This 450-page special edition of Education Policy and Finance offers a one-stop shop for the teacher-pension novice and journeyman alike, furnishing timely and comprehensible overviews of our teacher-pension predicament as well as thoughtful empirical analyses of today’s muddled pension reality. No stone in this debate is left unturned. Rick Hess and Juliette Squire illustrate the political dynamics perpetuating the “irresponsible fiscal stewardship” of teacher pension plans and offer political strategies to make such plans more tractable. For those interested in the legal frameworks behind pensions, Amy Monahan outlines the regulations that affect states' ability to reform. And for those curious about the cost of defined benefit-programs on mobile teachers, Robert Costrell and Michael Podgursky offer a sobering analysis. (Splitting a thirty-year teaching career across two states adds up to a net loss of over half of one’s cumulative pension wealth.) As fixing teacher pensions becomes an increasingly prominent piece of the education reform puzzle, studying this volume might just serve you well.
Thomas A. Downes and Dan Goldhaber, eds., “Education Finance and Policy: Special Issue: Rethinking Teacher Retirement Benefit Systems” (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Fall 2010, Volume 5, Issue 4).
