Poster #55 - Right-to-Work Laws and Teacher Turnover: A Case Study from Pennsylvania

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

In 2018, the United States Supreme Court ruled that public sector unions do not have the right to extract compulsory payments, often called agency fees, from the non-member workers that they represent in Janus v. AFSCME (Janus). This ruling is an example of a right-to-work (RTW) policy, and represented the first nationwide RTW policy in the United States. While previous studies have examined the effect of state-specific RTW policies on the teacher labor market, the extant literature has not addressed the impact of a more expansive, national RTW policy. My analysis fills this gap by examining the effect of Janus on public school teachers in a state that had no previously standing public sector RTW law.Using annual teacher rosters, data on school characteristics, and a difference in differences research design, my analysis identifies that Janus caused a 2.5 percentage point increase in the teacher turnover rate and was associated with a 5.5% reduction in teacher salary at traditional public schools in Pennsylvania when compared to charter schools in the state. I also find significant heterogeneity in the Janus effect across several teacher subgroups: tenure-eligible teachers experienced larger turnover effects than tenure-ineligible teachers (a 3.2 percentage point effect for experienced teachers compared to a nonsignificant -0.1 percentage point effect for inexperienced teachers), female teachers experienced larger turnover effects than male teachers (2.6 percentage points vs. 1.5 percentage points, respectively), and teachers with graduate degrees experienced larger turnover effects than those with baccalaureate degrees (3.6 percentage points vs. 1.9 percentage points, respectively). The higher-than-average effect on tenure-eligible teachers is a particularly concerning finding, considering that steep gains in teacher effectiveness are made in the early years of a teacher’s career. Future inquiry into this topic should examine the downstream effects of Janus on measures of school health, such as student achievement and school climate.

Author

• Christopher Johnston, American University
  Presenting Author