Teacher strikes are effective in increasing wages, working conditions, study finds

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A detailed study of more than 770 teacher strikes in the United States between 2007 and 2023 found that the strikes benefit teachers and classrooms, and have no measurable impact on students.

Melissa Arnold Lyon, an assistant professor of public policy at Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, was the lead author of the study, "The Causes and Consequences of U.S. Teacher Strikes," published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The study looked at how strikes affect public school teacher wages, working conditions and productivity, as well as the reasons behind the strikes. The authors found that 89% of strikes were in part for higher wages and more than 50% were for improved conditions such as lower class size and increases in support staff.

And the strikes largely work. Teacher pay rose on average by 8% by the fifth year after a strike; class sizes went down and per-student spending went up; and school districts spent more on student support staff such as nurses and social workers.

"Despite legal restrictions in many states, teacher strikes have proven to be powerful tools for advancing worker interests, contrasting sharply with the decline in strike effectiveness in the 1980s and 1990s," Lyon said, noting that people had "written off the effectiveness of strikes since Reagan fired thousands of striking air traffic controllers in 1981. However, this research shows that in the past 16 years teacher strikes have been potent forms of leverage for achieving compensation gains in the public sector."

The study says that teacher strikes have impacted roughly 11.5 million students, leading to the cancelation of a total of 3,403 days of school (48 million student days idle) over the past 16 years.

Even so, the researchers found "no evidence of sizable positive or negative effects of strikes on students." For strikes that lasted longer than two weeks, there was a slight decline in math achievement, but that was made up within a year. And most U.S. teacher strikes are short—two out of three ended in five days or less.

Co-authors of the study were Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University, and Matthew Steinberg, an education economist who is director of research and evaluation at Accelerate, a nonprofit that studies strategies to improve student learning.

Lyon, who studies educational policy, including inequality, governance and teacher politics and policy, is on leave from the University this year on a Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Academy of Education.

This study complements her past work, soon to be published in the American Educational Research Journal, demonstrating that the teaching profession is facing historic lows across multiple dimensions of societal prestige, student interest, teacher preparation and job satisfaction.

This study comes at a critical moment, at the beginning of a new school year with the teaching profession confronting unprecedented challenges and Americans witnessing a surge in strikes, partly spurred by large-scale teacher strikes in 2018.

More information: Melissa Arnold Lyon et al, The Causes and Consequences of U.S. Teacher Strikes, National Bureau of Economic Research (2024). DOI: 10.3386/w32862

Journal information: American Educational Research Journal

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