Few things have baffled education policy researchers in the United States more than public school teachers’ strikes, driven by educators at the forefront of a resurgence of labor activism. However, nationwide union membership continues to grow to rejectAbout one in five union members in the United States is a public school teacher — and theirs high-profile, disruptive Strikes generate significant media attention and public debate.
But do these strikes work? Do they provide benefits for workers? Do they help or hurt students academically?
Answering this question has been challenging, largely due to the lack of centralized data that scholars can use to analyze strikes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics used to keep track of all strikes and work stoppages across the country, but since its budget cuts in the early 1980s, the agency has only tracked strikes involving more than 1,000 employees. Given that 97 percent of US school districts employ fewer than 1,000 teachers, most teacher strikes are not federally documented.
Now, for the first time, researchers Melissa Arnold Lyon University at Albany, Matthew Craft Matthew Steinberg of Brown University and the Education Group speed up has compiled a novel dataset to answer these questions, providing the first credible estimates of the impact of US teacher strikes.
Their data set — which covers 772 teacher strikes across 610 school districts in 27 states between 2007-2023 — took four years to compile. Three co-authors, and seven additional research assistants, reviewed more than 90,000 news articles to plug gaps in national data. Their paper, which will be published tomorrow, provides information on the causes and consequences of teacher strikes in America and suggests that they will be a powerful tool for teachers to improve their working conditions.
Teachers’ strikes lead to significant wage increases on average, regardless of length
After all, teacher strikes are not common in the United States, nor are long layoffs. The median number of strikes per year in the 16-year study was 12.5, with the typical strike lasting just one day. 65 percent of strikes ended in five days or less. Their longest marked strike was 34 days in 2013 in Strongsville, Ohio.
About 90 percent of the teacher strikes identified involved teachers calling for higher pay or increased benefits, and the researchers found that, on average, the strikes were successful in delivering those gains. Specifically, a strike caused average compensation to increase by 3 percent (or $2,000 per teacher) one year after the strike, reaching 8 percent, or $10,000, five years after the strike.
More than half of the strikes also called for better working conditions, such as lower class sizes or increased 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 decreased by 3.2 percent and spending on paying non-teaching staff increased by 7 percent in the third year after the strike.
Importantly, the new spending on compensation and working conditions did not result from changes in existing funding, but primarily from increases in overall education spending from the state level.
That these strikes were effective is remarkable, especially since labor strikes as a whole Not added including increases in wages, hours or benefits since the 1980s. The study’s authors suggest that strikes among public school teachers may be a more “high-leverage bargaining tactic” than in other unionized fields because teachers can be replaced less easily by non-unionized workers or technology automation.
Perhaps surprisingly, the researchers find no relationship between whether the strike is short or long in terms of impact on teacher pay.
Leon of the University at Albany thinks part of why teachers can be so successful in achieving such significant increases is because teacher strikes can send public signals that other labor strikes often cannot.
“Since education is such an important industry, even a one-day strike can have a big impact,” he told me. “The media will pick it up, people will pay attention and parents will be inconvenienced. You have this built-in mechanism for attracting attention that other forms of protest don’t.” Another study he co-authored with Kraft Earlier this year it found that teachers were more than twice as likely to mention education in US congressional political ads, underscoring their power in signaling the need for educational change.
Students did not suffer academically due to the strike
Previous research on teacher strikes Argentina, CanadaAnd BelgiumWhere work stoppages are longer, teacher strikes have been found to have larger negative effects on student achievement. (In the Argentine study, the average student lost 88 school days.)
In contrast, the researchers found no evidence that US teacher strikes, which are much shorter, affect student reading or math achievement in the year or five years after the strike. Although US strikes lasting two or more weeks negatively affected math achievement in both the year of the strike and the year after, scores rebounded for students afterward.
In fact, Lyon said they can’t deny that brief teacher strikes have actually increased student learning over time, given the increase in school costs associated with them. A A recent influential meta-analysis School Finance found that increasing operating expenses by $1,000 per student over four years helped student learning.
It is possible that higher wages may reduce teacher absenteeism, or the need to work a second job, thereby improving performance in the classroom. Still, Lyon explained, it’s also possible that increased spending on teachers won’t lead to higher student test scores, if wage gains go primarily to more experienced teachers or to pensions, or if teachers already maximized their effort before the strike.
Strikes were more frequent in conservative, labor-friendly areas
Overall, the researchers found that teacher union density declined more sharply than previously recognized. According to federal data, 85 percent of public school teachers reported being in a union in 1990, dropping to 79 percent in 1999 and then 68 percent by 2020.
“As a student of unions, that statistic alone is still pretty amazing to me,” Lyon said. “And it came from the feds School and Staffing SurveyThat’s one of our best data sources.” Tracking teacher union membership can be complicated because of mergers, and because two national unions — the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association — include non-teaching and retired teachers in their ranks. Still declining, the private sector While 68 percent dwarf Only 10 percent Workers are in unions.
Roughly 35 states have laws that either expressly prohibit or effectively prohibit teacher strikes, but those laws have not prevented teachers from organizing labor stoppages. (Almost every state in the #RedforEd teacher strike has banned teacher strikes since 2018 and 2019 — including Arizona, Kentucky, West Virginia and Oklahoma.)
In compiling their data set, Lyon, Kraft, and Steinberg include both legal strikes and illegal work stoppages, including mass walkouts, “sick-outs” (when teachers call in sick), or so-called “wildcat strikes.” (When teachers go on strike without the support of union leadership).
Perhaps counterintuitively, they found that strikes were more common in more conservative, labor-hostile states, which they attributed to the larger coordinated strikes across most districts that occurred more often in those places. Individual district strikes were more likely to occur in liberal areas, where such actions are legal
Teacher revolts over the past decade have helped raise support from parents and the wider public, who Report on survey support Teachers organize and for increased teacher pay. The percentage of the public who see teacher unions as a positive influence on schools rose from 32 percent in 2013 to 43 percent in 2019According to Education Next polling. A majority of the US public supports teachers Right to strikeWhich suggests that educators may feel comfortable moving forward using this strategy.
