Will New Teachers Make It To Their Retirement Age? Probably Not.

The attack on teachers in the last two decades has been unrelenting as politicians, the media, and people like Gates, Broad, and Bloomberg want to eliminate teacher rights.  Even New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo has demanded that the teacher evaluation system be strengthened so that up to 10% of the State's teachers be rated "ineffective" and terminated.  From all sides public education is attacked as education reformers and their corporate allies want to privatize the schools, be in charters, online, or voucher schools.  With this massive onslaught against public education and the teachers who provide instruction, let's look at the chances that a newly appointed 25 year old teacher makes it to full retirement age.

A non-profit  group called the Bellwether Education Partners published a study called "Friends Without Benefits" that showed that only 19.7% of all teachers are expected to make it to their retirement age.  In some States like Maine, only 1.8% of the teachers are expected to make it to their retirement age while the best state, California expects 48.2% of their teachers to retire at their retirement age.  Even just to be "vested" and receive a minimal pension is difficult in many states.  Nationally, only 44.5% of the teachers work long enough to be vested with Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, and Hawaii having only one out of four teachers being "vested".

While the numbers are pretty dismal for the States, the urban area results are downright terrible.  The Conservative Manhattan Institute published a study called "Better Pay, Fairer Pensions" that included the projected percentage of new teachers making it to their retirement age in the ten largest urban school districts. The Table below shows the expected percentage of new teachers that will make it to their retirement age.

City                           Teachers Making It To Retirement Age

New York City.....................................33%
Las Vegas..........................................20%
Philadelphia........................................7%
Los Angeles........................................6%
Honolulu.............................................5%
Washington D.C. .................................4%
Chicago..............................................4%
Houston..............................................3%
Miami.................................................1%
Tampa................................................1%

Interestingly, new teachers in New York City have a higher probably of reaching their retirement age than the State average (29.2%) which either means that the data is faulty or that the study assumes that the superior health and welfare benefits attached to the pension for New York City teachers as well as the fifteen year vesting requirement encourages many of the remaining teachers to stick it out until they reach the retirement age.  For the remaining urban areas, outside New York City and Los Vegas, the percentage of teachers reaching retirement age is dismal and in the single digits.  Even just making it to be vested is low with less than one in five teachers being vested in Washington D.C. (18.8%).

To make matters worse, in fifteen states, teachers are not eligible for Social Security and if they don't receive a full pension, then they jeopardize their retirement.  This is a dilemma and why the education reformers like the "fifth columnist" Educators for Excellence and the Conservative Manhattan Institute advocates for a portable pension system (401K) for teachers.  However, teaching has never been a short-term job and despite the many roadblocks that politicians and their education reformer allies try to impose on the teaching profession, it still should remain as a life-long position, complete with retirement benefits and adequate health care.

In New York City, even if you are to believe that 33% of the new Tier VI teachers will make it to their full retirement age of 63 (I don't), that means that 67% will have left the system before reaching the holy grail, a properly funded pension.