Teachers’ Unions, Collective Bargaining, and the Response to COVID-19

Hemphill, Annie A.; Marianno, Bradley D.

doi:10.1162/edfp_a_00326

Cited by 10 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Under these circumstances, administrators have been central to managing the crisis and will ultimately play a key role in successfully overseeing their institution until some semblance of normality resumes. Hemphill and Marianno [64] stated that school administrators have to carefully review and manage the working conditions of their teachers, the environment of working with such uncertainty, and the learning needs of their students during the pandemic. These factors have made it essential to investigate the interaction of phobia, work-life balance, and life satisfaction experienced by school administrators during the COVID-19 pandemic.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the Interrelationship between COVID-19 Phobia, Work–Family Conflict, Family–Work Conflict, and Life Satisfaction among School Administrators for Advancing Sustainable Management

2021

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This study aims to investigate the relationships between the COVID-19 phobia experienced by school administrators and their work–family conflict, family–work conflict, and life satisfaction. This descriptive research, designed according to the relational survey model, was conducted with the participation of 356 school administrators. The study data were collected through online questionnaires, and then t-test, ANOVA, correlation analysis, and simple linear regression analysis were employed for the statistical analyses. The results revealed that female school administrators experienced greater levels of COVID-19 phobia than their male peers and that COVID-19 phobia is felt more intensely in the psychological and social sub-dimensions. However, female school administrators’ life satisfaction levels were significantly higher than those of male school administrators. In the current study, it was determined that school administrators in the younger age group experienced greater levels of COVID-19 phobia and family–work/work–family conflict than their peers from other age groups. The results of this study revealed a positive and moderate relationship between school administrators’ COVID-19 phobia and their levels of both work–family and family–work conflict. The findings of the study offer significant implications for policy makers in education, showing the importance of developing strategies that will reduce the effects of the pandemic for a more sustainable and efficient employee performance.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the Interrelationship between COVID-19 Phobia, Work–Family Conflict, Family–Work Conflict, and Life Satisfaction among School Administrators for Advancing Sustainable Management

2021

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“…There is not yet much evidence relating teachers' unions and school districts' responses to COVID-19. Hemphill and Marianno (2020) found that teachers' unions renegotiated collective bargaining agreements in response to COVID-19 in 25 of the 101 reviewed public school districts. Valant (2020) observed that the reopening decisions of 256 public school districts reported by Education Week were significantly correlated with the share of Trump voters in the county in the 2016 presidential election, but not statistically related to COVID-19 cases per capita in the county.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are School Reopening Decisions Related to Union Influence?

DeAngelis

Makridis

2021

Social Science Quarterly

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Objective. The COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread school closures affecting millions of K-12 students in the United States in the spring of 2020. Groups representing teachers have pushed to reopen public schools virtually in the fall because of concerns about the health risks associated with reopening in person. In theory, stronger teachers' unions may more successfully influence public school districts to reopen without in-person instruction. Methods. We examine the relationship between teachers' union strength and the reopening decisions of 835 public school districts in the United States using regression analyses. Results. We find that school districts in locations with stronger teachers' unions are less likely to reopen in person even after we control semiparametrically for differences in local demographic characteristics. These results are robust to four measures of union strength, various potential confounding characteristics, a further disaggregation to the county level, and various analytic techniques and datasets. We do not find evidence that measures of COVID-19 risk are correlated with school reopening decisions. Conclusion. Our findings that school closures are uncorrelated with the actual incidence of the virus, but are rather strongly associated with unionization, implies that the decision to close schools has been a political-not scientific-decision.School reopening-when and how to do it-has become one of the largest and most politicized policy deliberations amid the coronavirus pandemic. At least 55 million students from over 120,000 public and private schools have been affected by closures since March 2020. 1 While only time will tell the ramifications that the absence of in-person learning will have on students' human capital development, a large body of literature suggests that higher academic achievement is associated with improved life outcomes (e.g., Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff, 2014;Hanushek, 2011). However, Gross and Opalka (2020) found that only about one-third of the 477 public school districts operating remotely in their analysis required teachers to deliver remote instruction, as opposed to no instruction, in the spring of 2020. They also found that less than half of the districts expected teachers to take attendance or check in with students regularly.School closures have had an even more immediate effect on the U.S. labor market. Because roughly 32 percent of households have children under the age of 14 living with them, coupled with the collapse in the childcare market (Ali, Herbst, and Makridis, 2021), the inability to reopen schools will necessarily affect the ability for the United States to fully reopen its labor market and attain traditional levels of full-time employment since many parents will be unable to return to work.

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“…One of our measures of second face power is a dichotomous indicator for whether the school district has a CBA. Collective bargaining creates a direct channel for teachers’ unions to influence reopening plans as many of the working condition changes required by the movement from in-person to remote instruction or from remote back to in-person instruction are required to be negotiated with teachers’ unions (Hemphill & Marianno, 2021). Collective bargaining gives teachers’ unions a legal voice in policies that affect working requirements for their teacher membership, and thus the opportunity to proactively shape a school district’s policy agenda.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Power in a Pandemic: Teachers’ Unions and Their Responses to School Reopening

et al. 2022

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Drawing on Bachrach and Baratz’s first and second faces of interest group power, we explore the relationship between teachers’ union power and reopening decisions during the fall 2020 semester in 250 large districts around the United States. We leverage a self-collected panel data set of reopening decisions coupled with measures of teachers’ union first face power (drawn from social media postings on teachers’ unions’ Facebook pages) and second face power (operationalized as district size, whether the school district negotiates a collective bargaining agreement with the teachers’ union, the length of the collective bargaining agreement, and the amount of revenue raised by the union). We found that school districts where teachers’ unions exhibit strong second face power (but not first face power) were less likely to start the school year with in-person instruction, were less likely to ever open during fall semester with in-person instruction and spent fewer weeks in in-person learning.

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Teachers’ Unions, Collective Bargaining, and the Response to COVID-19

Cited by 10 publications

References 6 publications

Exploring the Interrelationship between COVID-19 Phobia, Work–Family Conflict, Family–Work Conflict, and Life Satisfaction among School Administrators for Advancing Sustainable Management

Exploring the Interrelationship between COVID-19 Phobia, Work–Family Conflict, Family–Work Conflict, and Life Satisfaction among School Administrators for Advancing Sustainable Management

Are School Reopening Decisions Related to Union Influence?

Power in a Pandemic: Teachers’ Unions and Their Responses to School Reopening

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