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Teacher pension systems target retirements within a narrow range of the career cycle by penalizing individuals who separate too soon or remain employed too long. The penalties result in the retention of some teachers who would otherwise choose to leave, and the premature exit of some teachers who would otherwise choose to stay. We examine how the effects of teachers' pension incentives on workforce composition influence teacher quality. Teachers who are held in by the "pull" incentives in the pension systems are not more effective, on average, than the typical teacher. Teachers who are encouraged to exit by the "push" incentives are more effective on average. We conclude that the net effect of teachers' pension incentives on workforce quality is small, but negative. Given the substantial and growing costs of current systems, and the lack of evidence regarding their efficacy, experimentation by traditional and charter schools with alternative retirement benefit structures would be useful.

"The 2013 Attack on Teachers included the vicious slow impoverishment of elderly retired teachers. By attacking the earned delayed compensation (pensions) of active and retired teachers, the corporate led war against public education hits a terrorist level of ruthlessness. Who wishes to teach if they are assured of having their paychecks cut and plundered by corporate controlled legislators when they become old? Yes, this is The Shock Doctrine applied to teachers in state after state. Teachers, students, parents, taxpayers and the future of America are victims on the sacrificial altar of Insane Profit."

"If you're a public school teacher in Kentucky, the state has a message for you: You have no right to know the details of the investments being made with your retirement savings. That was the crux of the declaration issued by state officials to a high school history teacher when he asked to see the terms of the agreements between the Kentucky Teachers' Retirement System and the Wall Street firms that are managing the system's money on behalf of him, his colleagues and thousands of retirees."

Charter school advocates have sounded a warning about an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking from the Obama administration that they say could undermine the ability of teachers in those schools to participate in state retirement plans. The notice, released by the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service in November, says that federal officials are seeking to clarify what kinds of pension systems quality as "governmental plans," which would affect the regulation of them. Details of what's in the works drew a strong response from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which issued a statement saying the changes "would force states to prohibit public charter school teachers from participating in state retirement plans."

"Today, Fordham released our latest, "Charting a New Course to Retirement: How Charter Schools Handle Teacher Pensions." Authors Amanda Olberg and Michael Podgursky explain the report's findings here."

Erich Martel, one of the hardest-working D.C. teachers ever, received an e-mail last month from a former student. The man said he was switching from a successful business career to research in ancient history, in part because of Martel, "the best history teacher I ever had." That happens often to Martel, 68, an Advanced Placement history instructor. He has been teaching for more than 40 years, mostly at Wilson High School. His post-AP-test classes on the Vietnam War are famous, first for insisting on study during the usual late May and June playtime, and second for thrilling his audience with visits by Vietnam veterans and war opponents such as former senators Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern and prisoner of war Everett Alvarez Jr. Yet, Martel was forced to retire last summer after a long campaign to get rid of him. He had too much energy and investigative zeal for his supervisors' comfort. It also didn't help that he was a school representative for the Washington Teachers Union.

"Teachers who opt to teach in charter schools think they understand the changes and challenges they will face as a result of their decision. But I doubt anything prepares them for a proposal that the Internal Revenue Service quietly released late last year ("Charter school teachers fear IRS rules change," The Washington Times, Feb. 12). If the change goes into effect, it would make more than 93 percent of teachers in the 5,600 charter schools operating in 40 states ineligible for state retirement plans."

Earlier this week, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the membership of the Education Reform Commission he promised in his State of the State address in early January. It will be chaired by Richard Parsons, a retired chair of Citigroup, who was once an assistant counsel to Governor Nelson Rockefeller, among other roles. The members include State Education Commissioner John King, the Chancellors of the State and City University systems, the Chairs of the Assembly and Senate Education Committees, and many accomplished and impressive people from the non-profit and higher education sectors. More than a few leaders in public education have remarked, however, on the absence of anyone currently working in a public school or serving on a school board in the state.

The Metlife survey of American teachers has been much discussed in recent weeks. The biggest red flag I see waving here is the 70% increase, over the past two years, in the number of teachers who are likely to leave the profession in the next five years (from 17% to 29%). Assuming this data is accurate, this amounts to more than a million teachers who are preparing to march out of our classrooms. And this is in addition to the roughly one million baby boomers approaching retirement age! I wonder if the teaching profession as it is now being redesigned and redefined is one that any of us would have chosen when we began teaching? And I especially wonder who would choose to teach in a school with a high level of poverty?

This was written by Fred Smith, a retired New York City Board of Education senior analyst who worked for the city public school system in test research and development. In this post he writes about New York state's standardized testing program for students. Though his comments are specific to New York, the same types of problems are prevalent in other states as well.

Renee Kelly retired at 55 from her job teaching law at Riverview High School. Leaving early lowered her pension, she said. But she couldn't stomach changes under the new Gates-funded system of teacher evaluations. "We've been made out to be good guys against the bad guys," she said. Kelly is posting her views on websites and Facebook pages, and she isn't alone. In recent weeks, questions and complaints about the multimillion-dollar, seven-year Empowering Effective Teachers effort have grown more visible.

Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores ("value-added") a good measure of their quality? This question has sparked debate largely because of disagreement about (1) whether value-added (VA) provides unbiased estimates of teachers' impacts on student achievement and (2) whether high-VA teachers improve students' long-term outcomes. We address these two issues by analyzing school district data from grades 3-8 for 2.5 million children linked to tax records on parent characteristics and adult outcomes. We find no evidence of bias in VA estimates using previously unobserved parent characteristics and a quasi-experimental research design based on changes in teaching staff. Students assigned to high-VA teachers are more likely to attend college, attend higher- ranked colleges, earn higher salaries, live in higher SES neighborhoods, and save more for retirement. They are also less likely to have children as teenagers. Teachers have large impacts in all grades from 4 to 8. On average, a one standard deviation improvment in teacher VA in a single grade raises earnings by about 1% at age 28. Replacing a teacher whose VA is in the bottom 5% with an average teacher would increase students' lifetime income by more than $250,000 for the average classroom in our sample. We conclude that good teachers create substantial economic value and that test score impacts are helpful in identifying such teachers.

As the city's Department of Education moves to bring a charter school to Brooklyn's Cobble Hill neighborhood, a state assemblywoman and a former city schools official are backing a different school proposal that would compete with the charter school for space. The proposal asks the department to open an early learning center that would serve students in prekindergarten and kindergarten who live walking distance from 284 Baltic Street, the same address the city plans to give a new Success Academy Network charter school. Carmen Farina, a former deputy chancellor for the Department of Education who retired in 2006, and Joan L. Millman, a state assemblywoman representing Cobble Hill, are both promoting the idea as the best way to use available space in the Baltic Street building.

Though most of the critiques so far focus on the inherently volatile nature and large margins of error in any such calculation, here in NY State we have a special problem: the state tests themselves have been fatally flawed for many years.  There has been rampant test score inflation over the past decade; many of the test questions themselves are amazingly dumb and ambiguous; and there are other severe problems with the scaling and the design of these exams that only testing experts fully understand.  Though the State Education Department claims to have now solved these problems, few actually believe this to be the case. As further evidence, see Fred Smith's analysis below.  Fred is a  retired assessment expert for the NYC Board of Education, who has written widely on the fundamental flaws in the state tests.  Here, he shows how deep problems remain in their design and execution -- making their results, and the new teacher evaluation system and  teacher data reports based upon them, essentially worthless.  He goes on to urge parents to boycott the state exams this spring.

Philadelphia is about to take a fateful step. Thomas Knudsen, the recently retired chief executive officer of the Philadelphia Gas Works and now temporary CEO of the school system, has released a plan that will lead to the dismantling of public education in Philadelphia. The plan, or "blueprint," was written by a business strategy organization called Boston Consulting; it recommends the closing of 40 of the city's 249 schools in the coming year, with additional school closings in the years to come. The goal is to have a school district where the central district is phased out and a large portion of the students are enrolled in privately managed charter schools.

After 38 years of teaching in Vermont and Minnesota in a variety of schools and programs, I've decided to step away and retire from classroom teaching. I've cleaned out my classroom, graded all the papers and returned my library books. Now I need to clean out my head. Here is my bucket list of 10 items that are useless and should be removed from schools, followed by 10 items that should be the center of every school system.

"For more than a decade now we have heard that the high-stakes testing obsession in K-12 education that began with the enactment of No Child Left Behind 11 years ago has resulted in high school graduates who don't think as analytically or as broadly as they should because so much emphasis has been placed on passing standardized tests. Here, an award-winning high school teacher who just retired, Kenneth Bernstein, warns college professors what they are up against. Bernstein, who lives near Washington, D.C. serves as a peer reviewer for educational journals and publishers, and he is nationally known as the blogger "teacherken." His e-mail address is kber@earthlink.net. This appeared in Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors."

"In the beginning, she laid out what she intended to do.  As should be clear, I believe she more than achieved her goals.  It is the opinion of this reviewer, me, a retired teacher who returned to the classroom to make a difference, in part at the urging of Ravitch, that this book is by far her finest work, and is something with which everyone truly concerned about education should read."

With approximately 1.6 million teachers set to retire in the next decade, replenishing America's teaching force should be a top priority. But filling classrooms with new teachers is only half the battle. Retaining them is equally important.

Scandal is the news, but it's not always the story. I know, because the Atlanta public schools, which I ran for 12 years until I retired in June, are embroiled in cheating allegations that rightly are the focus of extraordinary media coverage. Yet there is a growing danger that this disgraceful situation will set back national educational reform, when it could ironically advance it.