When Teachers Choose Pension Plans: The Florida Story

Although long ignored by education-policy analysts, the structure of teacher retirement benefits has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. The vast majority of teachers, like other state and local public employees, are covered by traditional defined-benefit (DB) pension plans. Now rare in the private sector of the United States economy, these plans provide a retired teacher with a guaranteed lifetime benefit, the annual value of which is typically based on his number of years of service and average salary during the final years of his career. A teacher is often required to contribute from her salary to funds set aside to pay for this plan, but the size of her benefit is not tied to the amount of any contributions.Critics of existing teacher pension systems raise two broad sets of concerns. First, they note that the time lag between when the government funds and pays out retirement benefits encourages politicians to contribute too little to their pension systems, effectively borrowing from future taxpayers to fund current spending on government services.The shortfalls facing state and local pension systems covering teachers and other public workers due to persistent underfunding are staggering. Novy-Marx and Rauh13 estimate that achieving full funding of promised pension liabilities nationally over thirty years would require a tax increase of $1,385 per household each year. A more likely outcome is substantial cuts to public services such as education.Second, critics note that the reliance on traditional DB pension plans makes total teacher compensation severely back-loaded, potentially hindering efforts to improve teacher quality. Most of these plans have vesting periods of five or more years and are structured so that employees do not amass substantial benefits until late in their careers -- at which point benefits increase rapidly. These features may make teaching less attractive to individuals who are uncertain of whether they will remain in the profession long enough to benefit or would prefer to receive a higher salary to support present consumption. Recent evidence confirms that DB pension plans lead some veteran teachers to continue teaching solely for the sake of increasing pension wealth, while encouraging others to retire prematurely so as not to sacrifice years of benefit payments.The back-loading of benefits also imposes heavy costs on career-switchers and geographically mobile teachers, who typically stand to receive benefits worth far less than the pension contributions made on their behalf. The most prominent alternative to a traditional DB pension plan is the defined contribution (DC) model. Under DC plans, an employee builds up an individual retirement account through her or her employer's regular contributions throughout her career and exercises some control over how the account is invested. Because the value of that account is tied directly to these contributions (and the performance of investments), DC plans, by definition, cannot be underfunded. Rapidvesting, portability, and the smooth accrual of benefits over time eliminate the problematic end-of-career incentives created by existing DB plans and could make teaching more attractive to young workers, possible career-switchers, or those likely to be geographically mobile.Finally, because benefits take the form of a personal account that can be converted into a lifetime annuity, the employee gains control over the timing and structure of her retirement benefit. An important potential drawback of the DC model is that employees, rather than taxpayers, bear the consequences if disappointing investment returns or poor withdrawal decisions yield inadequate retirement savings. Unions representing teachers and other public employees have vigorously opposed proposals to convert public pension plans to the DC model, largely on these grounds. Proponents of DB pensions cite survey data suggesting that public employees strongly prefer the DB model and contend that "when given the choice between a primary DB or DC plan, public employees overwhelmingly choose the DB pension plan."Yet there is reason to believe that many current and potential teachers could find well-designed DC plans as or more attractive than traditional DB plans. As noted above, DB plans typically provide minimal benefits to those who do not remain in the profession (and in the same state retirement system) for many years. They may therefore be unappealing to a younger generation of workers prone to exploring multiple career paths before settling on one. Other teachers may simply prefer to exercise greater control over their retirement savings, either due to confidence in their investment abilities or to doubts as to whether public pension funds will be able to deliver on their promises. Consistent with this logic, a survey of Washington State teachers found that a plurality of teachers would prefer to invest additional retirement savings in a DC plan rather than in a DB plan. The extent to which preferences expressed on surveys correspond to the actual behavior of teachers when given the option remains unclear.In this paper, we examine teacher preferences as revealed by their decisions when empowered to choose between alternative pension-plan structures. Since 2002, public school teachers (and most other state and local employees) in Florida have been permitted to choose between a traditional DB retirement plan and a new DC plan. During the time period of our study, school districts were required to contribute 9 percent of the salary of teachers taking the DC option to personalinvestment accounts in their names. Neither DB nor DC choosers were required to contribute from their own salaries to the retirement system, meaning that teachers' plan choice did not alter their take-home pay. The benefits of teachers choosing the DC plan vested after just one year, as compared with six under the DB plan

Clearing Up Some Conceptual Confusions About Conspiracy Theory Theorising

A reply to Gérald Bronner, Véronique Campion-Vincent, Sylvain Delouvée, Sebastian Dieguez, Nicolas Gauvrit, Anthony Lantian, and Pascal Wagner-Egger's piece, '“They” Respond: Comments on Basham et al.’s “Social Science’s Conspiracy-Theory Panic: Now They Want to Cure Everyone”

Do More Effective Teachers Earn More Outside of the Classroom?

We examine earnings records for 90,000 classroom teachers employed by Florida public schools between the 2001–02 and 2006–07 school years, roughly 20,000 of whom left teaching during that time. Among grade 4–8 teachers leaving for other industries, a 1 standard deviation increase in estimated value-added to student achievement is associated with 6–9 percent higher earnings outside of teaching. The relationship between effectiveness and earnings is stronger in other industries than it is for the same teachers while in the classroom, suggesting that existing compensation systems do not account for the higher opportunity wages of effective teachers.

Analysis of one structured fitness motivation intervention on self-efficacy, achievement goal orientations and exercise adherence in sedentary and moderately active adults

Currently, many Americans spend extended periods of time in sedentary activities, potentially contributing to a variety of health concerns such as obesity and the onset of many chronic diseases. Given this widespread societal challenge, and using intact university undergraduates as a study sample, this dissertation research first provided descriptive information concerning psychological characteristics of physical appearance self-efficacy and goal orientation as potentially correlated with exercise adherence behavior. A second purpose of this research examined how known effective behavior analytic interventions of instructor-set goals/modeling, public posting, and peer-feedback might affect the research sample\u27s exercise adherence behavior, and might affect linked psychological determinants of self-efficacy and goal orientation. The dissertation research was conducted in a modern, well-equipped exercise and fitness facility located at a metropolitan Midwest university, using three introductory structured exercise and fitness classes of with a total of 51 participants across the three experimental classes. Two university physical activity classes were exposed to a simple repeated measures reversal design (ABACADA and ABADACA) across classes and across participants to determine the relative effectiveness of three instructional strategies (i.e., instructor-set goals, public posting, peer-feedback) on increasing exercise adherence, changing physical appearance self-efficacy levels, and alterations in primary achievement goal orientation. The third intact physical activity class was used as a control comparison group and only received the instructor-set goals/modeling intervention. Adherence measures included class attendance and the amount of active participation during class time (i.e., number of sets completed per exercise session). Psychological measures were gathered using respective Self Efficacy Scale for Physical Appearance (SEPA) and Achievement Goal Orientation Scale for Physical Activity survey instruments. Results of Study I indicated that the correlation data among physical appearance self-efficacy, goal orientation, and exercise participation were not statistically significant (p\u3c.05). The findings of the behavior analyses contained in Study II showed that public posting and peer-feedback were effective in reducing absenteeism and increasing participant effort levels. However, the public posting treatment was found to be generally superior to the peer-feedback treatment. Interestingly, the goal-setting treatment did not significantly influence class attendance or participant effort levels compared to the other treatments, though this pedagogical method is most widespread in contemporary settings of the type this dissertation research used. Implications are last provided in recommending additional study of the as yet unknown functionally related variables that may impact in important ways the tendency to participate and adhere to structured exercise regimens

Towards a chiral gauge theory by deconstruction in AdS5

We describe an implementation of a deconstructed gauge theory with charged fermions defined on an interval in five dimensional AdS space. The four dimensional slices are Minkowski, and the end slices support four dimensional chiral zero modes. In such a theory, the energy scales warp down as we move along the fifth dimension. If we augment this theory with localized neutral 4-dimensional Majorana fermions on the low energy end, and implement a Higgs mechanism there, we can arrange the theory such that the lightest gauge boson mode and the chiral mode on the wall at the high energy end are parametrically lighter than all the other states in the theory. If this semiclassical construction does not run into problems at the quantum level, this may provide an explicit construction of a chiral gauge theory. Instanton effects are expected to make the gauge boson heavy only if the resulting effective theory is anomalous.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, presented at Lattice2005(Chiral fermions), Dublin, July 25-30, 2005, to appear in Proceedings of Scienc

Search for Gamma-ray Emission from Dark Matter Annihilation in the Small Magellanic Cloud with the Fermi Large Area Telescope

The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is the second-largest satellite galaxy of the Milky Way and is only 60 kpc away. As a nearby, massive, and dense object with relatively low astrophysical backgrounds, it is a natural target for dark matter indirect detection searches. In this work, we use six years of Pass 8 data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope to search for gamma-ray signals of dark matter annihilation in the SMC. Using data-driven fits to the gamma-ray backgrounds, and a combination of N-body simulations and direct measurements of rotation curves to estimate the SMC DM density profile, we found that the SMC was well described by standard astrophysical sources, and no signal from dark matter annihilation was detected. We set conservative upper limits on the dark matter annihilation cross section. These constraints are in agreement with stronger constraints set by searches in the Large Magellanic Cloud and approach the canonical thermal relic cross section at dark matter masses lower than 10 GeV in the $b\bar{b}$ and $\tau^+\tau^-$ channels.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures. Accepted by PR

Radion Induced Brane Preheating

When the interbrane separation in compact Randall-Sundrum models is stabilized via the Goldberger-Wise mechanism, a potential is generated for the four dimensional field that encodes this geometric information, the so-called radion. Due to its origin as a part of the full five dimensional metric, the radion couples directly to particles on both branes. We exhibit the exponential growth in the number of brane particles due to parametric amplification from radion oscillations and discuss some of the consequences of this process for brane cosmology.Comment: 4 pages, uses ReVTeX, 3 postscript figure

Hubble Space Telescope Imaging and Spectroscopy of the Sirius-Like Triple Star System HD 217411

We present Hubble Space Telescope imaging and spectroscopy of HD 217411, a G3 V star associated with the extreme ultraviolet excess source (EUV 2RE J2300-07.0). This star is revealed to be a triple system with a G 3V primary (HD 217411 A) separated by ~1.1" from a secondary that is in turn composed of an unresolved K0 V star (HD 217411 Ba) and a hot DA white dwarf (HD 217411 Bb). The hot white dwarf dominates the UV flux of the system. However; it is in turn dominated by the K0 V component beyond 3000 {\AA}. A revised distance of 143 pc is estimated for the system. A low level photometric modulation having a period of 0.61 days has also been observed in this system along with a rotational velocity on the order of 60 km s-1 in the K0 V star. Together both observations point to a possible wind induced spin up of the K0 V star during the AGB phase of the white dwarf. The nature of all three components is discussed as are constraints on the orbits, system age and evolution.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure

Asymmetrically severe internal auditory canal hypoplasia: A case report.

We present a case of an otherwise healthy 20-month-old with congenital sensorineural hearing loss. CT and MR imaging demonstrated bilateral asymmetrically severe hypoplasia of the internal auditory canals and vestibulocochlear nerves. Additional developmental inner ear anomalies were present in this patient, including unilateral semicircular canal hypoplasia and suspected bilateral cochlear hypoplasia. The patient retained normal facial nerve function bilaterally. We highlight the current research and understanding of congenital IAC abnormalities