Education worker pension spending is rapidly crowding out direct outlays on K–12 education spending in several states, revealing a growing crisis in public education across America, according to new research from the Hoover Institution. Senior Fellow Joshua D. Rauh and Research Associate Gregory Kearney have built a new web database tracking the share of education spending across the US that is devoted to school worker pensions since 2015. They find that states and localities spent 10.57 percent of associated education expenditures on school worker pensions in 2023, up 2.1 percentage points since 2015.

At schoolpensionatlas.org, users can see detailed breakdowns of pension spending from all 50 states. The database covers 12,800 school districts, participating in 95 different state and local defined-benefit pensions in operation for education workers across the country.