Teachers’ strike helped teachers, didn’t hurt students

Few things have puzzled U.S. education policy researchers more than educator-driven public school teacher strikes. Being at the forefront The revival of labor activity is a sign of rejectIn the United States, nearly one in five union members are public school teachers—their High Profile, Destructive The strike sparked widespread media attention and public debate.

But are these strikes useful? Do they benefit workers? Do they help or hurt students’ academic performance?

Answering these questions has been difficult, largely because of a lack of centralized data that scholars can use to analyze strikes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics used to track all strikes and work stoppages nationwide, but since budget cuts in the early 1980s, the agency has tracked only strikes involving more than 1,000 employees. Given that 97% of U.S. school districts employ fewer than 1,000 teachers, there are no federal records of most teacher strikes.

Now, researchers have for the first time Melissa Arnold Lyon University at Albany Matthew Craft Matthew Steinberg of Brown University and Matthew Steinberg of the Education Group accelerate A novel dataset has been compiled to answer these questions and to provide, for the first time, reliable estimates of the impact of teachers’ strikes in the United States.

Their dataset covers 772 teacher strikes in 610 school districts in 27 states between 2007 and 2023 and took four years to complete. The three co-authors, along with seven additional research assistants, reviewed more than 90,000 news articles to fill in gaps in the national data. Their working paper, which will be published tomorrow, provides revealing information about the causes and consequences of teacher strikes in the United States and shows that teacher strikes remain a powerful tool for educators to improve working conditions.

Overall, U.S. teacher strikes are uncommon and short-lived. The median number of strikes per year over the 16-year study was 12.5, and strikes typically lasted just one day. 65% of strikes ended in five days or less. The longest strike was in Strongsville, Ohio, in 2013, which lasted 34 days.

The survey found that nearly 90% of participants in teacher strikes demanded higher wages or increased benefits. The researchers found that strikes led to these benefits on average. Specifically, one year after a strike, average teacher pay increased by 3% (or $2,000 per teacher), and five years later by 8%, or $10,000 per teacher.

More than half of the strikes also demanded improved working conditions, such as smaller class sizes or more spending on school facilities and non-teaching staff such as nurses. The researchers found that strikes were also effective in this regard, as the student-teacher ratio fell by 3.2% and non-teaching staff wage spending increased by 7% in the third year after the strike.

Importantly, the new spending on pay and working conditions came not from reallocating existing funds but from increasing overall education spending, primarily at the state level.

That these strikes were effective is noteworthy, especially since labor strikes in general Not yet linked Wages, hours or benefits have increased since the 1980s. The study’s authors suggest that public school teacher strikes may be a “high-leverage bargaining strategy” compared to other union sectors because teachers are not easily replaced by non-union workers or technological automation.

Perhaps surprisingly, the researchers found no relationship between the length of a strike and its impact on teacher wages.

Lyons of the University of Albany believes that part of the reason why teacher strikes have been so successful and achieved such large pay increases is that teacher strikes can send a signal to the public in a way that other labor strikes often cannot.

“Because education is such an important industry, even a one-day strike has a huge impact,” she told me. “The news media will report it, people will pay attention, and parents will be inconvenienced. You have these built-in mechanisms for attracting attention that other types of protests don’t have.” Another study she co-authored with Kraft A study earlier this year showed that teachers’ strikes were more than twice as likely as education to be mentioned in congressional political ads, highlighting the power of political advertising in communicating the need for education reform.

Previous research on teachers’ strikes Argentina, Canadaand BelgiumIn the Argentine study, where the shutdowns were longer, the teachers’ strike had a large negative impact on student achievement. (In the Argentine study, average student achievement fell by 88 school days.

In contrast, the researchers found no evidence that U.S. teacher strikes (which were much shorter) affected student reading or math scores in the year of the strike or in the five years afterward. While U.S. strikes lasting two weeks or more had a negative impact on math scores in the year of the strike and the year after, student scores recovered afterward.

In fact, Lyons said they can’t rule out the possibility that a short teachers’ strike would actually improve student learning over time, since strikes would increase school expenses. Recent influential meta-analyses The school finance study found that increasing operating spending by $1,000 per student over four years would help student learning.

Higher wages could improve classroom performance by reducing teacher burnout or the need for part-time work. But more spending on teachers might not improve student test scores if wage increases go primarily to more experienced teachers or pensions, or if teachers were already doing the best they could before the strike, Lyons explained.

Overall, the researchers found that teacher union density has declined more than previously realized. In 1990, 85% of public school teachers said they were in a union, according to federal data. That fell to 79% in 1999 and to 68% in 2020.

“As someone who studies unions, that statistic alone is pretty surprising to me,” Lyons said. “And it comes from the federal School and Staff Surveyone of our best sources of data. ” Tracking teacher union membership can be complicated because of mergers and because the two national unions — the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association — include non-teachers and retired teachers in their ranks. Still, even with the decline, 68% of teachers have union membership far higher than in the private sector, where Only 10% of workers joined the union.

About 35 states have laws that explicitly or effectively prohibit teachers from striking, but those laws do not prevent educators from organizing. (Almost every state has laws that explicitly or effectively prohibit teachers from striking.) In the #RedforEd teachers strike Arizona, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Oklahoma are among several states that have banned teachers from striking since 2018 and 2019.)

In compiling their data set, Lyons, Craft, and Steinberg included both legal strikes and illegal work stoppages, including mass strikes, “sick-outs” (teachers calling in sick en masse), or so-called “illegal strikes” (strikes by educators without the support of union leadership).

Perhaps counterintuitively, they found that strikes were more common in more conservative, labor-hostile states, a finding they attributed largely to the fact that large, coordinated strikes across regions occur more often in those places. Individual regional strikes are more likely to occur in liberal areas, where such actions are legal.

Teacher protests over the past decade have helped to build support among parents and the wider public. Investigation Report backing Promote educator organization and improve teacher pay. The percentage of the public that believes teachers unions have a positive impact on schools has increased from 32% in 2013 It will reach 43% in 2019Most Americans support teachers, according to Education Next poll The right to strikeThis suggests that educators may be willing to use this strategy in the future.