear from those diverse voices, we invited a range of panelists—from union leaders to economists to teacher voice organizations—to participate in an online forum on teacher pensions.  We asked each of them to respond to two main questions:

    1. Is there a teacher pension crisis? If so, what exactly is the problem?

    2. How do we ensure that teachers have secure, sustainable, and affordable retirements?

    We’ve collected those responses and will be posting the authors’ contributions here, in their own words, on a rolling basis starting next week. Come back to read contributions from the National Education Association, TeachPlus, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and more. 

    To read each contributor's response, click on the following links: 

    Celine Coggins, Founder & CEO, TeachPlus
     
    Dennis Van Roekel, President, National Education Association
     
    Josh B. McGee, Vice President of Public Accountability, The Laura and John Arnold Foundation
     
    Dean Baker, Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research
     
    Elisabeth Evans, Founding CEO & Board Member, The VIVA Project
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  • What Is the "Average" Teacher Pension? An Example From Illinois

    December 13, 2013
    Chad Aldeman

    How much is the “average” teacher pension? That may sound like an easy question, but there are actually many different ways to answer it.

    I’ll use Illinois to show why. Illinois lawmakers recently agreed to legislation that will change the way teacher pension benefits are calculated. In the process, news articles often cited the “average” teacher pension as justification for or against the changes. The Teachers’ Retirement System of the State of Illinois’ official estimate says the weighted average teacher pension in 2012 was $4,018 a month or $48,216 a year.* This estimate would be adequate to use if pension payments formed a normal distribution and there were no high or low outliers. In reality, pension averages tend to be skewed by a small number of large winners.

    It's important to clarify that most teachers won't qualify for a pension in the first place. They simply won't stay teaching in their state long enough to qualify for a pension. Illinois estimates that only about 40 percent of beginning teachers will teach in the state for 10 years, the length of time now required to earn even a minimal pension. But, even for those that do qualify, there are many teachers who stay long enough to qualify for some minimal monthly payment but not long enough to reap the full rewards of the pension system. Depending on the state, teachers need to stay for 25-30 years in order to maximize benefits. Only a small minority last that long, but they’re rewarded with much higher pension payments, delivered monthly for the rest of their lives. Weighted averages hide all the teachers who leave before then. 

    In its Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports, Illinois publishes a table of the monthly pension payments received by all retirees, disaggregated by when the teacher retired and how many years they taught. The table lists average monthly payments for groups of retirees, so, for example, users can see there were 1,370 teachers who retired between one and four years ago who had accumulated 10-14 years of experience. These ex-teachers received monthly payments of $1,282, or $15,384 per year.

    Mobility and Portability
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  • Welcome to TeacherPensions.org

    December 10, 2013
    Chad Aldeman

    Welcome! Thanks for visiting TeacherPensions.org, a new website covering the latest information on teacher pensions. While you’re here, please take a look at our collected resources on a variety of topics, ranging from politics to legal issues to alternative retirement models. We intend the site to be an entry point for experts and non-experts seeking to learn more about educator pensions, and we’ll be expanding the archives over time and featuring new work as it comes out. Check back often--we'll be regularly updating the site with new analysis and content.

    This page is the Teacher Pensions Blog, where we’ll be discussing pension news, highlighting the latest research, and featuring a variety of experts and perspectives on the pension issue. If you're looking for even more pension-related information, sign up for our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter. If you want to subscribe to semi-regular updates (we promise not to spam you), sign up on our homepage.

    Teacherpensions.org is a project from the Thought Leadership team at Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit dedicated to helping education organizations – in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors – become more effective in their work and achieve dramatic results, especially for high-need students. To do this, we provide a unique combination of exceptional thinking, talent, and hands-on strategic support. Our Thought Leadership practice works to shape the broader education policy landscape by conducting policy analysis, research and writing, and idea generation on education issues and advising education entities on policy and public affairs. See the “About Us” section for more information about us and this site.

    Today, we believe there is a need for high-quality information and analysis to help stakeholders – especially teachers and policymakers – understand the teacher pension issue and the trade-offs among various options for reform. We believe the teacher pension issue has not yet gained sufficient attention nationally, despite its seriousness and immediacy. We aim to make the issues around teacher pensions more accessible and relevant to the general public, more compelling to policymakers, and more understandable for current and future teachers.

    Again, thanks for visiting, and we hope you’ll make this site a regular stop. 

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