The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same? Examining the Consistency of Collective Bargaining Provisions Across States and Time

• In Event: Hilton Roundtable Session 17
  In Roundtable Session: The Effects of Teacher Policy Reforms on Collective Bargaining Agreements and Teacher Employment

Abstract

Collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) engender tremendous public debate and controversy, as evidenced by the state and national policy debates centered around them (Marianno, 2015). Over 50 years of research finds that CBAs dictate the majority of local district policy, including the allocation of resources to schools and the ways in which school personnel are managed (e.g., Hill, 2006; Strunk, 2012), and that they are associated with the ways in which districts allocate funding (Eberts, 1983; Eberts & Stone, 1984; Strunk, 2011) and with lower student achievement (Moe 2009; Strunk 2011; Strunk and McEachin 2011). However, because this research is all cross-sectional, there is little evidence about why and how contracts change over time, or about the causal impacts of CBAs on relevant outcomes. Only two studies examine the same districts’ CBAs in more than one time period. McDonnell and Pascal (1988) use a national sample of 151 CBAs taken from two time periods in the early1970s and 1980s. They show that very few CBAs change substantially between periods. Cowen and Fowles (2013) examine a single district’s CBA over a thirty year period and similarly conclude that the CBA has stayed largely the same over the three decades. Neither study examines how changes in policy, political or fiscal contexts may lead to changes in the content or restrictiveness of CBAs. This represents a critical gap in our knowledge given the current policy attention being given to CBAs in the courts, national discourse and state legislatures.

In this paper, we seek to better understand the extent to which CBAs change over time and respond to district and state contextual factors. We describe findings from research on the content and restrictiveness of CBAs in three states, California, Michigan and Washington. We examine the degree to which measures of overall CBA restrictiveness, and restrictiveness of provisions governing teacher policies and practices, are similar across states and change over time in each state. The cross-state longitudinal aspects of this study are both novel and especially interesting given that California was relatively static in terms of state reforms to teacher policies while Washington and particularly Michigan adopted major teacher policy reforms.

In each state, we use a census of CBAs across two periods that span the wave of teacher policy reforms that have occurred in the last decade. These CBAs are coded according to the methodology developed by Strunk and Reardon (2010) that allows us to categorize the restrictiveness of each school district’s CBA overall and in relevant sub-areas. This study is the first of which we know to assess how CBAs change in response to state initiatives.

Preliminary results suggest that CBAs in both states do change over the period under study, especially in areas affected by recent policy reforms such as teacher evaluation and the role of seniority in layoffs and within-district teacher transfers. Moreover, Michigan and Washington CBAs change more than those in California, suggesting that changes in state policy are indeed reflected in the local CBAs.

Authors

• Katharine Omenn Strunk, Michigan State University

• Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

• Joshua M. Cowen, Michigan State University

• Bradley Marianno, University of Nevada - Las Vegas

• Roddy Theobald, American Institutes for Research

• Tara Kilbride, Michigan State University