In a curious break with tradition, lawmakers are poised to let future teachers retire at a younger age than other government workers (with the exception of state troopers).
Why this special treatment — other than the obvious reason, that the teachers union favors it? As we shall see, the other explanations aren’t terribly persuasive, either.
Senate Bill 1, which puts the Colorado Public Employees’ Retirement Association on a path toward solvency, started out by treating everyone alike. It raised the retirement age from 55 to 60 for government workers with 30 years of service as of January 2047. But the education lobby balked at even this modest, mid-century reform. So the Senate passed an amendment setting teacher retirement at 58 — nine years less than the Social Security retirement age for those born after 1960.
The most popular justifications for early teacher retirement tend to repeat four themes: teacher burnout, turnover, cost savings and the idea that age is a liability in the classroom.
• During the PERA board’s “listening tour” last year, a retired principal warned that “people who’ve been in the same or similar job after 25 or 30 years begin to tire. Some even suffer burnout . . . that youthful patience and enthusiasm … begins to wane.”
• Gerald Keefe, superintendent of Kit Carson School District R-1, told me a higher retirement age “shuts out new talent.” Moreover, “absent changes in contract practices, I think many administrators are hesitant about someone having to be in the classroom for 35-40 years before they can draw a full benefit.”
• The Colorado Education Association, on its website, contends a higher retirement age “costs districts money as it limits their ability to replace retiring employees at the top of the salary schedule with new employees who make less.”
• Sen. Greg Brophy, R-Wray, who supports the revised bill, told me “older teachers are the least effective in my opinion and the most expensive.”
Well, now. Let’s begin by stipulating, in Keefe’s words, that “being an educator is darn hard work” and that burnout is a definite risk. But is burnout truly higher among teachers than in other difficult (and, in some cases, much more boring) careers where retirement at 55 or 58 is out of the question? For that matter, doesn’t the school schedule, with its summer vacations, afford teachers time to rejuvenate their spirits?
And if tenure is an obstacle to pushing ineffective teachers out the door, why not reform tenure rather than bribe the entire workforce — good teachers and bad — with costly early retirement? Ineffective employees afflict every profession. Most employers successfully deal with the problem.
I asked Chester Finn, a former assistant secretary of education and now president of the Fordham Institute, if there was any proven relationship between age and teacher quality.
“No, zero,” he replied. “There’s a limited relationship between teacher experience and classroom effectiveness but it plateaus after three to five years and doesn’t get significantly better.”
Eugene Sheehan, dean of education at the University of Northern Colorado, agreed that a certain amount of experience is important. “We prepare excellent beginning teachers,” he told me. “Over the next four or five years, they will become more and more effective.”
So is the age disparity between middle-aged teachers and their students a problem? It “shouldn’t be an obstacle at all,” he replied. By then, teachers should be “master craftsmen at the job,” professionals who “continually work at their trade and their skill” — although it’s critical, he added, “they get regular feedback.”
The director of UNC’s school of teacher education, Alexander Sidorkin, said “none of the proxies that people try to use to determine teacher effectiveness check out. It’s not the degree they have . . . it’s not the years of service, it’s not probably the age as well . . . . You have to actually measure what they do [in the classroom] rather than any external characteristics.”
No one can blame teachers for wanting to retire early with full benefits. Many other people would love to, too. But we can blame lawmakers if they fail, in this age of growing life expectancy, to muster the courage to say “no” to this inequitable request.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
