Author
Chad Aldeman
Articles
Health Care for Life
Will teachers’ post-retirement benefits break the bank?
Why Most Teachers Get a Bad Deal on Pensions
State plans create more losers than winners, and many get nothing at all
The Teacher Evaluation Revamp, In Hindsight
What the Obama administration’s signature reform got wrong
Blog Posts/Multimedia
How to Fix Teacher Pensions
It is possible to re-design defined benefit pension plans so that they offer adequate retirement benefits to more teachers.
Pension Fix Depends On Accurate Counting
How should we measure teacher longevity?
Teacher Salaries, Benefits, and Incentives All Leading to Strike Talk in Denver
Debate is focused on a pay-for-performance program but benefit costs loom in the background.
Why Los Angeles Teachers May Strike
From 2001 to 2016, the Los Angeles Unified School District increased overall spending by 55.5 percent, but employee benefit costs soared 138 percent.
What Happened to Wisconsin’s Teacher Workforce After Act 10? Not Much
Many predicted that the restrictions Act 10 placed on collective bargaining would devastate the teacher workforce in Wisconsin, but the more drastic predictions have not transpired.
Are Teacher Preparation Programs Interchangeable Widgets? An Interview With Paul T. von Hippel
States have imposed a variety of rules on teacher candidates and the programs that seek to license them, with the goal of ensuring that all new teachers are ready to succeed on their first day in the classroom. New research challenges the very assumptions underlying these efforts.
Teachers Have the Nation’s Highest Retirement Costs. But They’ll Never See the Benefits
Teachers can’t buy food, afford child care, or pay their mortgages with the promise of future benefits — especially ones that never come.
Democrats Are In Denial About Teacher Pensions
Earlier this month the Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee issued a report called “Retirement Security in Peril.” While they get some facts right, they also miss the forest for the trees.
Yes, Teacher Turnover Can Be a Problem. But New Federal Data Show It’s Far From a National Crisis
Public education has some of the lowest rates of job turnover in our economy.
Are Pension Plans ‘Better’ for Charter School Teachers?
The traditional Pennsylvania system costs three times as much as what the charter school is offering.
AFT Still Working At Cross-Purposes with Teachers’ Interests
A response to AFT President Randi Weingarten
We Have to Say More About Teacher Evaluation Reforms Than Just “They Didn’t Work”
Rather than turning away from teacher evaluation reform, we should learn from the massive Obama-era effort: what worked and what didn’t work and why.
Teacher Retirement Plans Are Among the Worst in the Country
Public school teachers are enrolled in horribly back-loaded retirement plans. Most teachers won’t be served well by that arrangement.
What Are the Options for States Dealing With Unfunded Pension Liabilities?
Collectively, states face $1.4 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities, and $500 billion of that is due to teacher pension debt.
Why Should Education Advocates Care About Pension Reform?
Here are my best arguments for why education advocates should invest their time and political capital in pensions, as opposed to everything else they might want to work on.
Donald Trump Won. What Does That Mean for Education Policy?
Here are my 11 reflections on what this means and predictions for what might happen.
Are Teacher Turnover Rates Rising? Maybe Not
We may just be employing more teachers who fall into career stages with high turnover.
There’s A Huge Flaw in the ‘Teacher Shortage’ Data
Earlier this month the Learning Policy Institute (LPI) released a report with the worrying title, “A Coming Crisis in Teaching? Teacher Supply, Demand, and Shortages in the U.S.”
Hiring Teachers After the School Year Starts Harms Students
Somewhere between 10 and 30 percent of all new teachers are hired after the school year begins.
We Have to Improve the School Improvement Process
School is back in session in many places. And yet, state test results from last spring are still trickling out.
What Does it Mean to ‘Raise the Bar’ for Entry Into the Teaching Profession?
Policymakers have few useful tools to screen out “bad” teachers from the profession. The current screening tools are doing little more than unnecessarily limiting the supply of new teachers.
ESSA Didn’t Settle Federal Education Policy. Far From It.
Our next President will be forced to make a number of important education policy decisions almost immediately upon taking office.
Much Ado About Grit? Interview with a Leading Psych Researcher
Research conducted by Marcus Crede suggests that grit is barely distinct from other personality traits and that standardized test scores, attendance, and study habits are much better predictors of long-term success than grit.
Summative Ratings Are All Around Us. Why Are We Afraid of Them in K-12 Education?
Cars, colleges, neighborhoods, restaurants, you name it — if there’s some sort of choice that people can make, there’s probably a rating system to help them decide.
Teacher Pension Systems Are Incompatible with Efforts to Improve the Teaching Profession
Colorado has done the right thing in making the teaching profession at least somewhat contingent on performance. The state should create a retirement system that matches that expectation.
The Illinois Teacher Labor Market Is Incredibly Fragmented
The fragmented teacher labor market has implications for how we think about improving teacher preparation, not to mention how school districts go about hiring new teachers.
Teachers Unions and Hedge Funds Are Frenemies
Teacher retirement plans have real clout with Wall Street hedge funds, and the unions that staff the boards deciding how to invest that money also have clout.
Retirement Plans Don’t Affect Teachers Until Teachers Are Ready to Retire
Advocates of today’s defined benefit teacher pension plans claim that these plans encourage workers to stick around and devote their lives to the profession, but there’s not much evidence that this is the case.
10 States Spend More on Employee Retirement Costs Than on Higher Education
Pensions are eating further and further into state and local education budgets, eating up dollars that could be spent on lots of other things, especially higher education.
Teachers Union Leaders Support Equity (in Theory) Or, Why We Can’t Have Nice Things In Education
How should public policies address inequities across schools and districts? American Federation of Teacher President Randi Weingarten says we hold schools accountable for how much money they have and the types of programs they build with that money.
What Do Pac-Man and Pensions Have in Common?
If states continue to preserve their existing pension systems at any cost, teachers will see the Pension Pac-Man eat further and further into their take-home pay.
What Was Behind the Rise (and Subsequent Fall) in Teacher Turnover?
Despite the conventional wisdom, there’s very little evidence that current education policies are driving teacher turnover.
The Chicago Teacher Pension Crisis: By the Numbers
As is true for the state as a whole, Chicago is spending a lot of money to preserve a pension plan that isn’t serving its teachers very well.
How Many Teachers Deserve Adequate Retirement Benefits? Some? Most? All?
Current teacher retirement systems require teachers to stay 20, 25, or even 30 years before they qualify for adequate retirement benefits.
How Should States Design School Rating Systems? A Conversation with an Expert
Under the newly enacted Every Student Succeeds Act, all states will be responsible for designing their own statewide accountability systems.
3 Reactions to Our Teacher Prep Reports
Our report, which finds that we don’t actually know very much about how to prepare teachers or help them improve, has generated a lot of feedback.
Can We Predict Who Will Be a Great Teacher? An Interview with Allison Atteberry
How much do we know about a teacher before they enter the classroom? What about after they’ve been teaching a few years? Is any of this information strong enough to act on?
The Montessori Approach to Teacher Training: An Interview With Jackie Cossentino
Nationwide, the public sector offers more than 400 Montessori programs which now enroll more than 100,000 students. Those numbers are growing as more places offer Montessori programs and more families opt into it.
School Accountability Before, During, and After NCLB
With NCLB reauthorization taking another step forward, I’m again hearing the refrain that states won’t back away from school accountability when they’re not forced to by the feds.
Graphs: Teacher Pension Costs Are Higher Than Teacher Pension Benefits
Pension debt alone now eats up to about 10 percent of the average teacher’s compensation. This is money that is spent on teachers but isn’t actually going to them now or in the future; it’s money just to pay down debts that were accrued in the past.
Hillary Clinton Should Listen to Her Friend Raj Chetty on Teacher Effectiveness
She could learn about his work linking value-added measurement (VAM) scores of teachers to their students’ long-term life outcomes
Teacher Retention and the Economy: An Example from North Carolina
Teacher turnover rates don’t change all that much over time, but we see higher turnover during economic expansions than during recessions.
Over the Long Term, NAEP Scores Are Way, Way Up
In anticipation of new NAEP scores coming out this week, I thought it would be useful to spend some time reflecting beforehand on what we know on a macro scale.
Do New Common Core Test Results Tell Us Anything New?
What do new assessments aligned to the Common Core tell us? Not much more than what we already knew.
Schooling Isn’t Learning, the Rewards to Better Schools Are Enormous, and Other Observations from Eric Hanushek
An interview about accountability, attainment, and more
Sorry, Folks, ESEA Reauthorization Just Got Much Harder
Some folks are claiming that news that House Speaker John Boehner will step down at the end of October makes an ESEA reauthorization more likely this fall. That’s just crazy talk.
Would Pension Plans Be Fine If They Were (Magically) Fully Funded?
Teachers suffer from low salaries while they work in exchange for the promise of better retirement savings when they leave, but for most teachers, that promise never becomes a reality.
Politicians Couldn’t Agree on a “Common” Yardstick for Schools. Statisticians Created One Anyway.
SchoolGrades uses the results of state tests to create a comparable, A-F grading system for all public elementary and middle schools in the U.S.
Scott Walker’s Act 10 Caused an Uproar, But Things Are Mostly Back to Normal
In the midst of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s controversial 2011 budget bill, many warned that the state’s public employees, including teachers, would retire in droves.
Can Teachers Really Teach Anywhere?
Teachers are much more likely to move within a state than to cross state lines.
Teacher Retention Rates Are Up, Not Down
The data simply don’t support the notion that teachers are leaving schools in droves in response to recent education reforms.
Teacher Shortage? Blame the Economy
A new study finds that when recessions hit, both men and women are less likely to want to become teachers and instead turn to fields like accounting and engineering.
Graduation Rates Are Insufficient as an Accountability Measure
Graduation rates don’t tell us very much about whether students are prepared for life after graduation.
Eye-Opening Stats About High School and College Dropouts
American adults in the 1940s had about the same odds of being a high school graduate as today’s Americans have of being a college graduate.
Why Aren’t NAEP Scores for High School Students Going Up?
And how do we kickstart achievement for high school students?
Great News: Fewer Students Attending High School Dropout Factories
Something amazing is going on with high school graduation rates.
4 Things North Carolina Can Teach Us About the Market for New Teachers
North Carolina has a new “Educator Quality Dashboard” with some fascinating data on teacher preparation in the state.
Teacher Experience Levels Vary By State
Data suggest that some states should be investing much more heavily in teacher recruitment and retention efforts.
Teacher Retention and the Economy: An Example from Colorado
Big trends in the economy like unemployment rates and wages have at least as big an impact on teacher mobility as specific education policy changes.
Eight Ways Teachers Can Maximize Their Pensions
If you read this list and think it doesn’t quite square with why you went into teaching, your pension plan may not be working in your best interests (or the best interest of schools and students).
Simpson’s Paradox Hides NAEP Gains (Again)
The achievement scores of black, Hispanic, and low-income students have increased dramatically.
President Obama and the Politics of Pensions
As evidence mounts showing how poorly structured pension plans fail to meet the needs of today’s workforce, let’s hope more politicians make it a trend.
Campbell’s Law, Cheating, and Atlanta’s NAEP Score Gains
Although 11 educators were convicted of cheating on state tests, the city made remarkable improvements on low-stakes measures of educational progress such as NAEP.
A Wonky But Important Argument for Annual Statewide Testing
A move away from annual testing would leave many subgroups and more than 1 million students functionally “invisible” to state accountability systems.
Will the Common Core Lead to More Schools Labeled Failing? Not Really.
Since the Obama Administration has quietly transitioned to a normative accountability system, where schools are compared to each other rather than to some pre-determined “proficiency” benchmark, it doesn’t matter if all students appear to perform worse this year.
Grade-Span Accountability Is A Bad Idea: Just Ask CAP and the AFT
Rather than having regular check-ups on student progress, with relatively low stakes on those results, we’d have much higher stakes attached to a smaller number of test scores.
The Not-So-Secret Recipe for ESEA Reauthorization
As the edu-intelligentsia anxiously anticipates another attempt at updating the law, it’s worth revisiting how we got our last reauthorization.
Pension Theory Versus Pension Reality
In the fantasy world that the National Institute on Retirement Security has created, state pension plans do a bang-up job of delivering benefits to workers. That’s just not the reality of the world we live in.
Illinois Turns Its Back to the Future
A court ruling is potentially very problematic for new teachers and those who aren’t yet teaching.
Teachers’ Unions Support Local Collective Bargaining…Except When it Comes to Their Pensions
Teachers might prefer a different arrangement than current state pension plans, but they don’t really have a voice in those decisions.
The Teacher Equity Problem Is Real. The Proposed Solutions Are Not.
If teachers are the most-important in-school factor for student growth, we certainly don’t act like it.
Colorado’s Unreal Teacher Retirement Plan
Teachers are forced to forego their own retirement savings in order to pay down a debt accrued over many years. It harms their future retirement security and, by forcing districts into painful budget decisions, it harms the quality of education delivered to Colorado’s students.
Teachers Would Prefer Cash
A common perception about how we pay public sector workers is fundamentally flawed.
The Stock Market Has Recovered. Why Haven’t Pensions?
Pension plans have not made much of a dent in their long-term unfunded debt. How could this be?
Charter School Teachers Subsidize State Pension Plans
Charter schools and their teachers pay the same high employer and employee contribution rates as all other schools, but higher turnover rates mean their teachers will get much less in return.
A Quick Note to Dana Goldstein About Pensions
No one is seriously advocating for reducing the pensions of any individual teachers or retirees.
Diagnosing the Right Pension Problems
When the public is led to believe financial issues are the only problems with today’s pension plans, financial issues will be the only problems legislators seek to address.
Is Arne Duncan’s Teacher Evaluation Moratorium Unnecessary?
Despite state policy changes, many districts still don’t factor student growth into teacher evaluation ratings in a meaningful way.
The Evolution of Teacher Pensions
Over the years, legislators increased pension benefits significantly, but they have not distributed those increases evenly to all teachers.
The Politics of Teacher Evaluation Formulas
As states revamp their teacher evaluation systems, they continue to search for that magic number: the percentage of a teacher evaluation rating that should be based on student academic performance.
Americans Stink at Math (But We’re Much Better Now)
Elizabeth Green’s story for Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, “Why Do Americans Stink at Math?” is a must-read. But for all the time Green spends documenting the ways Americans stink at math, she never mentions that we’ve gotten much better.
Five Thoughts on the New Yorker Cheating Story
Rachel Aviv’s article about a cheating scandal involving teachers at one middle school in Atlanta is very well-written, but the sources of the pressure on Atlanta teachers and principals to improve and the threat behind it are more complex than NCLB alone.
Teacher Pensions, Recruitment, and Retention
Are state pension plans a recruitment or retention incentive for teachers? It’s complicated, but many of the claims about the value of pensions don’t stand up to scrutiny.
Are Maryland Teachers Leaving Because of the Common Core or New Teacher Evaluation Requirements? Probably Not.
There are a number of factors that may affect teacher retention in any given year. We should be wary about trying to pin down any one reason.
Teacher Benefits Still Eating Away at District Spending
Instead of hiring more teachers or paying them more money, districts are devoting an increasing share of finite resources to employee benefits.
Another Hidden Penalty On Teachers
In the median state, teachers must wait 24 years before their pension is finally worth more than their own contributions.
Early Retirement Trade-Offs
Faced with a budget crisis, Illinois offered teachers a generous early retirement package. Large numbers of older, more experienced teachers took the offer, Here’s what happened next.
California’s Pension Debt Will Eat Everything In Its Path
California discovered a $2.4 billion budget surplus from what it projected in January, but that money won’t be going to any new, exciting program.
Different Standards for Different Students?! We’ve Had Them for Years
Under a provision in the federal No Child Left Behind Act called “safe harbor,” states must set different standards for different groups.
States Penalize New Workers
States have responded to their pension funding gaps by cutting retirement benefits for new hires and increasing the amount of time workers need to serve before qualifying for a pension, raising the normal retirement age, and reducing benefit formulas.
Randi Weingarten Talks About Pensions, But Doesn’t Really Want to Have a Conversation About Them
Teachers need leaders willing to have courageous conversations about how to modernize and improve retirement security for all of our nation’s teachers.
The Warning Michigan Schools Should Be Giving Teachers
High mobility rates and a 10-year service requirement for teachers to qualify ensure that less than half of Michigan’s new teachers will remain long enough to earn a pension
Is TFA to Blame for the Rise in Teacher Attrition?
No, or at least not very much
The Pension IOU
Teachers should insist that all forms of compensation—including retirement benefits—are paid for upfront and that benefit promises are matched by real contributions.
How Generous Are Public Pensions?
For the average full-career state worker, traditional defined benefit plans are working quite well.
Washington State’s Waiver May Be in Jeopardy
Most states are living up to the promises in their waiver, but Washington over-promised in this case, and failure to fix it may force them back under No Child Left Behind.
The Unpredictability of (New York) Teacher Pensions
The unpredictable nature of pension contibutions has a real consequence on school district budgets and, therefore, on teachers.
Two Graphs on Urban Teachers and Their (Lack of) Pensions
The majority of teachers in these cities do not remain in the same district long enough to qualify for even a minimal pension, and only a very tiny fraction of teachers stay long enough to receive a pension that would be sufficient for a stable retirement.
California Pension Reform: An Interview With San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed
Will states and cities facing skyrocketing costs find a way to protect the retirement benefits that people have already earned while making changes to the way benefits are earned in the future?
Teacher Pensions Don’t Boost Retention
Empirically, pensions appear to have no effect on early- or mid-career teachers.
Half of New York City’s Teachers Won’t Qualify for a Retirement Benefit
Pension plans need to estimate how much money they’ll need in order to pay the benefits they’ve promised in the future. They also need to estimate how many employees will qualify for a benefit in the first place.
Illinois Pension Reform: An Interview With State Senator Daniel Biss
Illinois recently passed pension reform legislation with robust bipartisan support. Here’s how and why it happened.
Pension Reform vs. the ‘California Rule’
Cities and states faced with rising pension costs have begun to search for the most effective way to balance retirement promises made to workers with the need for fiscal sustainability and employer flexibility.
According to Its Pension System, D.C. Teacher Turnover Hasn’t Increased
If you follow news about the District of Columbia Public Schools closely, you could be forgiven if you thought teacher turnover had increased since the schools were handed over to mayoral control in 2007.
What You Should Know about TFA and the Value of Experience
Teach for America is not doing harm to our nation’s schools or our low-income students. In fact, TFA seems to be out-performing not just other beginning teachers but veteran teachers as well.
How to Raise Teacher Salaries in Two Easy Steps
The majority of teachers stand to significantly benefit from two cost-neutral pension reforms
President Obama’s Not-So-Secret School Accountability Plan
Way back in March of 2010, President Obama released his blueprint for reauthorizing NCLB. Three years later, we’re still operating as if the blueprint never happened, as if three years of policymaking hasn’t happened.
Perspective on the Common Core
We have a lot more commonality in standards and assessments than we did five years ago
Teacher Benefits Are Eating Away at Salaries
Instead of hiring even more teachers or paying them more money, districts are devoting an increasing share of finite resources to employee benefits.
Timing the Common Core
The next time you read a proposal about halting the Common Core, keep in mind all the time and money that’s already been spent.
There Are Ineffective Teachers (and Principals, Superintendents, Librarians, Janitors, etc.)
If an employer can’t differentiate between their employees, they’re likely to treat them all as interchangeable widgets when it comes time to decide on how to help them improve, how much to pay them, or which ones should be retained.
