Peabody Hosts National Conference on Teacher Retirement Benefit Systems

topics: Education Reform

Melanie Moran, VU News

More than 80 experts convened to discuss and debate the controversial field of teacher retirement benefit systems at a conference Feb. 19-20 at Vanderbilt's Peabody College of education and human development. The conference, co-hosted by the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt, drew scholars from universities and research institutions across the country to discuss the design and implications of teacher retirement systems used in the American K-12 public education system.

"The subject of teacher pensions is a critical and understudied area for education reform, both because of the effects on the teacher workforce and on school finance. Districts are looking for new ways to recruit and retain high quality teachers in their on-going efforts to raise student achievement and narrow achievement gaps, and the structure of retirement benefits is a potentially important factor," Matthew Springer, NCPI director and research assistant professor of public policy and education at Peabody College, said. "Many states and districts also face increasing costs for their current retirement benefit systems - possibly exacerbated by recent developments in the value of pension funds."

The conference, "Rethinking Teacher Retirement Benefit Systems Benefits," was hosted jointly by NCPI, the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas and the University of Missouri-Columbia.

The papers commissioned for the conference focused on the following questions: Do current retirement benefit systems offer the best way to spend education dollars to recruit and retain a high quality teaching workforce? Are retirement benefit systems sustainable? How are retirement benefit systems regulated? What is the legal status of retirement benefits? What can data from states tell us about the relationship between retirement benefit systems and labor market dynamics? What can the United States K-12 public school system learn from retirement research from other sectors?

The papers, as well as more information about the issue and speakers, are available on the NCPI Web site: http://www.performanceincentives.org/conference/conference2009.asp. The papers were funded through gifts from an anonymous foundation and The Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.

In addition to Peabody faculty, speakers included experts from AFL-CIO, American Enterprise Institute, American Federation of Teachers, American Institutes for Research, Boston University, Brown University, Carnegie-Mellon University, Committee for Economic Development, Education Sector, Hoover Institution, Massachusetts Public Employee Retirement Administration Commission, National Institute on Retirement Security North Carolina State University, Public Impact, Teach Plus, Texas A&M, University of Arkansas, TIAA-CREF Institute, University of Missouri-Columbia, University of Oklahoma, University of Southern California, University of Virginia, University of Washington and Urban Institute.

The National Center on Performance Incentives is a research and development center funded by a five-year, $10 million grant from the United States Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. The grant is a cooperative agreement between the Institute of Education Sciences, the U.S. Department of Education and Vanderbilt University.