The impact of teacher collective bargaining laws on student achievement: evidence from a New Mexico natural experiment.

• Jurisdiction: United States
• Author: Lindy, Benjamin A.
• Date: 01 March 2011

NOTE CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. TEACHER COLLECTIVE BARGAINING LAWS II. THE NONEMPIRICAL LITERATURE ON TEACHER BARGAINING A. The "Teachers' Unions Are Terrible" Arguments B. The "Teachers' Unions Are Vital" Arguments III. THE EMPIRICAL LITERATURE ON TEACHER BARGAINING A. Cross-Sectional Comparisons and Endogeneity Problems B. Panel Data and Instrumental Variable Approaches IV. NEW MEXICO'S NATURAL EXPERIMENT A. Natural Experiment Studies B. Data C. Econometric Models D. Results E. Possible Limitations V. DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS A. Explaining the Core Findings B. Normative Arguments Against Mandatory Bargaining C. Policy Relevance CONCLUSION APPENDIX A APPENDIX B INTRODUCTION

An interest group called the "Center for Union Facts" ran a two-page advertisement in the New York Times in the spring of 2008. (1) It depicted a small boy hanging from a coat hook by his jacket as if hung there by a bully. The advertisement read: "The Biggest Bully In Schools? Teacher Unions. Teacher unions bully principals into keeping bad teachers, scare politicians who support school reform, and block efforts to pay great teachers higher pay. It's time to stand up to the bully." (2) The advertisement offered to give America's ten worst union-protected teachers $100,000 to resign, and it directed readers to a website where they could submit nominations. (3)

The group's advertisement is but a single example of the strong anti-teachers' union sentiment that appears in the mainstream media. (4) For years, this criticism has come primarily from conservatives. (5) More recently, however, tensions have developed between unions and liberals as well. Through its "Race to the Top" program, President Obama's Department of Education has encouraged state legislatures to pass laws that threaten core union values. (6) The program seeks, for example, to reward states that tie teacher evaluations in part to student performance on standardized tests. (7) Union leaders have publicly criticized the program, (8) led major campaigns to defeat responsive state laws, (9) and fought for language that subordinates the new policies to existing collective bargaining agreements. (10)

Why do teachers' unions occupy such a controversial place in discussions of American education policy? Teachers' unions exert tremendous power over the structure and operations of America's public schools. (11) In thirty-four states and the District of Columbia, teachers' unions can require school districts to engage in collective bargaining over a wide range of issues. (12) Those issues include teacher salaries, grievance and dismissal procedures, class sizes, the length of the school day and school year, the amount of free time that teachers have during the work day, transfer and layoff procedures, and even the number and duration of required after-school meetings. (13) Teachers' unions argue that the ability to bargain over these issues ensures fair treatment for America's teachers; union critics counter that the bargaining process advances the interests of teachers over the needs of students. (14) Disagreements over these and other issues have led to recent confrontations between districts and unions across the United States, including high-profile clashes in California, (15) Colorado, (16) Florida, (17) New York, (18) and the District of Columbia. (19)

As these confrontations multiply, it is troubling that there is remarkably little empirical evidence of the true impact of teacher bargaining on student achievement. Rigorous empirical work is crucial in public policy debates because often one's intuition about the effect of a policy turns out to be incorrect. (20) Unfortunately, the existing empirical literature on teacher bargaining suffers from a series of methodological flaws, and as a result it has produced inconsistent evidence. (21) Some studies find that teacher bargaining has a positive effect on student achievement, and some studies find the opposite. (22) Rather than clarifying the debate between union supporters and critics, the existing empirical literature has instead fueled both sides.

This Note provides a way forward by offering new and reliable empirical evidence of the causal impact of teacher bargaining on student achievement. It does so by exploiting a previously untapped natural experiment from New Mexico. Between 1993 and 1999, New Mexico--like most states--required school districts to enter into a formal collective bargaining process with a teachers' union once that union was properly recognized. (23) In 1999, however, the enabling piece of state legislation expired, and until 2003--when the legislature reinstated the law--school districts in New Mexico could refuse to bargain with teachers' unions. Through the use of panel data regressions with state and year fixed effects, this Note uses this set of legal changes to identify the causal impact of mandatory collective bargaining laws on student achievement. It finds that mandatory bargaining laws lead to an increase in students' SAT scores and a decrease in high school graduation rates. The laws appear to have no effect on per-pupil expenditures.

This Note proceeds as follows. Part I describes the relevant legal background on teacher collective bargaining and shows how state bargaining laws potentially affect student achievement. Part II reviews in greater depth the conflicting arguments that union supporters and union critics have made about teacher bargaining. Part III shows how methodological flaws in the existing empirical studies of teacher bargaining prevent those studies from clarifying the theoretical debates from Part II. Part IV describes the Note's empirical strategy and presents its core findings. Part V then discusses those findings along several dimensions. It uses interviews with local union and district leaders to suggest possible explanations for the results in Part IV. It also explores the normative implications of these findings and their relevance for contemporary debates over American school policy.

1. TEACHER COLLECTIVE BARGAINING LAWS

   Teachers' unions influence public school policy in large part through the collective bargaining process. (24) This Part reviews the state laws that establish collective bargaining for teachers and that govern its scope. It also shows how collective bargaining leads to contract provisions that potentially influence student achievement. These discussions provide important context for the arguments that union supporters and critics make about collective bargaining (discussed in Part II), and they help explain the significance of the legal changes New Mexico experienced in 1999 and 2003 (discussed in Part IV).

   As state government employees, public school teachers are exempt from federal labor laws. (25) For this reason, states have tremendous flexibility in shaping the collective bargaining rights of teachers. Some states have extensive bargaining regimes that mirror the federal system established under the National Labor Relations Act. (26) Other states impose powerful restrictions on public employee bargaining. For example, although the First Amendment protects the right of public school teachers to join a teachers' union, (27) states can ban teacher strikes (28) and even ban collective bargaining altogether. (29)

   Despite the diversity of legal regimes, one can usefully classify each state as falling into one of three categories. (30) The first category consists of "mandatory" states, where the law requires school districts to bargain collectively with a properly recognized teachers' union. (31) The second category consists of "permissive" states, where a district may choose whether or not to engage in collective bargaining. (32) The third category consists of "right-to-work" states, where the law expressly prohibits collective bargaining between a school district and a teachers' union. (33)

   Most states have mandatory bargaining regimes. (34) Borrowing heavily from federal labor law, these regimes typically involve three components: provisions for exclusive representation, an obligation to bargain in good faith, and impasse procedures. "Exclusive representation" refers to the inability of the school district to bargain with any employees other than the exclusive bargaining representative. (35) Attempts to bargain with subgroups of teachers--what some call "divide and conquer" strategies--are expressly illegal. (36) Under the "obligation to bargain in good faith," both the union and the school district must propose contract terms and do their best to reach compromises in areas of disagreement. (37) State agencies police this process. (38) Should those agencies find that unions or districts are guilty of bargaining in bad faith (because of a refusal to negotiate or the taking of too inflexible a position on a given issue), they can impose stiff penalties. (39) "Impasse procedures" typically involve nonbinding mediation or a factfinding process whereby a neutral third party publicly provides a set of terms that the third party believes to be fair under the circumstances. (40) The goal here is to impose pressure on the bargaining parties; a desire to "look[] good in the eyes of their respective constituencies" following the judgment of a neutral third party will in theory push both sides toward the most reasonable position on a contentious issue. (41)

   What provisions typically emerge from this process, and in what ways might they influence district operations? I already noted in the Introduction several types of common collective bargaining provisions. (42) Terms governing the length of the school day, the school calendar, class sizes, and the afterschool time of teachers all impose restrictions on how school districts allocate their budgets. If, for example, the contract requires class sizes to remain below a certain threshold, then the district may have to hire additional teachers even if it would rather put those same funds to a different...