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A key attribute that is NOT associated with successful student outcomes or efficient resource utilization is my perennial whipping boy, teachers' unions.
(It's at this point that any unionized public school teachers should promptly hit the "ignore" button on my profile. I can guarantee: you will vehemently dislike me, unless you are a passionate educator who feels held back by the teamsters around him/her.)
;tldr, unionization is associated with higher district expenditures, particularly on (tenured) teacher salaries, lower high school graduation rates, neutral to lower academic achievement, and lower graduate earnings (particularly among visible minority males) in the long run. While conventional research suggests that, across unionized and non-unionized populations in aggregate, higher teacher salaries produce better quality teachers, the mere presence of unions undoes this effect! Unionization also fosters greater inter-district competition for education resources, and penalizes smaller/less affluent districts.
If you want to get into the nitty gritty, let's start with the usual political arguments we hear from teacher's unions, and discuss them each in turn...
[1] The effect of collective bargaining is to increase resources available to students.
Cowen and Strunk (2015), "generally find that the preponderance of empirical evidence suggests that teacher unionization and union strength are associated with increases in district expenditures and teacher salaries, particularly salaries for experienced teachers."
Moreover, they state that, "The empirical patterns are consistent with a rent-seeking hypothesis." In other words, premium pricing on salaries as an additional wage-based profit, not funds directed to infrastructure or non-salary expenditures.
Hoxby (1996) finds "that teachers' unions increase school inputs but reduce productivity sufficiently to have a negative overall effect on student performance. Union effects are magnified where schools have market power."
Rose and Stonstelie (2010) determine that larger school districts are associated with a greater degree of unionization in California. "Teachers’ salaries rise and the ratio of teachers per pupil falls with increasing district size." Yes, you read that right: unions actually increase class sizes AND cost more. Great bargain, that.
[2] Higher union salaries attract more qualified teachers.
Figlio (2002) studies the association between teacher salary, unionization, graduation from selective colleges, and university studies in the subject taught. Higher pay among non-unionized schools does carry this relationship, but this relationship does not hold for unionized schools.
West and Mykerezi (2011) reinforces the idea that teacher collective bargaining is profit-seeking and "unions tend to encourage teacher bonuses that are based on additional qualifications or duties, but discourage bonuses that directly reward improved student test scores."
The research seems to suggest that unionized environments do not attract objectively more qualified candidates, but do drive post-university credentialing as a key factor in compensation policy.
Note that there is ample evidence that higher teacher pay attracts higher quality teacher candidates, reduces teacher mobility, and contributes to better student outcomes. Note that this is blunted in unionized environments! Isn't that telling? Unions actually detract from benefits that would otherwise occur in non-unionized environments.
Lovenheim and Willen (2018) find damning evidence of sustained negative effects on earning power and skills development among students who attend K-12 in a unionized system, with minority males most adversely affected.
"We find robust evidence that exposure to teacher collective bargaining laws worsens the future labor market outcomes of men: in the first 10 years after passage of a duty-to-bargain law, male earnings decline by $2,134 (or 3.93%) per year and hours worked decrease by 0.42 hours per week. The earnings estimates for men indicate that teacher collective bargaining reduces earnings by $213.8 billion in the US annually. We also find evidence of lower male employment rates, which is driven by lower labor force participation. Exposure to collective bargaining laws leads to reductions in the skill levels of the occupations into which male workers sort as well. Effects are largest among black and Hispanic men... we demonstrate that collective bargaining laws lead to reductions in measured non-cognitive skills among young men."
Hall et al. (2016) study the impact of collective bargaining agreements on the proportion of ninth graders passing the state's math proficiency exam. In Ohio school districts, the length of a union’s collective bargaining agreement was linked to lower math scores. The authors state, “It would seem that more stringent negotiations lead to less productive education production."
Cowen and Strunk (2015) find that higher unionized teacher pay is not associated with the lift in academic performance we would hope is achieved. The authors state, "The evidence for union-related differences in student outcomes is mixed, but suggestive of insignificant or modestly negative union effects."
Brunner et al (2020) assess the impact of school finance reforms and intergovernmental transfer regimes on a host of student factors. In more unionized states, increases in funding tend to increase average teacher compensation, but do not reduce class sizes, suggesting the benefits accrue to teachers. Moreover, larger union districts bargain away resources and reduce new teacher hiring in smaller, less well-resourced districts, magnifying inequality by district size.
"We should therefore expect to find greater class size reductions in states with stronger teachers' unions if unions do not alter the allocation of school resources between teacher hiring and raising teacher salaries. On the contrary, we find no statistically significant difference in the effect on class size by teachers' union power. If anything, there is suggestive evidence that there was less of a class size reduction in the stronger union states by 0.144 pupils (standard error of 0.118), suggesting that unions alter the allocation of resources away from teacher hiring."
"Furthermore, the school spending in strong teachers' union states was allocated more toward increasing teacher salaries, while districts in weaker teachers' union states spent the money primarily on hiring new teachers."
[4] Teachers need collective bargaining agreements to be compensated fairly.
This appears to be untrue in the United States, though higher teacher salaries in non-unionized settings would be beneficial (on net) to students. This argument is offensively untrue in Canada.
Median teacher wages in the United States are much lower than in Canada - I was quite surprised by just how much. When I benchmarked posted full-time teacher salaries for all the districts in Canada, a teacher with 10 years of experience in 2016 - depending on age - is between the 80th and 90th percentile among individual incomes, or about $84,200 CAD.
However, it looks like Canadian teachers often pro rate their salary and work fewer hours than full time, in addition to not working in the summers. Average elementary + secondary teachers salaries are $60,744, suggesting that Canadian teachers work about 72% of a full-time load. Because teacher benefits in Canada - from my research- account for an additional 15-20% of compensation when you factor in benefits, this is an extremely inefficient and expensive way to amortize fixed labour costs over work hours. I would expect Canadian data on teacher productivity (weighted by income) would be much lower than in the US.
As does the National Centre for Education Statistics, which shows that median teacher salaries in the US in 2016-17 were $58,950, approximately the 55th percentile, roughly on par with average earnings for Americans with a bachelor's degree.
So the take-away here is that teachers are paid commensurate to their level of education and are on-track for population-wide norms for bachelors' degree holders in the US. Canadian teachers earn a significant premium over US teachers, and appear (based on actual vs posted salary data) to only work 72% of the time, yet collect full-time benefits.
In Canada, this speaks to excessively high unionized teacher salaries creating a surplus of teachers, and well below-average teacher income among non-tenured / itinerant teachers. This is the same effect we see of unions magnifying the receipt of increased salaries at the top of the teacher salary table, and reducing hiring.
