It is quite common for school districts to post advertisements to recruit new teachers. You may have noticed an interesting change in these postings recently—they are focused on retired teachers. In an effort to alleviate teacher shortages, the Missouri Legislature passed Senate Bill 75 this past session. Among other things, it allows retired teachers to come back to teaching while continuing to receive their retirement benefits. This idea of allowing retired teachers and administrators to continue working after retirement is not a bad one; indeed, I’ve proposed something similar myself.
The problem is that allowing retired teachers to come back to the classroom does nothing to address the problem. Let me be clear on what I mean by “the problem.” I am not talking about the problem of teacher recruitment and the number of people entering the profession. I’m talking about the teacher pipeline problem caused by the retirement system itself. It is a system that pushes people out. It incentivizes teachers, principals, and superintendents to retire in their mid-50s. This new provision does not address that issue; instead, it makes it worse.
Researchers have long known that defined-benefit pensions, such as those used in the Missouri teaching profession, have two key effects on the labor market. They provide a pull for workers to stay until the peak benefit period, then they push workers out. If a teacher begins working in Missouri right out of college around the age of 22, they will likely hit their peak benefit period around the age of 53.
If lawmakers truly want to keep great late-career teachers in the profession, they should revise the system that pushes them out in the first place. The best way to do this would be to move to a new type of pension system where teachers’ retirement plans would continue to accrue wealth as they continue to work through their 50s.
If we view Senate Bill 75 as a temporary fix (it does have a sunset built in) to address an immediate issue of teacher shortages, then the bill is fine. It is not, however, a fix to a teacher pension system that pushes out individuals who have so much more to give.
