An eyebrow-raising study on the impact of early retirement
incentives on student achievement was released this week. The working paper, by
Maria Fitzpatrick and Michael Lovenheim, takes a look at the effect of an early
retirement incentive offered in Illinois in the early 1990s.
Their results are somewhat counterintuitive — they find no
negative effects of the retirement of experienced teachers on student
achievement and, in some cases, they find small statistically significant increases
in students’ test scores following the retirement of these experienced
teachers. One would expect retiring teachers to be replaced by brand new teachers
just entering the profession who are, on average, less effective than their
more-experienced peers. Prior research has shown that the relationship between
experience and effectiveness diminishes over the first few years of teaching,
plateauing somewhere around year six.
It’s hard to know what other influences may have played a
part in student test scores. The authors attempt to control for pupil-teacher
ratios and don’t find significant results, but they lacked data to control for
many other potential changes on a state-wide basis. They hypothesize that
eligible, less productive teachers may have been more likely to take advantage
of the early retirement incentive, but there’s no evidence to validate that
theory.
What are the policy implications for this work? Should there
be a massive wave of retirement incentives? Probably not. While districts may
see savings in teacher salaries without a drop in test scores, there can be
significant additional costs to the retirement system (usually borne by the
state). The very real costs for recruiting, hiring and providing professional
development for new teachers would eat up some of the district savings, as
well.
The authors’ findings are surprising, but the early
retirement incentives themselves are solely the children of traditional teacher
salary schedules. Instead of incentivizing more senior teachers to retire, districts
should structure salary schedules to keep highly effective teachers in the classroom. Without salaries moving up in lock step with
years of experience, teachers –regardless of their years in the classroom — are
paid based on their effectiveness, eliminating the incentive to shed effective,
experienced teachers just to save a few bucks.
