(Educational Psychology and Higher Education) has two recent publications.
He published in . In this study, he asks: what is the relationship between changes in interest group resources and the proposal and adoption of state teacher policy? Using a dataset of proposed and enacted teacher policies across five legislative cycles in all 50 states and measures of interest group relative resource strength, he finds that legislatures propose more unfavorable and fewer favorable policies toward teachers’ unions in states where teachers’ union opposition interest groups are expending more election resources over time. Further, he finds that more unfavorable and fewer favorable policies are adopted in states where teachers’ union opposition groups are growing in election resource strength. Expanding on prior empirical work, this study suggests that interest group resources matter for policy change and highlights the importance of capturing changes in interest group resources over time. Additionally, the study captures the changing policy dynamics in education. This study provides some evidence that status quo policies are shifting away from traditional union positions.
Additionally, he published in with co-author Katharine Strunk. The article examines how teacher collective bargaining agreements (CBAs), teacher salaries, and class sizes changed during the Great Recession. Using a district-level data set of California teacher CBAs that includes measures of contract strength and salaries from 2005–06 and 2011–12 tied to district-level longitudinal data, they estimated difference-in-difference models to examine bargaining outcomes for districts that should have been more or less fiscally constrained. They find that unions and administrators change critical elements of CBAs during times of fiscal duress. This includes increasing class sizes, reducing instructional time, and lowering base salaries to relieve financial pressures, and negotiating increased protections for teachers in areas with less direct financial implications, including grievance procedures and nonteaching duties. Together, the findings indicate that during times of fiscal constraint, districts and teachers’ unions negotiate changes in their CBAs that directly reduce expenditures even though they may also have implications for instruction. They compensate teachers for these losses by enhancing the contract language surrounding working conditions that have little fiscal impact.
