Chapter 14: Teacher Pensions and Teacher Quality: Drawing on Existing Evidence to Formulate New Ideas

Over the past 20 years, the cost of teacher pensions has ballooned. In this chapter, I draw on existing literature to describe teacher pension systems, including how they differ from other pension systems, and discuss the implications of those systems for the quality of teachers in schools. This review of the literature finds little relationship between teacher quality and pension incentives. I offer some policy proposals grounded in the goals of (a) giving teachers the option to have more of their lifetime compensation paid to them while they are working and (b) giving citizens information about how much money is spent on teacher pensions (at the expense of spending on other things).