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

Published in the American Educational Research Journal (AERJ)

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

Published in Education Finance and Policy (EFP)

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. 

Published in the Journal of Human Resources (JHR)

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

Published Open Access in Policy Studies Journal (PSJ)

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

The U.S. has witnessed a resurgence of labor activism, with teachers at the forefront. We examine how teacher strikes affect compensation, working conditions, and productivity with an original dataset of 772 teacher strikes generating 48 million student days idle between 2007 and 2023. Using an event study framework, we find that, on average, strikes increase compensation by 8% and lower pupil-teacher ratios by 0.5 students, driven by new state revenues. We find little evidence of sizable impacts on student achievement up to five years post-strike, though strikes lasting 10 or more days decrease math achievement in the short-term.

Collaborative project with Matthew Kraft and Matthew Steinberg

NBER Working Paper 

Strikes are inherently political, yet theories diverge on how they may affect politics. On the one hand, they are forms of protest that could mobilize allies or opponents by highlighting issues through picket lines and service disruptions. On the other hand, strikes could demobilize residents who perceive public officials as responsive to striking workers at the expense of ordinary voters. To examine this, we use an original, hand-collected dataset of teacher strikes from 2007-2020. We combine these data with voter turnout data from the National Neighborhood Data Archive (NaNDA) and the Cumulative Cooperative Election Study (CCES). We use a dynamic differences-in-differences (DiD) approach to find that teacher strikes decrease voter turnout, primarily among Republicans, by decreasing their support for striking worker demands and political efficacy. In contrast, strikes heighten the frequency with which Democrats engage with government and public affairs. 

Collaborative project with Leslie Finger and Hyesang Noh

Working paper provided on request

Recent high-profile reports of exploitative child labor in the United States raise questions about the state of child labor regulations. Despite the potential health, social, and educational detriments of child labor, little empirical work considers contemporary U.S. child labor policies. We develop an original state-by-year dataset systematically documenting 15 child labor policies from 2003-2024, summarize recent policy changes, and create an index of state-level child labor policy strength. We find that U.S. child labor policies are likely much weaker and more fragmented than most Americans expect. Washington, New York, and California currently hold the strongest child labor protections in the U.S., while Kansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee hold the weakest. Over half of states have policies that conflict with federal law. A third of states have made changes to their child labor policies in the past 20 years. Child labor has again become a contested policy area in the U.S.

Collaborative project with Ji Hyun Byeon, Lucy Sorensen, and Stephen B. Holt

Working paper provided on request

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.

This project will shed new light on labor dynamics in the American landscape, at a potentially pivotal moment in time. Child labor violations have increased by over 250% since 2015, and states are actively revisiting and, in some cases, weakening longstanding child labor protections. I will comprehensively examine the causes and the consequences of changing child labor changes to develop new knowledge regarding how they affect and interact with inequality in the present day. I hypothesize that child labor policies vary considerably across states and that such variations have a real impact on children’s lives. To the extent that child labor policies are becoming less restrictive, I predict that child labor rates and violations are also increasing, particularly for children from minoritized, lower income, or immigrant backgrounds. Additionally, I hypothesize that child labor protections have the capacity to reduce academic and health inequalities across race, income/wealth, and immigration status. This has critical policy implications as states actively consider both more and less restrictive child labor protections. Understanding the role of child labor regulation in shaping inequality in children’s health and academic outcomes is urgently necessary.

Collaborative project with Ji Hyun Byeon, Stephen Holt, and Lucy Sorensen

This study is the first project out of a broader effort to create a first-of-its-kind dataset of school board elections. This project will focus on three states: North Carolina, Washington State, and California, where we will estimate turnout in school board elections and examine the extent to which strikes affect school board election turnout. Teacher strikes may lead to the dissemination of knowledge about low levels of education spending with the public and encourage exposed residents to become more actively engaged in education politics. On the other hand, teacher strikes could frustrate “third parties” (e.g., parents, community members) when they disrupt the daily functioning of schools and deter them from participating in education politics. The disruptions caused by strikes could even provoke backlash from community members, resulting in the counter-mobilization of groups angry about school closures. In this paper, we plan to descriptively examine trends in voter turnout leading up to and after teacher strikes. We then plan to use a non-parametric DiD approach (event study) leveraging the variation in strikes across districts and over time. 

Collaborative project with Adam Shepardson, Leslie Finger, Josh Bleiberg, and Hyesang Noh

State takeovers of school districts typically involve dramatic changes to the workforce in the targeted school system and are often undertaken for the express purpose of improving a school system’s finances. However, little is known about how takeover affects education spending, particularly the distribution of funds across schools within districts. This has important implications for human resources because inequitable spending exacerbates teacher quality shortages for schools that serve marginalized students. We capitalize on a novel source of school-level education spending data for 2018–2019 to examine how takeover influences overall spending, equality of spending across schools within districts, and race-, ethnicity-, and class-based gaps in spending across schools. We do this for a national sample of 24 districts taken over between 2013 and 2019 matched to a set of untreated comparison districts with a high propensity for takeover. We find that state takeover is associated with higher levels of education spending, and that the greater funding promotes racial and ethnic fiscal equity but does not increase income-based school finance equity. Importantly, average increases in school spending are likely too small to substantially affect educational inequality. Therefore, takeover does not seem to be a sufficient mechanism for meaningfully mitigating within-district finance inequity.

Collaborative project with Joshua Bleiberg and Beth Schueler 

Published in the Journal of Education Human Resources

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