A Working Paper from EPIC

The Impact of Teacher Labor Market Reforms on Student Achievement: Evidence from Michigan

June 2019

Many states have recently enacted substantial reforms to teacher policies. In Michigan, the state legislature implemented teacher evaluation requirements, reduced tenure protections, and restricted teachers’ unions’ abilities to collectively bargain. Some teacher advocates view such reform as a “war on teachers,” but proponents argue these policies may enable personnel decisions that positively impact student performance. Evidence to discern between these perspectives remains limited. In this study, we use detailed administrative data from all Michigan traditional public schools from 2005-06 to 2016-17. We estimate event study models for the first two cohorts exposed to these reforms, exploiting the plausibly exogenous timing of collective bargaining agreement expirations. Across a variety of samples and specification checks, we find very little evidence of negative achievement impacts, with generally null impacts on the first cohort exposed to reform, and generally positive impacts on the second cohort exposed to reform.

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