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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.

In many school districts, the policies that regulate teaching personnel are governed by collective bargaining agreements (CBAs). While there is significant policy attention that has affected the scope of these agreements, there is relatively little research on how CBAs vary over time, or whether they change in response to states’ legislative reforms. Using a panel data set of over 1,200 CBAs across three states, we compare CBA change before and after reforms in two states (Michigan and Washington) relative to a state with no statutory changes (California). We show that the state policy reforms lessened the restrictiveness of CBAs, as intended. The results suggest when reforms limit bargaining negotiations, unions are unable to compensate for the substantial reductions in working conditions.

From 2005 to 2015, the number of Black teachers in Michigan dropped by 48%, substantially exceeding declines in the corresponding K–12 Black student population. These teacher losses are an acute phenomenon within a broader national context of deurbanization of K–12 student populations away from those districts with the largest and most established faculties of color. Districts receiving large numbers of incoming Black students hired few Black teachers over the period, leading to marked declines in Black student exposure to Black educators, and Black employment gains since 2016 have generally been in areas where Black teachers were already employed. We discuss the historical conditions under which Michigan’s Black faculties were established and multiple forward-looking challenges to building and sustaining Black faculties in geographically diffuse populations.

We examine the effect of Michigan’s 2011 reforms to teacher evaluation and tenure policies on teacher retention. Our data are drawn from administrative records containing the population of public school employees from 2005–2006 through 2014–2015. To identify the causal effects of these reforms on teacher attrition, we utilize a difference-in-differences (DD) strategy that compares the exit rates of teachers with the exit rates of other professional staff in the same school districts who were not affected by the policy changes. We find that, on average, Michigan’s teacher reforms had little impact on teacher attrition overall. However, further analyses provide strong evidence that early-career teachers assigned to hard-to-staff districts were more likely to exit post-reform.

In the wake of political and legal challenges facing race-based integration, districts have turned to socioeconomic integration initiatives in an attempt to achieve greater racial balance across schools. Empirically, the extent to which these initiatives generate such balance is an open question. In this article, we leverage the school assignment system that the Wake County Public School System employed throughout the 2000s to provide evidence on this issue. Although our results show that Wake County Public School System’s socioeconomic-based assignment policy had negligible effects on average levels of segregation across the district, it substantially reduced racial segregation for students who would have attended majority-minority schools under a residence-based assignment policy. The policy also exposed these students to peers with different racial/ethnic backgrounds, higher mean achievement levels, and more advantaged neighborhood contexts. We explore how residential context and details of the policy interacted to produce this pattern of effects and close the article by discussing the implications of our results for research and policy.

In July 2011, the State of Michigan adopted a broad set of teacher labor market reforms, including a high-stakes evaluation system designed in part to remove low-performing teachers. We examine the characteristics of teachers rated as “minimally effective” and “ineffective,” as well as their schools, and the relationship between low effectiveness ratings and later employment outcomes. Results suggest teachers of color across traditional and charter schools are more likely to receive low effectiveness ratings than their within-school peers. These low rating risks are higher for teachers of color working in comparatively White-faculty contexts. Male and novice teachers are also rated low more frequently, and important differences appear to exist in the usage of low ratings by traditional public and charter schools.

Centralized school enrollment is designed to improve the allocation of seats in choice-based systems. We study the quality of K-12 public school placements relative to revealed family preferences using data from New Orleans, where a market-based school system allocates most seats through a centralized enrollment lottery. We propose a theory of family utility maximization under school choice systems with and without guaranteed placements. Using an instrumental variables strategy, we estimate the causal effect of losing a school placement lottery on the school quality a student receives. We find a significant gap between preferred and actual school quality for students who do not win a first-choice assignment, some of which is regained when multiple rounds of assignment are offered. From the supply side, this allows schools of choice to operate with weak demand by enrolling students who fail to win assignment to oversubscribed schools of greater quality and higher preference ranking.

We examine the characteristics of schools preferred by parents in New Orleans, Louisiana, where a “portfolio” of school choices is available. This tests the conditions under which school choice induces healthy competition between public and private schools through the threat of student exit. Using unique data from parent applications to as many as eight different schools (including traditional public, charter, and private schools), we find that many parents include a mix of public and private schools among their preferences, often ranking public schools alongside or even above private schools on a unified application. Parents who list both public and private schools show a preference for the private sector, all else equal, and are willing to accept lower school performance scores for private schools than otherwise equivalent public options. These parents reveal a stronger preference for academic outcomes than other parents and place less value on other school characteristics such as sports, arts, or extended hours. Public schools are more likely to be ranked with private schools and to be ranked higher as their academic performance scores increase.

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.

We examine more than 1,000 collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) in place across California, Michigan, and Washington. We investigate the prevalence of a set of 43 key provisions between and within these states, providing the first comprehensive comparison of CBA terms using data drawn from economically and demographically different districts, as well as districts that vary considerably by student enrollment. We find that CBAs vary substantially within and across states, and that this variation is more associated with district size than the proportion of low-income students within districts. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for research and policy.

This article provides provide a new, systematic profile of more than 18,000 homeless students in Michigan, utilizing rich administrative data from all test-taking students in Grades 3–9 during three academic years. These data are part of a larger study of school choice and student mobility in that state. Homelessness is a condition found disproportionately away from suburban school districts. African American and Hispanic students are more frequently homeless, and homeless students are almost universally impoverished. They are far more mobile between districts and zip codes than their non-homeless peers and are more likely to participate in interdistrict school choice and charter schools. Finally, homeless students score far lower on state math and reading tests relative to their state, district and school peers.

This chapter outlines recent reforms to the teaching profession, and discuss where and how future policy change is likely to occur. It focuses on teacher evaluation, job security, compensation, and recruitment, and on collective bargaining agreements that teachers’ unions negotiate with their districts, and the authors conclude with the expectation that the next decade will feature new and ongoing debates over each of these issues. Teacher labor issues will continue to vary in their details by state, as do other areas of education law and policy. The chapter notes, however, that new changes to the teacher labor market are unlikely to be substantial enough on their own to change more fundamental economic, demographic, and sociological conditions that provide the backdrop to where teachers work and organize. The chapter also acknowledges that much remains hidden from view. As researchers and policymakers understand more about how children learn, the authors believe that the laws governing not only teachers and teaching but public education more generally will shift to incorporate those new directions—wherever they lead. For teacher advocates, such changes need not undermine the professionalism or the security of employment or of purpose that historically has drawn new educators into the profession. But all stakeholders should hope and expect that whatever new reforms occur—for teachers, their unions’, their contracts, and the schools in which they work—they begin from a perspective that places opportunity for children as the first principle of public education.

In this paper we consider more than three decades of research on teachers' unions in the United States. We focus on unions' role as potential rent-seekers in the K-12 educational landscape, and specifically how teachers' unions impact district and student outcomes. We review important methodological improvements in the identification of union impacts and the measurement of contract restrictiveness that characterize a number of recent studies. We generally find that the preponderance of empirical evidence suggests that teacher unionization and union strength are associated with increases in district expenditures and teacher salaries, particularly salaries for experienced teachers. The evidence for union-related differences in student outcomes is mixed, but suggestive of insignificant or modestly negative union effects. Taken together, these patterns are consistent with a rent-seeking hypothesis. We conclude by discussing other important union activities, most notably in the political arena, and by noting that recent changes in state laws pertaining to teachers and teacher unions may provide context for new directions in scholarship.

Schools and neighborhoods are thought to be two of the most important contextual influences on student academic outcomes. Drawing on a unique data set that permits simultaneous estimation of neighborhood and school contributions to student test score gains, we analyze the distributions of these contributions to consider the relative importance of schools and neighborhoods in shaping student achievement outcomes. We also evaluate the sensitivity of estimated school and neighborhood contributions to the exclusion of an explicit measure of the other context, indicating the extent to which bias may exist in studies where either measure is unavailable. Taken together, results of these analyses provide substantial insight into the influences of two of the most important contextual settings in students’ lives.

This article considers the impact of a high-stakes testing and reporting requirement on students using publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools. We describe how such a policy was implemented during the course of a previously authorized multi-year evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which provided us with data on voucher students before and after the reform, as well as on public school students who received no new policy treatment. Our results indicate substantial growth for voucher students in the first high-stakes testing year, particularly in mathematics, and for students with higher levels of earlier academic achievement. We discuss these results in the context of both the school choice and accountability literatures.

Despite periodic consideration of public sector unions in the public management and administration literature, empirical evidence on the union membership decisions of public employees remains scant. In this article, we begin to address this issue by considering unique data on union membership drawn from a local educational agency in a midsize American city. We find union membership rates to be highest in schools that are hardest to staff and where working conditions may be most difficult. We consider this evidence in light of recent efforts to reform public sector unions in general and teacher unions in particular.

This article considers professional development activity among employees in remote public school agencies in eastern Kentucky. Drawing from a panel of principal and teacher data in 38 agencies, we predict teacher participation in a targeted development program as a function of teacher and school characteristics, with special attention to the role of the principal in promoting the program. Gender, experience, and educational characteristics appear to play important roles in who participates. Teachers whose principals joined the program and teachers with newer principals were more likely to participate. These results are interpreted in the context of the broad literature on public management.

We examine what factors predict why some parents enroll their children in voucher schools while other parents with similar types of children and from similar neighborhoods do not. Furthermore, we investigate how aware parents are of their educational options, where they get their information, and what school characteristics they deem the most important. To answer these questions, we analyze the school choice patterns in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. Using survey data, we compare responses from a representative sample of voucher parents and a matched sample of public school parents. While public school parents have higher incomes than voucher parents do, voucher parents have more years of education on average. We find that parents in both sectors rely heavily on their social networks to gain information about school options. Finally, we conclude that religion plays an important role in explaining why some parents use vouchers while others do not.

Several states have recently adopted or are pursuing policies that deny or revoke tenure from teachers who receive poor evaluation ratings over time based in part on quantitative measures of performance. Using data from the state of Florida, we estimate such value-added measures to consider the future effectiveness and number of teachers who would have been dismissed under different versions of these policies. Students assigned to teachers who would have been dismissed according to a value-added policy made considerably smaller academic improvements than did students assigned to teachers who would have avoided dismissal. Critically, however, we show that specific policy design determines the extent of the potential for value-added to improve the overall quality of the teaching workforce.

Few school choice evaluations consider students who leave such programs, and fewer still consider the effects of leaving these programs as policy-relevant outcomes. Using a representative sample of students from the citywide voucher program in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, we analyze more than 1,000 students who leave the program during a 4-year period. We show that low-performing voucher students tend to move from the voucher sector into lower performing and less effective public schools than the typical public school student attends, whereas high-performing students transfer to better public schools. In general, transferring students realize substantial achievement gains after moving to the public sector; these results are robust to multiple analytical approaches. This evidence has important implications for school choice policy and research.

In this paper, we consider several features of teacher-retention policies based on valueadded measures of effectiveness under a variety of empirically grounded rules and parameters. We consider the effects of policy design by varying the standard above which satisfactory teachers are expected to perform. We simulate recently adopted policies that remove teachers based on consecutive unsatisfactory performance and compare these to policies that remove teachers based on poor performance on average over a multiyear period. We also consider the precision of the performance measure and the underlying variation in teacher quality on policy effects. Finally, the simulation makes a step forward by incorporating recent empirical findings of a relationship between teacher quality and natural attrition from the profession. Our results indicate that deselection policies based on value-added measures have the potential to improve teacher quality, although understanding the role of policy design, self-selected exits, and the underlying variation in teacher quality is essential for determining policy effects. C � 2013 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

Background/Context Recent political efforts to minimize the influence of teacher unions have called new attention to collective bargaining in American education. Such attention has only heightened a longstanding controversy within the realms of both research and practice. A renewed scholarly literature has systematically considered the relationship between teacher unionization and educational outcomes. The current paper provides additional context for such work by considering teacher contracts over time. Purpose/Objective/Research Question In this study we examine the ways in which the collective bargaining agreements in a large, Midwestern American school district have changed during more than 30 years of policymaking. Research Design The paper presents an historical content analysis/case study of every contract in Louisville, Kentucky since 1979. We focus on several areas of current interest to researchers studying teacher quality. These include salary schedules, transfer and assignment policies, teacher evaluation, dismissal, and working conditions. To fix our analysis within a theoretical framework, we consider an interpretation of our evidence suggested by the perspective of New Institutionalism. Conclusions/Recommendations We show that these contracts have changed very little in more than three decades, and most key provisions are identical. The time period we examine covers important educational reforms at the state and federal levels, as well as a number of popular movements such as efforts to reduce class size and enhance teacher quality through new evaluation schemes and tenure reform. If confirmed in other districts, our evidence would suggest limited potential for policy change to be reflected in individual bargaining agreements.

This article considers the introduction of a performance measurement reform for private schools serving students who receive state-provided vouchers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Drawing on unique panel data collected both before and after the reform, we show that private sector performance increased significantly when outcomes were publicly reported. We frame these results in the context of third-party provision of public services and argue that our evidence suggests that market-based competition alone may not drive nongovernmental providers to perform at optimal levels. Instead, such vendors may require performancemonitoring schemes similar to those faced by their governmental counterparts.

In this article we examine educational attainment levels for students in Milwaukee's citywide voucher program and a comparable group of public school students. Using unique data collected as part of a state-mandated evaluation of the program, we consider high school graduation and enrollment in postsecondary institutions for students initially exposed to voucher schools and those in public schools at the same time. We show that exposure to voucher schools was related to graduation and, in particular, to enrollment and persistence in a 4-year college. These differences are apparent despite controls for student neighborhoods, demographics, early-career test scores and—for a subsample of survey respondents—controls for parental education, income, religious behavior, and marital status. We conclude by stressing the implications for future scholarship and policy, including the importance of attainment outcomes in educational research.

Recruiting high quality employees is one of the key functions of public human resource managers and a critical component of effective public service delivery. This is particularly true in education but little is known about public sector or teacher hiring patterns in areas that are predominantly rural, poor, and isolated from other locales. This article begins to fill that gap. We find that rural educational agencies employ the new teachers of lowest observed aptitude, implying that organizational outcomes associated with these districts may differ in systematic ways that reinforce longstanding gaps in quality. As such, human resources strategies for increasing the attractiveness of geographically and culturally isolated regions for high quality public service are needed. These strategies are likely to require different policy prescriptions than those utilized to enhance the attractiveness to employees in urban areas.

We analyze patterns of teacher attrition from charter schools and schools in the traditional public sector. Using rich data on students, teachers, and schools in Florida, we estimate teacher effectiveness based on repeated test scores reported at the student level for each teacher over time. Among all teachers, those in charter schools appear more likely to exit the profession than those in the traditional public sector, and in both sectors the least effective teachers are more likely to exit than their more effective counterparts. Few of these relationships appear evident for within- or between-district transfers, and there are no differential relationships between effectiveness and attrition in the charter sector. We interpret these results as indicating that whatever administrative or organizational differences may exist in charter schools, they do not necessarily translate into a discernible difference in the ability to dismiss poorly performing teachers. © 2013 Association for Education Finance and Policy

In this article I review the use of randomized field trials to evaluate school voucher interventions. I argue that although estimates of the effect of the voucher offer on achievement are unbiased in these trials, more specific interpretations such as the effect of attending private school may be difficult to obtain. I discuss several evaluation parameters in the context of voucher experiments, with particular attention to the theoretical assumptions needed to identify private school impacts. I argue that if there are direct effects of the voucher offer on student achievement, and compliance with voucher assignment is imperfect, instrumental variable estimates are likely to overstate the extent to which achievement gains may be attributable to private schooling.

This article uses a regression discontinuity approach to study the influence of New York City’s school grading policy on student math and English language arts (ELA) achievement. We find evidence that students in schools receiving a failing grade realized positive effects in English in the 1st year of sanction, but we find no statistically significant effect during the 1st year of sanction on student math achievement. There is no evidence that receiving letter grades other than F had positive effects. Finally, we show that students in schools that received an F-grade in the 1st year continued to realize a positive average ELA effect in the 2nd year and that a positive math effect was evident as well.

In this paper we analyze teacher attrition from Appalachian school districts over nearly twenty years of data. We employ a unique panel of public K-12 teachers active in Kentucky between 1986 and 2005, and discern several patterns of interest to scholars and policymakers. Inter-district mobility is rare in Kentucky, and rarer still among Appalachian teachers. Few teachers transfer between regions, but teachers are considerably more likely to leave Appalachia than to transfer to it. Our results also indicate that Appalachian teachers are more likely to exit the profession. One implication of this evidence is that improvements to teacher quality in such isolated areas would require a focus on the home labor pool.

This article contributes to research concerning the determinants of student mobility between public and private schools. The authors analyze a unique set of data collected as part of a new evaluation of Milwaukee’s citywide voucher program. The authors find several important patterns. Students who switch from the private to the public sector were performing lower than their peers on standardized tests in the prior year. African Americans were disproportionately more likely to leave the private sector, as were students in schools serving proportionally more voucher students. The authors argue that although these results indicate that a large voucher program may provide an educational home for some students, it may not provide a long-term solution to those who are among the most disadvantaged.

Kentucky is a poor, relatively rural state that contrasts greatly with the relatively urban and wealthy states typically the subject of education studies employing large-scale administrative data. For this reason, Kentucky's experience of major school finance and curricular reform is highly salient for understanding teacher labor market dynamics. This study examines the time path of teacher salaries in Appalachian and non-Appalachian Kentucky using a novel teacher-level administrative data set. Our results suggest that the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) provided a salary boost for all Appalachian teachers, resulting in a wage premium for teachers of low and medium experience and equalizing pay across Appalachian and non-Appalachian districts for teachers of high experience. However, we find that Appalachian salaries fell back to the level of non-Appalachian teachers roughly a decade following reform, at which point the pre-KERA remuneration patterns re-emerge. © 2011 Association for Education Finance and Policy

I argue that lottery-based school choice programs offer the opportunity to study a unique group of students: those who want to attend or are very interested in attending private school but simply cannot, even when given the chance. The differences between these students and those who choose private school are compelling education outcomes in their own right. To illustrate the argument, I analyze data from a small and little-known private school scholarship lottery in Charlotte, North Carolina, that occurred prior to the 1999–2000 academic year. I show that race, family structure, employment status, and religion significantly predict the decision to refuse a voucher offer, as does student admission into a specific school of choice. I argue that models of voucher effects on student achievement are interpretable only in the context of factors underlying the ability to choose in the first place.

A small number of studies have examined the importance of collective bargaining agreements in the context of teacher quality, school finance, or student outcomes. Although the evidence for a bargaining effect on most measures is mixed, the preponderance has suggested that bargaining increases expenditures on teacher compensation. In this article, I provide new evidence for this result, using a dataset of more than 1,000 districts in states with a mixture of bargaining and non-bargaining districts. I present several specifications of a general model in which district spending on teacher compensation is conditioned on bargaining status as well as other features that account for district and state educational contexts. I initially find that bargaining districts spend more on teacher compensation, even after holding constant the number of students served. The results are more complicated when bargaining status is interacted with key variables. This suggests that bargaining influences expenditures, but with more nuance than in a simple imposition of additional average costs to district operations.

Charter school reforms are predicated on the existence of motivated groups or individuals that create these public schools of choice. Rhetoric concerning charter schools largely takes for granted the supply side and assumes that market forces will compel educational entrepreneurs to open schools. We argue that the motivations of charter school founders are variable and have important implications for the charter school landscape. Examining data on charter school sponsors in Texas, we estimate the impact of sponsor characteristics on the makeup of the student populations these schools serve. We apply a latent class analysis to measure motivation as an underlying variable whose outcomes we observe as qualitatively different sponsors. The analysis distinguishes between three groups of sponsors: those motivated in their capacity as school districts, those seeking to provide a general alternative to traditional district-run public education, and those offering a special service. The results suggest to...

Randomized field trials of school voucher policy interventions face major statistical hurdles in the measurement of a voucher effect on student achievement. Selection bias undermines the benefits of randomization when the treatment, a random offer of a voucher, is declined by participants who systematically differ from those who accept. This article argues that the complier average causal effect (CACE) is the parameter of interest in voucher evaluations. As an example, the CACE is estimated using data from a small, one-year field trial of vouchers in Charlotte, NC. In this estimation, voucher impacts in Charlotte are positive, but appear to be moderated by the probability of compliance. For math achievement, maximum likelihood CACE estimates are smaller and insignificant compared to intention to treat and instrumental variable estimates of mean treatment effects.

In this paper we explore the relationship between students’ residential location and participation in Milwaukee’s large, widely available private school voucher program. We are interested in one overarching question: do voucher schools disproportionately draw students from better public schools and city neighborhoods, or do they draw students most in need of alternative options? We consider whether the public schools attended by students in neighborhoods contributing large numbers of students to the voucher program are more or less effective than those attended by students in neighborhoods with fewer voucher students. We also consider whether voucher students are located in city neighborhoods that directly contribute more or less to student outcomes. We find consistent evidence that neighborhoods whose students attend less effective public schools and neighborhoods with lower academic outcomes contribute disproportionately to the voucher program. This evidence is quite consistent with patterns apparent on Census-based observational measures of neighborhood socioeconomic characteristics: higher rates of voucher use are found in the least advantaged neighborhoods. We also find, however, that disadvantaged students in general are those most likely to leave the voucher program after enrolling.