Collective Bargaining and the Student Bottom Line
Labour relations in North America’s school systems can be highly political, brutish, blamestorming affairs. Always in the middle are the hapless students who are often used as pawns.
Critics says collective bargaining raises the cost of education, blocks reform, protects incompetent teachers, and increases we-they tensions. Union supporters say bargaining empowers teachers and increases their input in policy decisions. But when you get right down to it, does collective bargaining have any impact on the academic performance of students?
It is a brave research question posed by Robert Carini of University of Louisville, Kentucky. In the Journal of Collective Negotiations, Carini writes that the “thin body of research” linking collective bargaining with academic outcomes is inconclusive and of “widely varying quality.”
As Carini points out, studies on bargaining often analyze only math gains or de-emphasize reading gains by combining math and reading gains into a composite score. In contrast, he used data from the U.S. National Education Longitudinal Study to see whether student gains on standardized math, reading, science, and history tests differed for students in public schools with and without collective bargaining.
His conclusion: collective bargaining is not negatively related to student achievement. Students in schools with and without collective bargaining showed comparable changes in
educational expectations between the eighth and tenth grades.
“Although there is mounting evidence that bargaining shapes the social organization of schools, these effects taken together do not appear to depress student achievement,” Carini writes. “There is evidence that teacher unions are more willing to be at the vanguard of reform than in the past, yet the degree to which unions oppose and effectively block reforms counter to their interests is still open to debate.”
Is Collective Bargaining Detrimental to Student Achievement? Evidence from a National Study; by Robert M. Carini; Journal of Collective Negotiations (2008, vol. 32 [3], 215-235)
Email me for a copy of this paper: Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com
