Labor Strife in Public Schools: Does it Affect Education Production?

Last school year, teachers or employees from fourteen Pennsylvania public school districts went on strike. In Pennsylvania, as in eight other states, strikes are a legal and regulated part of collective bargaining, a process in which, every few years, teachers’ unions and local school boards meet to agree upon pay, benefits, and working conditions. Theory and empirical evidence from manufacturing (Kleiner, Leonard & Pilarski [1999]; Mas [2007]; Krueger & Mas [2003]) and the service sector (Mas [2006]) tell us that labor strife causes a decrease in employee productivity, but there have been no studies exploring whether the relationship between labor strife and teacher productivity can be measured empirically. The contribution of this paper to the literature is to document whether the same relationship that exists in firms, between production and labor strife, exists in public schools, between education production and teachers’ labor disputes

Testing 1,2,3: An Analysis of 4Sight in Pennsylvania

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of a battery of formative assessments, 4Sight, which are broadly aligned with annual assessments required by NCLB. These formative assessments are designed to provide teachers with feedback on student performance throughout the year in order to raise end of year student test scores. Methodologies for evaluating the effect of using 4Sight on test score outcomes are drawn from the program evaluation literature, and include individual and school-level OLS as well as matching at the school-level. Micro-econometric results show that 4Sight had no discernible effect on math scores and a small negative effect on reading scores in its first year in Pennsylvania. Policy recommendations include continuing a smaller-scale trial period of 4Sight for several more years in conjunction with careful, improved alignment between 4Sight and PSSA, ongoing empirical analysis of its effects, and incorporating more opportunity for feedback to teachers and students to improve 4Sight as a formative assessment