The Long-Run Effects of Teacher Collective Bargaining

Lovenheim, Michael; Willén, Alexander

doi:10.1257/pol.20170570

Cited by 31 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…Moe (2009), Marianno and Strunk (2018), and Strunk and McEachin (2011) found that more restrictive collective bargaining agreements were associated with null to negative effects on student outcomes in California. More recently, Baron (2018) found evidence from Wisconsin's Act 10 to suggest that teachers' unions reduced average test scores by 20 percent, and Lovenheim and Willén (2019) found that exposure to duty-to-bargain laws reduced annual earnings by 3.93 percent and hours worked per week by 0.42 for men. However, Matsudaira and Patterson (2017) found that teacher unionization in California charter schools increased math achievement by 17 percent but had no effects on reading achievement.…”

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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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are School Reopening Decisions Related to Union Influence?

DeAngelis

Makridis

2021

Social Science Quarterly

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“…Hoxby (1996) and Lovenheim (2009) showed that union effects on student outcome, measured by high school dropout rate, are either negative or insignificant. Lovenheim and Willen (2019) examined more long‐run effects of unions and found that students educated under duty‐to‐bargain laws had lower annual incomes later in life.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Myth of Unions’ Overprotection of Bad Teachers: Evidence from the District–Teacher Matched Data on Teacher Turnover

Han¹

2020

Industrial Relations

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This article examines the relationship between teachers' unions and teacher turnover in U.S. public schools. The trade-off between teacher pay and employment predicts that unions raise the dismissal rate of underperforming teachers but reduce the attrition of high-quality teachers, as the higher wages unions negotiate provide districts strong incentives to scrutinize teacher performance during a probationary period while encouraging high-quality teachers to remain in teaching. Using the district-teacher matched data and a natural experiment, I find that, compared to less-unionized districts, highly unionized districts dismiss more low-quality teachers and retain more high-quality teachers, raising average teacher quality and educational outcomes.Recent studies suggest that teachers are the most important school factor in improving the educational achievement of U.S. students (Burke and Sass 2006; Goldhaber, Brewer, and Anderson 1999; Ingersoll and Merrill 2017;Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain 2005). Yet, researchers find that the quality of the teaching workforce in the United States has been declining for the past several decades (Bacolod 2003;Corcoran, Evans, and Schwab 2004; Hoxby and Leigh 2004;Lakdawalla 2001; Murnane et al. 1991). Raising teacher quality, therefore, becomes a primary objective for policymakers in educational reforms. Staffing classrooms with high-quality teachers can be achieved by both hiring and retaining good teachers, and teacher turnover is a key factor linking both approaches.

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“…32 Some studies, however, find evidence of negative effects of teachers' unions on student outcomes (e.g. Hoxby 1996;Lott and Kenny 2013;Lovenheim and Willen 2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2 The evidence on teachers' unions generally shows increases in intermediate inputs such as teacher salaries (e.g. Hoxby 1996;West and Mykerezi 2011;Brunner and Squires 2013), while results are more mixed for student outcomes (Hoxby, 1996;Lovenheim, 2009;Lott and Kenny, 2013;Lovenheim and Willen, 2016). See Cowen and Strunk (2015) for a recent survey of this literature.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%