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

Teacher Unionization and Student Academic Performance: Looking beyond Collective Bargaining

“…Many of these studies include only California schools and rely on scores from California Standards Tests and the related summary Academic Performance Index (API). In this framework, Matsudaira and Patterson (2017) identify positive impacts of CB contracts on mathematics proficiency in California charter schools; Moe (2009) finds negative impacts of contract restrictiveness on the growth of API in the largest California districts; and Marianno and Strunk (2018b) find small, negative impacts of contract strength in simple OLS regressions, though these effects are generally not significant when prior test performance or district-fixed effects are included. Eberts and Stone (1987) examine a national sample using math test scores from the Department of Education’s Sustaining Effects Study and get mixed results, with positive union impacts in the middle of the performance distribution and negative impacts in the upper and lower tails.…”

“…Others have used continuous measures of union strength, depending on union membership or union dues collected (Carini, Powell, and Steelman 2000; Lott and Kenny 2013). Similarly, some studies have focused on indicators of particular contract provisions scaled in terms of the degree to which they restrict supervisors’ discretion (Marianno and Strunk 2018b; Moe 2009).…”

“…2 Our CB and MC coding simply indicates whether the given type of agreement was in force in a district. These agreements might vary in terms of specific provisions, ranging from rules governing hiring, firing and assignment, to salary schedules, to forms of evaluation and grievance procedures, to limits on the number of faculty meetings required (Marianno and Strunk 2018b; Moe 2009). We do not have information on these specific provisions, so our estimated effects identify an average impact across potentially heterogeneous agreements.…”

The Effect of Teachers’ Union Contracts on School District Efficiency: Longitudinal Evidence From California

“…However, Baron's (2018) later study finds that Wisconsin high school student achievement decreased as a result of Act 10. Marianno and Strunk (2018b) find that once time-invariant district working conditions are accounted for, the relationship between contract restrictiveness and student achievement in California school districts is at worst small and negative and, at best, zero. Brunner et al (2019) find that following school finance reforms, the increase in and reallocation of local education expenditures associated with union influence translated into larger achievement gains.…”

“…In this article, we add to the literature about the effects of teachers' unions on school district administration by using a longitudinal dataset from California school districts to estimate the relationship between CBAs and district efficiency over time. We bring to bear a measure of CBA or contract restrictiveness that has been broadly used in the education literature, in which we define contract restrictiveness as the extent to which the CBAs negotiated between teachers' unions and their school district counterparts impose restrictions on administrators in the management of day-to-day school operations (e.g., Goldhaber et al, 2013;Marianno et al, 2018;Marianno & Strunk, 2018b;Strunk et al, 2018Strunk & Grissom, 2010;Strunk & Reardon, 2010). Our measure of contract restrictiveness relies on a partial independence item response model that estimates the restrictiveness of approximately 500 California school district CBAs in place during the 2005-2006, 2008-2009, 2011-2012, and 2014-2015 school years.…”