Wisconsin has a Retention Problem. Personal Finance Literacy Is Part of the Fix. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction just released its 2024 Educator Preparation Program and Workforce Analysis Report , and I think anyone who cares about teacher education should sit with the data. Source: Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, dpi.wi.gov/education-workforce For example, out of 5,256 educator preparation program completers in 2023-24, only 3,568 stayed in the state as employed teachers, meaning roughly 30 percent left teaching in Wisconsin public schools. For those folks who do start a career in teaching in Wisconsin, the eight-year retention rate was only 52.6% for all teachers (for special education teachers, that number drops to 43.2 percent). The report is blunt about the cause of the continued teacher shortage: "The lack of retention of early-career teachers is a significant factor contributing to Wisconsin's shortage of educators."  So, this isn'...

AI will change how we teach, but it won't change why we're needed. 1961 airborne television broadcast (Rockefeller Archive Center) Everyone has an opinion about teaching because everyone has been a student. Ask any teacher and they'll tell you: what people think teachers do and what teachers actually do are very different things. The current discourse around AI tends to flatten professions into a single question—can a machine do this job? For teaching, I think that's the wrong question. A better one is: what opportunities does AI create to improve teaching?  This post is a collection of my current thinking on why the replacement framing gets teaching wrong, what it misses about the fundamental nature of the profession, and why I think new teachers should have confidence that there will be plenty of work in their future. I’m not a tech futurist, but I am a mathematics educator with focus on the integration of technology. I'm also a person who has spent my career in a...

Why I think a Roth IRA Is Often the Best Retirement Account for Teachers Happy New Year! This post is part of the Path Series , where I try to help early- and mid-career educators  chart a path toward financial stability and freedom .  I think there are many paths to financial stability and freedom for educators. As I've brainstormed the paths I want to highlight with this project, I’ve tried to keep in mind a few guiding goals: paths that are accessible to most educators in Wisconsin, avoid complicated financial structures or behaviors, and allow flexibility as life circumstances change. With these goals in mind, I think there are four financial tools that will suffice for most folks: a pension, the Roth IRA, a regular brokerage account, and the 457(b) supplemental retirement. Although there are certainly other financial tools one might pick, I think understanding how these tools work together can put many teachers in a position to retire at 55—or potentially even earlier. Ho...

Valuing meaning beyond money. Personal finance is full of frameworks to help shape how we think about money and life. The 4% Rule, zero-based budgeting, FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early), and even my own idea of  The Teaching Lifestyle  all offer ways to understand our opportunities and choices. One reason I’m an avid consumer of personal finance podcasts, books, and research is because each helps me see something new in my own financial journey. Lately, I’ve been drawn to one idea in particular: the dimensions of wealth. This framework has helped me recognize the richness of the teaching profession beyond financial compensation. I believe that teaching cultivates wealth across many dimensions, often in quiet or unexpected ways.  If you’d like to hear more on this idea, I highly recommend Risk Parity Radio,  Episode 436: Your Fear of Running Out of Money May Be Something Else . Frank Vasquez (“Uncle Frank”) captures the truth that wealth goes far beyond num...

How much money do you actually take home? Yesterday I had the opportunity to present to a large group of student teachers. I had 45 minutes to highlight anything that I wanted to about personal finance. Figuring out what to talk about was a wonderful challenge. My own growth in this project continues to come from thinking through how to distill big ideas into smaller, coherent, concise points. I’m grateful for the feedback I received from the 75 students in the audience, and I have a new goal of working through all their comments over the next few weeks. One immediate takeaway from the experience was that it reinforced my belief that the  Personal Finance for Educators Project  is critically important. A slide from my recent presentation. Teachers—especially new ones—rarely get structured opportunities to learn how salary, benefits, and deductions fit together. As a mathematics educator, I know that personal finance education is often haphazard, fragmented, or minimal in K-1...

As I continue experimenting with the Personal Finance for Educators Project , I’m trying different approaches to the content—sometimes diving into a specific financial tool, other times reflecting more broadly on the teaching lifestyle. My hope is that the blog and podcast together provide spaces for expanding on ideas, sharing resources, and connecting the dots between topics. The goal is to offer both quick takeaways and deeper reflections that help educators make more confident financial choices. PFE Episode 4 In Episode 4 of the Personal Finance for Educators Podcast , I took a different approach and created a screencast that walks through an employee handbook. My aim was to demonstrate how reviewing a handbook can help you identify useful resources. When you start a new teaching job, chances are someone gives you a link to an employee handbook during orientation. Many of us file it away because we’re focused on the task at hand (e.g., classroom prep, curriculum...

With the school year approaching, I wanted to make a post for folks who might be starting a new teaching job and feeling overwhelmed with everything. First, congratulations! You’ve joined a wonderful profession! Thank you for the time, dedication, and heart that you've already committed. When it comes to personal finance, my experience has been that new teachers often get minimal guidance related to benefits. Unless you are someone who enjoys digging through pdfs, reading spreadsheets, and examining fine print*, you likely won't have much engagement with specifics apart from surface-level comments at an orientation meeting. This is problematic because the benefit decisions you make now can have significant short-term and long-term financial consequence. Moreover, as I mentioned in  Focus Less on Numbers,  the first few years in the teaching profession can be overwhelming as you learn the trade (e.g., lesson planning, assessment, classroom management) and navigate big life chan...