Inconvenient Truth? Do Collective Bargaining Agreements Help Explain the Mobility of Teachers within School Districts?

Abstract

We utilize detailed teacher‐level longitudinal data from Washington State to investigate patterns of teacher mobility in districts with different collective bargaining agreement (CBA) transfer provisions. Specifically, we estimate the log odds that teachers of varying experience and effectiveness levels transfer out of their schools to other schools in the district in Washington kindergarten through 12th grade (K‐12) public schools. We find little consistent evidence relating voluntary transfer provisions in CBAs to patterns in teacher mobility, but do find evidence that patterns in within‐district mobility by teacher experience and effectiveness vary between districts that do not use seniority in involuntary transfer decisions and those that use seniority as a tiebreaker or the only factor in these moves. In models that consider teacher experience, the interaction between teacher experience and school disadvantage in teacher transfer decisions is more extreme in districts with strong involuntary seniority transfer protections; novice teachers are even more likely to stay in disadvantaged schools, and veteran teachers are even more likely to leave disadvantaged schools. On the other hand, models that consider value‐added measures of teacher effectiveness suggest that more effective teachers are less likely to leave disadvantaged schools in districts that do use seniority in involuntary transfer decisions, that is, seniority transfer provisions could actually make the distribution of output‐based measures of quality more equitable. Taken together, these results suggest that seniority transfer provisions may have differential impacts on the distributions of teacher experience and effectiveness.

Has It Always Been This Way? Tracing the Evolution of Teacher Quality Gaps in U.S. Public Schools

“…Within-district sorting also contributes to TQGs far more in North Carolina than in Washington, across all measures of teacher quality we consider. This is important because while prior work in Washington suggests that seniority transfer provisions in CBAs may be an important contributor to within-district inequities in teacher quality (Goldhaber, Lavery, et al, 2016), districts in North Carolina are not bound by collectively bargained personnel laws yet appear to have even more within-district inequity.…”

Crossing the Border? Exploring the Cross-State Mobility of the Teacher Workforce

“…Yet while there is some empirical evidence on how seniority transfer provisions in collective bargaining agreements may affect within-and between-district mobility (Anzia & Moe, 2014; Cohen-Vogel, Feng, & Osborne-Lampkin, 2013; Goldhaber, Lavery, & Theobald, 2015;Koski & Horng, 2007), to our knowledge, there is no evidence on whether they influence cross-state teacher mobility. 1 An inhibitor of cross-state mobility in the teacher labor market that has received some empirical attention in the literature is the structure of teacher pensions.…”

Taking Their First Steps: The Distribution of New Teachers in School and Classroom Contexts and Implications for Teacher Effectiveness

“…Moreover, when teachers transfer, they often transfer into schools with larger shares of same-race students (e.g., Hanushek & Rivkin, 2007; Sun, 2018). Racial congruence between teachers and their schools may thus be higher among teachers with more experience, either because more experienced teachers have had more opportunities to sort into homophilic environments or because seniority often comes with greater transfer rights under local CBAs (e.g., Goldhaber, Lavery, & Theobald, 2016).…”