The Long-Run Effects of Teacher Collective Bargaining

Lovenheim, Michael; Willén, Alexander

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2815374

Cited by 15 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 34 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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“…Looking at teachers’ unions influence broadly, several studies have leveraged wholesale changes to collective bargaining rules to find either positive or negative impacts for students dependent upon the methodology and the outcomes of interest. Lovenheim and Willén (2019) found improved long-term outcomes for students in states with weaker unions; exposure to duty-to-bargain laws decreased male students’ earnings by nearly 4%. But to give one counterexample, Brunner et al (2019) demonstrated that in the aftermath of state finance reforms, unionized districts improved student achievement at a greater rate than non-unionized districts.…”

Section: Teachers’ Unions Contracts and Student Outcomesmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Teachers' unions have the ability to shape teacher quality as well as students' short-term and long-term outcomes, including test scores, workforce participation, and earnings (Biasi, 2018;Brunner et al, 2019;Lovenheim & Willén, 2019). Looking at teachers' unions influence broadly, several studies have leveraged wholesale changes to collective bargaining rules to find either positive or negative impacts for students dependent upon the methodology and the outcomes of interest.…”

Section: Teachers' Unions Contracts and Student Outcomesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Partisan Predictors for Collective Bargaining Agreement Items

Edgerton

2021

Educational Policy

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The United States is rare among nations in its highly decentralized process for negotiating collective bargaining agreements with local teachers’ unions. To determine whether partisanship can predict these highly localized decisions, I construct an original database of Pennsylvania collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) merged with publicly available voter registration records to predict the presence of high-profile contract items. Using spatial autoregression and probit regression, I reveal that the partisanship of a school district is a significant predictor for fewer seniority protections but not for lower salaries. These partisan relationships can guide both district administrators and union leaders in future negotiations.

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“…Keefe (2018) finds that male union teachers face a 25 per cent wage penalty, whereas female union teachers obtain a small wage premium when compared to similarly educated and experienced non‐teachers. Lovenheim and Willén (2019) also find that the effects of CB law exposure on teachers’ labour market and educational attainment outcomes greatly differ by gender. Han (2020b) finds that the teacher wage penalty is much greater for male teachers than for female teachers, and that union‐friendly states show a smaller teacher wage penalty compared to anti‐union states.…”

Section: Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of changes in public sector bargaining laws on teacher union membership

Han

2022

Brit J Industrial Rel

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This study uses a simple model of demand for and supply of union services to analyse the effect of public sector bargaining laws on teacher unionization. Relying on a nationally representative dataset covering 2001–2018, I exploit natural experiments that occurred in several US states to identify the effect of legal and institutional changes weakening collective bargaining rights of teachers on their union membership rate. Based on both difference‐in‐difference estimation and synthetic control method, I find that the new legislation significantly reduces teachers’ union membership and that the impact of the anti‐union bills on unionization evolves, growing in magnitude, over time. I also find that the magnitudes of the impacts are greater for female, younger and minority teachers.

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The Long-Run Effects of Teacher Collective Bargaining

Cited by 15 publications

References 34 publications

Are School Reopening Decisions Related to Union Influence?

Are School Reopening Decisions Related to Union Influence?

Partisan Predictors for Collective Bargaining Agreement Items

The effect of changes in public sector bargaining laws on teacher union membership

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