Teacher Strikes Help Everyone Who Matters
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Their data set — which covers 772 teacher strikes across 610 school districts in 27 states between 2007-2023 — took four years to compile. The three co-authors, plus seven additional research assistants, reviewed over 90,000 news articles to plug the gaps in national data. Their NBER working paper, published on Monday, provides revealing information about the causes and consequences of teacher strikes in America, and suggests they remain a potent tool for educators to improve their working conditions.
Almost 90 percent of the teacher strikes identified involved educators calling for higher salaries or increased benefits, and the researchers found that, on average, strikes were successful in delivering those gains. Specifically, the strikes caused average compensation to increase by 3 percent (or $2,000 per teacher) one year after the strike, reaching 8 percent, or $10,000 per teacher, five years out from the strike.
More than half of strikes also called for improved working conditions, such as lower class sizes or increased spending on school facilities and non-instructional staff like nurses. The researchers found that strikes were also effective in this regard, as pupil-teacher ratios fell by 3.2 percent and there was a 7 percent increase in spending dedicated to paying non-instructional staff by the third year after a strike.
Importantly, the new spending on compensation and working conditions did not come from shuffling existing funds, but from increasing overall education spending, primarily from the state level.
That these strikes were effective is notable, particularly since labor strikes overall have not been associated with increases in wages, hours, or benefits since the 1980s. The study authors suggest strikes among public school teachers may be a more “high-leverage negotiating tactic” than other unionized fields because teachers can be less easily replaced by non-unionized workers or tech automation.
Perhaps surprisingly, the researchers find no relationship between whether a strike is short or long in terms of the effect it has on teacher salary.
Now, if teachers’ strikes did have a slight impact on student outcomes, I’d probably live with that, but it’s better to know that the evidence suggests students lose nothing at all.
In contrast, the researchers find no evidence that US teacher strikes, which are much shorter, affected reading or math achievement for students in the year of the strike, or in the five years after. While 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 after that.
In fact, Lyon said they could not rule out that the brief teacher strikes actually boosted student learning over time, given the increased school spending associated with them. A recent influential meta-analysis on school finance found that increasing operational spending by $1,000 per student for four years helped student learning.
It’s possible higher wages could reduce teacher burnout, or the need to work second jobs, leading to improved performance in the classroom. Still, Lyon explained, it’s also possible that increased spending on teachers would not lead to higher student test scores, if wage gains went primarily to more experienced teachers, or to pensions, or if teachers were already maximizing their effort before the strike.
Right–the question is, would you rather your teacher be grading your kid’s work and getting a good night’s sleep or working the evenings as an Uber driver? A few days of work stoppage isn’t going to mean anything compared to the positives of your kid’s teacher actually being ready to do their job.
Basically, teachers should strike more.