Totally, this @bakerdphd.bsky.social paper is a big hit for our week on affirmative action in my undergrad schools and social inequality class

So what?

After Reagan’s firing of PATCO strikers, strikes/unions have struggled to make gains for workers

BUT times may be changing…

Teacher strikes have been a potent form of leverage for achieving compensation gains in the past 16 yrs

12/13

We don’t observe a $1K increase in PPE till year 4. When we look farther out small (+ & -) gains are well within the bounds of our estimates.

11/13

Are our results inconsistent with the literature on school spending? Not necessarily. SFR studies find achievement gains emerge slowly after sustained levels of higher spending.

10/13

Effects on students?

The typical strike has no effect on student achievement w/in 5 yrs—we can rule out very small positive or negative effects in this period.

Strikes lasting 10+ days cause math achievement to decline somewhat in the year of the strike and 1 year later.
9/13

Effects on working conditions?

Strikes cause pupil-teacher ratios (~class sizes) to decrease by ½ a student –also starting in yr 3. Strikes also increase expenditures on working conditions by 10%.

8/13

What are the effects on compensation?

Strikes cause avg teacher salaries and benefits to increase by ~$10,000/per teacher (8%) after 5 yrs. Big increases begin in yr 3 post-strike.

$$ is from new revenues, not reallocations

7/13

Most strikes are brief, with the modal strike lasting a single day. 65% of strikes ending in five days or less.

The median strike is 2 days.

6/13

We found 772 U.S. teacher strikes impacting ~11.5 million students, cancelling 3,403 days of school (48 million student days idle) over the past 16 years.
Compensation was a focus of 89% of strikes.
5/13

Economists used to study strikes a lot, but in the 80s the BLS stopped tracking strikes w/ less than 1K employees. A lot of strike research in the US stopped w/o data.

So, we created a dataset of teacher strikes by reviewing ~90k news articles/press releases

4/13

@MatthewAKraft @MP_Steinberg & I started studying teacher strikes 4+ yrs ago after the big #redfored strikes—we wondered do strikes achieve their goals?
🧵3/13

We’re starting a new school year when the state of the teaching profession is facing historic lows
AND strikes and other labor actions are on the rise 🏭📣🪧
www.nber.org/papers/w32386
🧵2/13

📢New @nberpubs w/ @matthewakraft.bsky.social & Matthew Steinberg

We document & examine 772 U.S. teacher strikes from 2007-23—strikes increase compensation & working conditions w/ little effect on achievement w/in 5 yrs. 10+ day strikes decrease math scores short term.
nber.org/papers/w32862

@edweek.bsky.social did a poll asking teachers/school admin what the "science of reading" is.

I can't say I expected agreement, but this is still pretty astounding

www.edweek.org/teaching-lea...

You and me both!

The Office of Title II hasn't produced those data, but we get a sense from education degree completers, who follow a similar pattern in overlapping years.

This is from IPEDS/HEGIS.

I should probably have a first post...so here's what I'm working on today

Revising/updating my working paper with @matthewakraft.bsky.social on the rise and fall of teaching profession: www.edworkingpapers.com/ai22-679

New teacher licenses still down (by ~100k relative to 2006) in Title II data