But this result is impossible. According to the same official state projections that Rhee and Joyner apply to their sample, Colorado’s teacher pension plan assumes that 37 percent of males and 34 percent of females will leave in their first year, let alone make it to five years. Rhee and Joyner are trying to tell us that twice as many teachers will vest at 5 years than Colorado says will stay for one year.
I could repeat this same exercise for every state, with similar results, and it’s all due to the underlying sample that Rhee and Joyner start with. Looking only at the current teacher workforce has led them to impossible conclusions. Sure, Colorado’s pension plan looks ok for its current workers, but that’s only if we ignore all the people who have already left. It’s sort of like making inferences about tenure in the NFL by only looking at current rosters. For every statistical rarity like the 41-year-old Tom Brady, there are dozens and dozens of players who quietly shuffle in and out of the league.
Rhee and Joyner are certainly right to note that early-career workers have much higher rates of turnover than mid-career workers, and it’s reasonable to ask whether we should treat all workers the same in any retirement scheme. But they’ve taken that argument too far. The teaching profession is too large a group of American workers, and too important, to simply ignore all the ones who give five or ten or even 20 years of service and leave. Those teachers don’t do that well under current pension plan systems, and Rhee and Joyner don’t seem to have much sympathy for them.