Teachers' Union Contracts and the Productive Efficiency of School Districts: Longitudinal Evidence From California

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

Abstract

Whether teachers’ unions help or harm schools has long been a topic of debate. The primary means through which teachers’ unions impact schools is the collective bargaining agreement (CBA, or contract) that local unions negotiate with district administrators. These CBAs dictate most facets of school and district operations, and govern the interactions between teachers, students, and administrators (Eberts, 2007). The existing literature that examines the impacts of CBAs finds that stronger CBAs – those that constrain administrators’ actions to a greater extent – are associated with both higher district expenditures and lower student achievement (Eberts & Stone, 1987; Moe, 2009; Strunk, 2011; Strunk & McEachin, 2011). This suggests that stronger CBAs may lead to inefficiency in school district operations, but little research has empirically examined district spending efficiency directly.

In this paper we combine a longitudinal dataset of measures of CBA strength with measures of district resource allocation and student achievement. We generate the measures of CBA strength from approximately 500 California school districts through the use of a partial independence item response model (see Strunk & Reardon (2010) for a review), obtaining measures for the CBAs in place in the 2005-6, 2008-9, 2011-12 and 2014-15 school years. This allows us to explore changes in in CBAs over time as well as the relationships between CBA strength and 1) district resource allocation, 2) student achievement, 3) districts’ productive efficiency. Our measures of California district resource allocation are taken from the state’s public finance dataset and include not only districts’ total per-pupil expenditures and but also subsets of expenditures allocated towards specific types of instruction, compensation, materials, and pupil services. Achievement data (average achievement on ELA and math achievement tests and the proportion of students who achieve proficiency on these tests) are also retrieved from publicly available data spanning the 2004-5 through 2015-16 school years. We then follow Lavigne et al. (2017) to construct several measures of efficiency, or performance-to-expenditure ratios. We model districts’ productive efficiency as a function of CBA strength and a set of district characteristics with district and year fixed effects, and incorporate specification checks that account for the potential impacts of the Great Recession, changes to the California school funding formula, and legal challenges to teachers’ unions in the state (e.g., Vergara vs. California).

We find that CBAs have become steadily more restrictive in California over the last decade, though this appears not to be driven by economic factors or by the Vergara lawsuit. Preliminary results suggest that, once we account for district and year fixed effects, CBA strength does not affect student achievement. However, CBA strength does impact the ways in which districts allocate their resources, causing districts to spend more overall, driven by increased expenditures on salaries (for both teachers and administrators). Unsurprisingly, then, that we find that districts with stronger CBAs are less efficient in their spending. These results have important policy implications for the many states that have implemented or are considering implementing restrictions to the scope of teachers’ collective bargaining rights.

Authors

• Paul Bruno, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Katharine Omenn Strunk, Michigan State University

• Bradley Marianno, University of Nevada - Las Vegas