Moreover, the report's descriptions
about teacher pension plans are wildly out of touch with reality and attempt to paper over real problems in the public sector.
* The first graph below shows total retirement contributions
into teacher pension plans, as a percentage of teacher salaries, by state.
** Some state governments take full responsibility
for teacher pension plans, other pass all the costs on to local school districts, while others split the responsibility between state and local governments.
Nearly 100 years ago, states
created teacher pension plans that were designed to serve a particular group of educators, especially women, who never married or had children.
Teacher pension plans expose teachers to attrition risk — the possibility that a teacher won't stick around long enough to qualify for the larger benefits waiting for those who stay.
This is a key reason
why teacher pension plans are so back - loaded, and it means that pensions reward later - career service much more heavily than early - career service.
Private equity firm TPG Capital along with PAG Asia Capital and
Ontario Teachers Pension Plan purchased DTZ from the Australian public, commercial property firm UGL for about $ 1.1 billion and then merged that with Cassidy Turley, which was acquired for about $ 557 million.
That's why our approach here at TeacherPensions is to focus primarily on the lack of generosity buried in
most teacher pension plans.
Debt costs: The majority of contributions into
teacher pension plans today are not going toward retirement benefits for today's teachers; they're mainly going toward unfunded pension liabilities.
In an ironic twist,
reforming teacher pension plans would help companies like Vanguard that offer cheap, mass - market index funds, and it would seriously harm hedge funds and private equity firms.
Our new report, «Illinois»
Teacher Pension Plans Deepen School Funding Inequities,» looks at the impact of pension spending in Illinois on school finance equity.
Typically, a
DB teacher pension plan requires that both teachers and employers make a contribution each year to a pension trust fund.
Typically, a DB
teacher pension plan requires that both teachers and employers make a contribution each year to a pension trust fund, much as in DC plans, but the funding characteristics are very different.
It's difficult to pull off, but the majority of
teacher pension plans actually incentivize employees to exit at a predetermined age, quietly penalizing those who continue to work.
Video: Robert Costrell talks with Education Next about the ways that
teacher pension plans punish short - term and mobile teachers and reward teachers who spend their entire career teaching in one state.
The Wall Street Journal had a big front - page story on how American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten
uses teacher pension plans to blackball disfavored Wall Street hedge fund managers.
In 1999, the St.
Louis teacher pension plan boosted benefits with an immediate 60 percent increase in pension wealth for all workers.
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.
Current
teacher pension plans back - load benefits to the last 5 to 10 years of service, mainly because benefit formulas are based on final average salary calculations that do not adjust for inflation.
Virtually every state -
run teacher pension plan would fail the financial rules that Congress put in place to protect workers in private - sector plans.
Weingarten is right to call out state policymakers for their fecklessness about properly
funding teacher pension plans, part of the cause of the pension mess today.
To help teachers and the general public understand how pensions work, we created a simple, 3 - minute video explaining
how teacher pension plans work and how they affect millions of public school teachers.
I calculated the assumed real rates of return of state
teacher pension plans by subtracting their inflation assumption from their investment return assumption.
This topic is particularly relevant in K - 12 education, where debates are waged over
whether teacher pension plans should be maintained as defined benefit (DB) systems or if they should transition to defined contribution (DC) systems which are, by definition, fully - funded.
This is how most people
see teacher pension plans, because they equate «teacher pension contributions» with «teacher retirement benefits.»
We're nine years into one of the largest stock market booms in history, and yet Colorado's
teacher pension plan faces a massive, and unmoving, unfunded liability.