In the Janus v. AFCSME (2018) decision, the U.S. Supreme Court mandated that all public sector workers, including teachers, operate in a Right To Work (RTW) framework. In the years since, teachers’ unions have not experienced the mass exodus that some predicted, but should we expect them to? Using an original, historical dataset spanning 1943-2017, I examine the effect of prior RTW policies on teachers’ union membership and school finance. I find that RTW policies decrease teachers’ union density by roughly 25% and reduce educational expenditures by nearly $800 per pupil. Importantly, effects take roughly 10 years to clearly materialize. Additional analyses provide support for the notion that effects on school finance are driven by effects on union density.

Published in Educational Researcher

Verba, Schlozman, and Brady’s influential Civic Volunteerism Model suggests that organizations play a critical role in developing citizen political participation. Though unions are one of the few organizations focused on the political and economic well-being of the less advantaged in America, little is known about the processes and mechanisms by which they promote the political participation of workers. We use data from semi-structured interviews with teacher candidates for state office in the 2018 midterm elections to describe how their unions shaped their candidacies. Our qualitative approach allows us to “peer into the black box” of candidate emergence to detail the long-term and often hidden mechanisms that enable unions to support the political careers of their members and other workers. We argue that unions can act as “schools of democracy” by shaping member knowledge and skills, political efficacy, political identities, material support, opportunities for mobilization, and political capital. Results have implications for labor politics, political representation, and candidate emergence.

Collaborative project with Rebecca Jacobsen, and Annie A. Hemphill 

Published in Political Behavior

Educational policy research on teacher unionization in the United States has been dominated by two theoretical perspectives: rent-seeking and teacher voice. While bringing valuable insights to bear, these views have mutated into rigid and often ideologically charged alternatives with strong normative claims about teacher collective bargaining. Drawing from a political economy framework, this article advances a distinct theoretical perspective focusing on the progressive coalition building activities of teachers’ unions (i.e., organizing and mobilizing to promote the interests of working people in policymaking). This perspective resolves previous theoretical anomalies of union behavior; provides many new avenues for research; and highlights distinct considerations for the practice of teacher organizing.

Published in Educational Policy

COVID-19 shuttered schools across the United States, upending traditional approaches to education. We examine teachers’ experiences during emergency remote teaching in the spring of 2020 using responses to a working conditions survey from a sample of 7,841 teachers across 206 schools and 9 states. Teachers reported a range of challenges related to engaging students in remote learning and balancing their professional and personal responsibilities. Teachers in high-poverty and majority Black schools perceived these challenges to be the most severe, suggesting the pandemic further increased existing educational inequities. Using data from both pre-post and retrospective surveys, we find that the pandemic and pivot to emergency remote teaching resulted in a sudden, large drop in teachers’ sense of success. We also demonstrate how supportive working conditions in schools played a critical role in helping teachers to sustain their sense of success. Teachers were less likely to experience declines in their sense of success when they worked in schools with strong communication, targeted training, meaningful collaboration, fair expectations, and authentic recognition during the pandemic.

Collaborative project with Matthew A. Kraft and Nicole S. Simon

Published in the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness

Working Paper Here

Although the Janus v. AFCSME (2018) decision fundamentally changed the institutional context for U.S. teachers’ unions by placing all public school teachers in a “Right to Work” (RTW) framework, little research exists to conceptualize the effects of such policies that hinder unionization. To fill this gap, I exploit the different timing across states in the passage of RTW policies in a differences-in-differences framework to identify how exposure to a RTW policy affects students, teachers, and education policymaking. I find that RTW policies lead to declines in teachers’ union power, but contrary to what many union critics have argued, I find that efforts to weaken unions did not result in political opportunities for education reforms nor did they improve student achievement outcomes.

Published in Economics of Education Review

Working Paper Here

Over the past several decades large philanthropies have adopted aggressive approaches to education reform that scholars have labeled venture philanthropy. These efforts focused on broad changes to schooling and education policy, borrowing techniques from the venture capital world. But many foundations have recently become convinced that market forces and macro-level policymaking alone cannot drive educational improvement, particularly in areas related to classroom teaching and learning. In response, foundations have begun to design their own instructional innovations and identify providers to implement them. This paper interprets these recent efforts as early evidence of a distinct adaptation in the evolving role of philanthropies, which we dub design philanthropy. Although this approach represents an attempt by foundations to simultaneously increase democratic engagement, directly influence the instructional core, and spur educational innovation, it poses new risks for coherence, scalability, and sustainability in education policymaking. 

Collaborative project with Shani S. Bretas and Douglas Ready

Published in Educational Policy

Working Paper Here

Teacher strikes have gained national attention with the “#RedforEd” movement. Such strikes are polarizing events that could serve to elevate education as a political priority or cast education politics in a negative light. We investigate this empirically by collecting original panel data on U.S. teacher strikes, which we link to congressional election campaign advertisements. Election ads provide a useful window into political discourse because they are costly to sponsors, consequential for voter behavior, and predictive of future legislative agendas. Using a differences-in-differences framework, we find that teacher strikes dramatically increase education issue salience, with impacts concentrated among positively-framed ads. Effects are driven by strikes lasting only a few days and occurring in battleground areas with highly-contested elections.

Collaborative project with Matthew A. Kraft

Working paper here. 

Narrative storytelling surrounds us. Narratives are especially salient in politics, as policy problems do not simply exist, but are actively created through the stories policy actors tell. Scholars introduced the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to create a generalized framework for studying how policy actors use storytelling strategically to influence policy. While NPF scholarship has expanded greatly since its introduction in 2010, scholars have struggled to operationalize and use the narrative element plot. We propose an inductive approach to identifying plots, so that future NPF scholarship can address plots with greater consistency. In doing so, we introduce the concept of both narrow and grand plots. This work also expands upon previous experimental studies by taking the NPF into the real world. We use the recent rise of Critical Race Theory in policy debates as an empirical example with a Michigan statewide survey fielded late 2021. We demonstrate that there was varied exposure to the narrative plots and that these plots influenced individuals differently based on their individual characteristics. We also introduce and test the concept of narrative spillover, which examines how hearing narratives about one policy can also influence other related policy beliefs, including macrolevel beliefs about institutions and culture.

Collaborative project with Ariell Bertrand and Rebecca Jacobsen

Schools today face hiring and retention challenges that have the potential to exacerbate preexisting inequities in schooling. The global pandemic has only increased the need for a more comprehensive understanding of teacher supply, one that encompasses both sociopolitical processes that shape the incentives and behaviors of market actors, as well as economic processes that shape perceptions of teacher status. Relevant literature suggests that salary is a critical element for understanding teacher supply but alone cannot explain changes over time. Deep consideration of the prestige of the teaching profession is also required. We emphasize four interrelated constructs of teacher prestige: (1) the public perception of teacher prestige, (2) teachers’ perception of teacher prestige, (3) high school and college interest in teaching, and (4) new teacher supply. Our theoretical approach acknowledges that these constructs interact with each other and are shaped by underlying sociopolitical and economic dynamics in complex and overlapping ways. We combine several longitudinal data sources (e.g., higher education surveys, public opinion polls, the Schools and Staffing Survey, and Title II data) to describe historical developments in teacher prestige over the past half century. 

Collaborative project with Matthew A. Kraft

Working Paper Here

A major challenge for states is determining how to support lower levels of government experiencing fiscal or performance challenges without incentivizing future financial mismanagement. Though classical liberal economics tradition argues that decentralization encourages fiscal responsibility, more recent work on fiscal federalism suggests that decentralization could instead encourage fiscal irresponsibility. In this paper, we study one key example of political centralization in the context of public education—state takeovers of local school districts—and its impact on the fiscal condition of the targeted districts. Using event study methods, we find takeovers from 1990 to 2019 increased annual school spending by roughly $2,000 per pupil after five years, leading to improvements in financial condition. Further examination of mechanisms suggests that increased funding was used for employee benefits and debt retirement and came primarily from state sources. The effects on spending were larger when accompanied by accountability mechanisms, and when they occurred in larger districts and districts with higher baseline debt levels. Takeover was less impactful for districts serving higher concentrations of Black students.

Collaborative project with Joshua Bleiberg and Beth E. Schueler

Working Paper Here

Who wins when teachers strike? Theory suggests strikes might benefit teachers at the expense of students who lose valuable instructional time. On the other hand, strikes might generate improved conditions for both teaching and learning that outweigh the costs of the strike. Answering this is increasingly important in wake of recent strikes across the country. In this study, we systematically document all of the teacher strikes that occurred nationally between the 2007-08 to 2021-22 academic years. Preliminary analytical findings suggest that individual teacher strikes lead to an immediate but slight decline in student achievement in the year of the strike, but then a small and sustained increase in student achievement. Results are driven by increases in instructional salaries and benefits to teachers. 

This research contributes new knowledge about the consequences of teacher strikes for students at a critical moment in time when teacher activism has been on the rise. We provide the first comprehensive survey of teacher strikes nationally over the preceding decade along with causal estimates of the impacts of teacher strikes on student achievement. This research informs ongoing public debates amongst policymakers and practitioners around the consequences of teacher strikes for student and teacher outcomes. 

Manuscript in progress

Policy narratives around social issues have become increasingly nationalized and powerful. Some of these narratives are so powerful that they result in “narrative spillover” that shapes not only beliefs on specific policy issues, but also broader trust in public institutions However, not all policy narratives result in spillover. In this study, we theorize that there are two factors that contribute significantly to a policy narrative spilling over into how the public views the public institution invoked in the narrative: (1) invoking racial identity politics, (2) using a ‘slash and burn’ style of rhetoric. When both of these factors are present, we hypothesize that narratives can become so powerful that they chip away at our faith in public institutions and exacerbate polarization in the electorate. We test this using a set of two survey experiments that are currently in progress.

Collaborative project with Ariell Bertrand and Rebecca Jacobsen.

Manuscript in progress

Recently, teacher strikes in the US have increased rapidly, but little is known about their effects. In theory, teacher strikes could affect political attitudes and voting behavior by highlighting issues and mobilizing residents through protest mechanisms including picket lines and service disruptions. More specifically, teacher strikes may affect attitudes and beliefs about education spending by sharing knowledge about low levels of education spending with the public and, in doing so, change beliefs about whether more spending in public education is needed (Hertel-Fernandez, Naidu, & Reich, 2020). On the other hand, teacher strikes could frustrate third parties (e.g., parents and other community members) when they disrupt daily functioning (Lipsky, 1968). In this process, strikes may lead the public to see public education as dysfunctional and therefore be less willing to support spending increases. Additionally, strikes may affect voting behavior by mobilizing teachers, their allies, and their opponents to become more involved in politics (Lyon, Hemphill, & Jacobsen, 2022). In doing so, strikes may motivate residents that are exposed to teacher strikes to vote in elections, thus increasing voter turnout. To the extent that strikes change these attitudes and behaviors, they could  reshape the politics of education and broader political activity in areas encompassing striking districts.  

In this paper, we estimate the political impacts of teachers’ strikes, focusing specifically on public support for education spending and voter turnout. We use a hand-collected dataset of teacher strikes from 2007-2022 combined with political behavior data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). We connect our original teacher strike data to CCES respondents at the zip code level such that we can estimate whether an individual respondent was exposed to a teacher strike in their district within a given year. We then use an event study approach leveraging the variation in strikes across districts and over time. We also examine whether the effects of strikes vary depending on whether the respondent is a union member or a parent, as well as their party identification. 

Collaborative project with Leslie Finger and Hyesang Noh

Manuscript in progress