EYE ON TEACH DAILY RETIREMENTS
No rush for exit due to COVID, as some officials feared
The number of city teachers filing for retirement this summer is up by more than a third compared with last year — but experts say a feared mass exodus amid the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t happening.
Retirements dropped to unusual lows in 2020 as teachers delayed hanging up the towel during the uncertainty of virtual learning, according to city data and union officials. Roughly 900 active teachers filed for retirement last summer, according to the city Education Department — down from about 1,100 in summer 2019.
This summer, the Education Department is estimating 1,200 to 1,300 teachers will have retired, a small increase, but in line with previous years. The agency will have a full picture of the number of retirements after school starts in the fall.
“There has been an uptick, but it really has taken us back to the regular number of teachers who retire every year,” said Debra Penny, the chairwoman of the New York City Teacher Retirement System, the pension fund for public school educators. “It’s not like they’re fleeing the classrooms.”
Fears of a teacher retirement boom emerged during the early stages of the pandemic in 2020, as educators took on challenging new responsibilities and surveys showed low morale.
Another data set showing retirements of teachers and paraprofessionals indicates a similar pattern.
Fewer than 1,600 teachers filed for retirement from June through mid-August of 2020, compared with nearly 2,100 the year before, according to the Teacher Retirement System statistics. That count varies from the Education Department numbers because it includes a wider swath of educators.
According to Penny, many teachers who were eligible to collect their pensions in 2020 opted to hold off on retirement because they didn’t want to leave in tumultuous times.
“So many contacted me and said I want to retire, but I don’t want to retire from a virtual classroom,” Penny said. “You don’t want to leave in the dead of night.”
Other veteran teachers hoped to get an early retirement incentive this year — an option the city declined to offer, Penny said.
Chad Aldeman, the policy director at Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, who has written about teacher retirements, said despite the rebound from last year, the city’s teacher retirement numbers are “still quite low. It’s not the expected boom we had seen or feared in surveys.”
Aldeman said the numbers are generally very stable, and are usually driven more by “fundamentals,” like their eligibility for pensions, rather than outside influences — even the pandemic.
Education Department officials said they’ve hired about 4,500 new staffers so far this year; they typically hire between 5,000 to 6,000 new teachers every year. About 2% of Education Department staff positions are vacant, a rate similar to prior years, officials said.
“We have a strong workforce ready to welcome our students back, and teacher retirements are on-par with pre-COVID levels,” Education Department spokeswoman Katie O’Hanlon said.