Teacher Labor Market Responses to Statewide Reform: Evidence From Michigan

Abstract

We examine the effect of Michigan’s 2011 reforms to teacher evaluation and tenure policies on teacher retention. Our data are drawn from administrative records containing the population of public school employees from 2005–2006 through 2014–2015. To identify the causal effects of these reforms on teacher attrition, we utilize a difference-in-differences (DD) strategy that compares the exit rates of teachers with the exit rates of other professional staff in the same school districts who were not affected by the policy changes. We find that, on average, Michigan’s teacher reforms had little impact on teacher attrition overall. However, further analyses provide strong evidence that early-career teachers assigned to hard-to-staff districts were more likely to exit post-reform.

The Effects of Teachers’ Unions on the Gender Pay Gap among U.S. Public School Teachers

“…The strength of unionization, however, provides no incentive for male teachers to consider a career change. The general findings of union effects on teacher attrition presented in Table 7 are consistent with recent studies which show that a decrease in union strength raises teacher turnover (Baron 2018; Biasi 2018; Brunner et al 2019; Han 2020).…”

Deurbanization and the Struggle to Sustain a Black Teaching Corps: Evidence From Michigan

“…These data (described further in the online Supplemental Appendix [available on the journal website]) include all traditional public and public charter schools and allow us to track school-by-grade-by-year longitudinal flows of teacher and student populations (but are not so precise as to confirm the race of students’ own-classroom teachers). The most recent data support analysis of prospective Black faculty after Michigan’s Race to the Top -era tenure and evaluation reforms (Brunner et al, 2019; Drake et al, 2019) and the political turmoil in many urban school districts caused by (now expired) state-ordered emergency management, school closures, and school reconstitution initiatives (Arsen & DeLuca, 2016; Kang, 2020). We use logistic regression to analyze patterns of hiring of new Black teachers by Michigan’s school districts with growing and declining student enrollment, evolving school-level student racial composition, and distributed rates of legacy Black faculty percentage.…”

“…State emergency managers effected significant change, intervening in teacher contracts and (especially in Detroit) closing and opening school campuses—part of a broader phenomenon of school closings within the state (Brummet, 2014). Fully 18% of the state’s Black teachers left after the 2009–2010 school year in concert with a teacher retirement incentive (Brunner et al, 2019). A package of reforms was passed in the summer of 2011 that included tenure and evaluation restrictions (Brunner et al, 2019; Drake et al, 2019) that have been linked to declines in new teacher formation (Kraft et al, 2019), but work within Michigan suggests only a moderate policy-induced increase in in-service exits in schools where Black teachers disproportionately work (Brunner et al, 2019).…”

“…Fully 18% of the state’s Black teachers left after the 2009–2010 school year in concert with a teacher retirement incentive (Brunner et al, 2019). A package of reforms was passed in the summer of 2011 that included tenure and evaluation restrictions (Brunner et al, 2019; Drake et al, 2019) that have been linked to declines in new teacher formation (Kraft et al, 2019), but work within Michigan suggests only a moderate policy-induced increase in in-service exits in schools where Black teachers disproportionately work (Brunner et al, 2019). Other work shows that Michigan’s Black teachers received greater numbers of low evaluation ratings than their same school White peers (including after conditioning both on prior receipt of a low rating and teacher value added scores) within the resultant high stakes evaluation regime, that receipt of low ratings is strongly associated with teacher exit, but that exits that can be strictly attributed to the evaluation policy (i.e., meeting the criteria for mandated removal) are few (Drake et al, 2019).…”

The effect of changes in public sector bargaining laws on teacher union membership

“…Recently, however, several states altered their long‐term stance regarding CB of public sector workers, offering researchers a fresh tool to analyse the causal impact of such legal and institutional changes in the public sector on various outcomes. For teachers, in particular, this has been extensively researched to examine consequences on outcomes of teachers and students (Han, 2020a; Han & Maloney, 2021; Baron, 2018; Biasi, 2021; Roth, 2019; Brunner et al., 2019).…”