Teacher Collective Bargaining Research Articles

The Impact of Teacher Labor Market Reforms on Student Achievement: Evidence from Michigan

Abstract Over the past decade, many states enacted substantial reforms to teacher-related laws and policies. In Michigan, the state legislature implemented requirements for teacher evaluation based partly on student achievement, reduced tenure protections, and restricted the scope of teacher collective bargaining. Some teacher advocates view such reform as a “war on teachers,” but proponents argue these policies may have enabled personnel decisions that positively impact student performance. Evidence on this debate remains limited. In this study, we use detailed administrative data from all Michigan traditional public schools from 2005–06 to 2014–15. We estimate event study models exploiting the plausibly exogenous timing of collective bargaining agreement expirations. Across a variety of samples and specification checks, we find these reforms had generally null results, with some evidence of heterogeneity by cohort. We investigate several possible mechanisms and conclude that districts with more restrictive teacher contracts prior to reform and districts with more rigorous use of teacher evaluations experienced more positive impacts after reform exposure.

Current Perspectives on Teacher Unionization, and What They’re Missing

Educational policy research on teacher unionization in the United States has been dominated by two theoretical perspectives: rent-seeking and teacher voice. While bringing valuable insights to bear, these views have mutated into rigid and often ideologically charged alternatives with strong normative claims about teacher collective bargaining. Drawing from a political economy framework, this article advances a distinct theoretical perspective focusing on the progressive coalition building activities of teachers’ unions (i.e., organizing and mobilizing to promote the interests of working people in policymaking). This perspective resolves previous theoretical anomalies of union behavior; provides many new avenues for research; and highlights distinct considerations for the practice of teacher organizing.

Synthetic Controls with Staggered Adoption

AbstractStaggered adoption of policies by different units at different times creates promising opportunities for observational causal inference. Estimation remains challenging, however, and common regression methods can give misleading results. A promising alternative is the synthetic control method (SCM), which finds a weighted average of control units that closely balances the treated unit’s pre-treatment outcomes. In this paper, we generalize SCM, originally designed to study a single treated unit, to the staggered adoption setting. We first bound the error for the average effect and show that it depends on both the imbalance for each treated unit separately and the imbalance for the average of the treated units. We then propose ‘partially pooled’ SCM weights to minimize a weighted combination of these measures; approaches that focus only on balancing one of the two components can lead to bias. We extend this approach to incorporate unit-level intercept shifts and auxiliary covariates. We assess the performance of the proposed method via extensive simulations and apply our results to the question of whether teacher collective bargaining leads to higher school spending, finding minimal impacts. We implement the proposed method in the augsynth R package.

Synthetic Controls with Staggered Adoption

Staggered adoption of policies by different units at different times creates promising opportunities for observational causal inference. Estimation remains challenging, however, and common regression methods can give misleading results. A promising alternative is the synthetic control method (SCM), which finds a weighted average of control units that closely balances the treated unit's pre-treatment outcomes. In this paper, we generalize SCM, originally designed to study a single treated unit, to the staggered adoption setting. We first bound the error for the average effect and show that it depends on both the imbalance for each treated unit separately and the imbalance for the average of the treated units. We then propose partially pooled SCM weights to minimize a weighted combination of these measures; approaches that focus only on balancing one of the two components can lead to bias. We extend this approach to incorporate unit-level intercept shifts and auxiliary covariates. We assess the performance of the proposed method via extensive simulations and apply our results to the question of whether teacher collective bargaining leads to higher school spending, finding minimal impacts. We implement the proposed method in the augsynth R package.

A Look Back: Teacher unions, quality, and professionalism, as seen in Kappan

The nature of the teaching profession has been a frequent topic in Phi Delta Kappan. Teresa Preston reviews what Kappan authors have written about the meaning of professionalism in teaching, how teacher unions and collective bargaining have contributed to perceptions of the profession, and how teacher quality has been defined.

Negotiating the Great Recession: How Teacher Collective Bargaining Outcomes Change in Times of Financial Duress

This article examines how teacher collective bargaining agreements (CBAs), teacher salaries, and class sizes changed during the Great Recession. Using a district-level data set of California teacher CBAs that includes measures of subarea contract strength and salaries from 2005–2006 and 2011–2012 tied to district-level longitudinal data, we estimate difference-in-difference models to examine bargaining outcomes for districts that should have been more or less fiscally constrained. We find that unions and administrators change critical elements of CBAs and district policy during times of fiscal duress. This includes increasing class sizes, reducing instructional time, and lowering base salaries to relieve financial pressures and negotiating increased protections for teachers in areas with less direct financial implications, including grievance procedures and nonteaching duties.

The bad end of the bargain?: Revisiting the relationship between collective bargaining agreements and student achievement

This paper revisits the relationship between teacher collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) and student achievement. Using a district-level dataset of California teacher CBAs that includes measures of overall and subarea contract strength linked to district-level panel data, we build on prior work by controlling for unobserved fixed and time-varying confounders. This study demonstrates that naïve pooled OLS estimates of student achievement on overall CBA strength are larger and more negative than lagged achievement and within-district estimates, signifying a negative bias in the naïve levels models. When controlling for time invariant and time-varying unobservables, the relationship between CBA strength and student achievement is persistently negative and small, or null, but never significantly positive. This relationship extends to specific CBA subareas and to subgroups of students. These findings have important implications for new reforms designed to weaken teacher collective bargaining rights.

Cut From the Same Cloth? Comparing Urban District CBAs Within States and Across the United States

There is considerable speculation and some empirical evidence that teacher collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) in urban school districts are more restrictive to district administrators than CBAs in other districts. We build on prior work by comparing urban with nonurban CBAs in three states—California, Michigan, and Washington—and, for a set of high-profile provisions, with those in CBAs from 72 of the largest districts in the country outside those states. We find that urban CBAs are more restrictive than nonurban CBAs in all three states, but there is still considerable heterogeneity across districts in overall restrictiveness and in high-profile provisions.

Defining “Comparable”: An Analysis of Reduction in Force Provisions in Ohio School Districts

Guided by Honig and Hatch's (2004) conceptualization of bridging and buffering, we undertook an analysis of reduction in force (RIF) provisions from 546 Ohio teacher collective bargaining agreements. We asked the following question: Are the most disadvantaged school districts providing greater protections to tenured teachers when making RIF decisions? Logistic regression analysis revealed a negative relationship ( p < 0.05) between the percentage of students within the district living in poverty and bridging to state efforts to reform the use of seniority alone in RIF decisions.

The Long-Run Effects of Teacher Collective Bargaining

We analyze how exposure to teacher collective bargaining affects long-run outcomes for students, exploiting the timing of state duty-to-bargain law passage in a cross-cohort difference-in-difference framework. Among men, exposure to a duty-to-bargain law in the first 10 years after passage depresses annual earnings by $2,134 (3.93 percent), decreases weekly hours worked by 0.42, and reduces employment and labor force participation. The earnings estimate implies that current duty-to-bargain laws reduce earnings by $213.8 billion annually. Effects grow with time since law passage, are largest among nonwhites, and are not evident for women. Duty-to-bargain laws reduce male noncognitive skills, supporting the labor market findings. (JEL I21, J22, J31, J45, J51, J52, K31)

The Long-Run Effects of Teacher Collective Bargaining

This paper presents the first analysis of the effect of teacher collective bargaining on long-run labor market and educational attainment outcomes. Our analysis exploits the different timing across states in the passage of duty-to-bargain laws in a difference-in-difference framework to identify how exposure to teacher collective bargaining affects the long-run outcomes of students. Using American Community Survey (ACS) data linked to each respondent’s state of birth, we examine labor market outcomes and educational attainment for 35-49 year olds. Our estimates suggest that teacher collective bargaining worsens the future labor market outcomes of students: living in a state that has a duty-to-bargain law for all 12 grade-school years reduces earnings by $800 (or 2%) per year and decreases hours worked by 0.50 hours per week. The earnings estimate indicates that teacher collective bargaining reduces earnings by $199.6 billion in the US annually. We also find evidence of lower employment rates, which is driven by lower labor force participation, as well as reductions in the skill levels of the occupations into which workers sort. The effects are driven by men and nonwhites, who experience larger relative declines in long-run outcomes. Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we demonstrate that collective bargaining leads to sizable reductions in measured cognitive and non-cognitive skills among young adults. Taken together, our results suggest laws that support collective bargaining for teachers have adverse long-term labor market consequences for students.

Collective Bargaining Agreement Provisions in the Wake of Ohio Teacher Evaluation System Legislation

Guided by Honig and Hatch’s conceptualization of bridging and buffering, we analyzed the first teacher collective bargaining agreements negotiated after the enactment of the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System to understand how state law has shaped provisions for teacher evaluation, compensation, reductions in force (RIF), transfers, and contract renewal. We found surprising variation in provisions across districts. Most notable was how districts defined comparable evaluations in making RIF decisions. Bridging districts provided the greatest protections for the most accomplished teachers, regardless of seniority. In contrast, buffering districts have RIF provisions based on seniority.

My End of the Bargain

A large literature on teacher collective bargaining describes the potential influence of the provisions in collectively bargained teacher union contracts on teachers and student achievement, but little is known about what influences the provisions that end up in these contracts. Using a unique data set made up of every active teacher collective bargaining agreement in Washington State, the authors estimate spatial lag models to explore the relationship between the restrictiveness of a bargained contract in one district and the restrictiveness of contracts in nearby districts. Employing various measures of geographic and institutional proximity, they find that spatial relationships play a major role in determining bargaining outcomes. These spatial relationships, however, are actually driven by two “institutional bargaining structures”: education service districts (ESDs), which support school districts, and UniServ councils, which determine who is bargaining on behalf of local teachers’ unions. This finding suggests that the influence of geographic distance found in previous studies of teacher wages may simply reflect the influence of these bargaining structures.

Keeping Sight of the Forest Through the Trees

In this invited response to Moe and Anzia (2014), we describe both the points of convergence and divergence between our prior research (2007a, 2007b) and that of Moe (2005) and Moe and Anzia (2014). We also respond to Moe and Anzia’s critique of our published work. Moe and Anzia’s study helps to refine the policy discussion around seniority preferences in teacher collective bargaining agreements by providing further evidence that such preferences may exacerbate the teacher quality gap in particular settings - specifically, large, likely highly bureaucratic, elementary school districts - a finding that is consistent with a finding from our earlier research. However, we believe that those significant findings are limited to certain school districts, and we were unable in our prior research to conclude that the strength of seniority preferences consistently and systematically exacerbates the teacher quality gap within and among all school districts. This is the point of divergence between our work and that of Moe and Anzia. Consequently, we caution that merely banning seniority preferences may not have widespread, long-term effects on closing the teacher quality gap.

Teacher Evaluation and Collective Bargaining

This case study analyzes controversial teacher evaluation policies in the context of collective bargaining. Dr. Jill Abrams, a new superintendent in a struggling school district, is at the center of the case. Her school board demands a form of teacher evaluation she finds problematic because it includes value-added modeling. Moreover, the board insists on excluding the union in the process of developing the new evaluation system. This case explores the potential consequences of implementing specific teacher evaluation policies and competing demands of relevant stakeholders in the process. The case weaves rich policy issues that frequently present to school leaders at the local level. Other policy and ethical dilemmas emerge as the case develops.

Teacher Collective Bargaining

In 2010, Strunk and Reardon introduced a potentially transformative method for analyzing teacher collective bargaining agreements (CBAs). We extend Strunk and Reardon’s work by assessing whether the Partial Independence Item Response (PIIR) approach can be applied to subsets of provisions from CBAs, data that may be more feasible for researchers to collect. Utilizing a new data set derived from all provisions in all active CBAs in Washington state, we find that estimates calculated from a subset of high-profile provisions are moderately highly correlated with estimates calculated from the full range of provisions, as are estimates calculated from several categories of provisions. This suggests that researchers can still draw important conclusions by applying the PIIR method to readily available data on teacher CBAs.

Attitudes About Teacher Labor Unions and Collective Bargaining: Education, Age, Family, Union Experience and Region Effects from a National Sample

Data from a 2008 Zogby Survey indicate that most respondents favor the right of teachers to unionize and engage in collective bargaining. Most also believe that public schools in their state do a good job educating students and they do not believe the schools would do a better job if teachers were forbidden to unionize. These results varied by region, union experience and having a family member as a teacher but the results overall were quite strong.

Contracting Away Success: The Way Teacher Collective Bargaining Agreements Are Undermining the Education of America's Children

While American public education once stood as an example of educational excellence globally, it now exists as only a shell of what it once was. Students from countries across the globe now routinely outperform American children and as each year passes, students filling classrooms in the United States slip farther and farther behind their international peers. American student proficiency rates across all subject areas sit at such low levels that they call into serious the question the creation of a competent and efficient workforce prepared to address and correct the varied problems the nation faces as it begins the 21st century. While numerous factors have contributed to this eroding of American education, one factor of significant influence is the practice of collective bargaining by teachers’ unions with school districts, as it exists today. Though unions and collective bargaining serve an important role in American public education, protecting the interests of teachers and ensuring fair employment standards for these professionals, many aspects of these agreements between unions and school districts give short shrift to their negative implications for the students these teachers hope to educate. The goal of this Note is to demonstrate the negative effects collective bargaining has had and continues to have on student achievement in America’s public schools, flesh out the problematic areas within these agreements, and put forth suggestions as to how the practice of collective bargaining might be modified to better serve American children, those on whom the public education should be principally focused.

The Impact of Collective Bargaining and Urbanicity on the Late Hiring of Teachers

It is commonly assumed that urban school districts hire teachers late due to issues related to district size and/or restrictions in collectively bargained teacher contracts affecting teacher hiring and transfers between schools. Our investigation of late teacher hiring and collective bargaining is based on a survey of 40 school districts that captured information about teacher transfer and hiring timelines. Findings indicate no differences between collective bargaining districts and non-bargaining districts in late teacher hiring. The findings confirm big differences in late hiring between suburbs and cities even when controlling for collective bargaining status and other contextual variables. Late school district budget action was also associated with late hiring.

Facilitating the Teacher Quality Gap? Collective Bargaining Agreements, Teacher Hiring and Transfer Rules, and Teacher Assignment Among Schools in California

Certain studies and the California legislature have recently concluded that seniority preference rules in teacher collective bargaining agreements facilitate a teacher ‘quality gap’ by permitting senior teachers to transfer to schools with higher-performing and more affluent children. This study examines the effects of such transfer rules on the distribution of teachers among and within school districts in California. The study finds that, when comparing California districts to each other, strong seniority preference rules are associated with a greater percentage of credentialed teachers in school districts. Employing hierarchical linear modeling, the study then finds that schools with higher percentages of minority students, within districts, have lower percentages of credentialed and experienced teachers. Contrary to certain previous research and conventional wisdom, however, this study finds no persuasive evidence that the seniority preference rules independently affect the distribution of teachers among schools or exacerbate the negative relationship between higher minority schools and uncredentialed and low-experience teachers.