Retirees return to work: How a North Carolina policy helped staff high-need schools

Abstract

Teacher vacancies have been a long-standing issue in U.S. public schools, only made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. Vacancies tend to be concentrated in high-poverty, high-minority schools and hard-to-staff subjects like special education and STEM. States have implemented various policies to decrease turnover, including offering teachers bonuses and salary increases. We study one of these policies, a return-to-work policy in North Carolina from 1999-2009, that allowed retired teachers to return to work full-time, earning both their full-time salary and pension benefits concurrently—often resulting in as much as 50% more income than a typical full-time teacher. We document policy take-up and characterize which teachers returned and what schools hired them. The main take-away is that retirees indeed returned under this policy and that high-need schools were disproportionately the ones that hired them.