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This research investigates whether teachers' unions influence student academic achievement in Southern states that prohibit collective bargaining. Our data are from the School and Staffing Survey and the Stanford Education Data Archive. We measure the strength of teachers' unions by union membership rate and meet-and-confer status of a district and employ a multilevel mixed-effects model to control for unobservable common characteristics of districts within each state. We find that teachers' unions have a significantly positive association with student test scores, in both math and English, particularly for Hispanic and Black students. This positive link of unions with math is concentrated on the low- and mid-socioeconomic status (SES) districts but is detected across all SES for English.

Most studies have focused on whether charter schools perform better than TPS. However, for the vast majority of students who remain in TPS, a more relevant question is whether charter schools have a positive or negative impact on their schools. This study uses national, district-level panel data to examine how charter school prevalence influences the academic performance of students from the same-district TPS. Our primary data source is the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA). The SEDA provides the average English and mathematics test scores for all US districts between 2009 and 2015. We assess the role of charter school penetration on TPS students' performance in recent years, using various measures of charter school prevalence. Employing the district fixed effects model exploiting within-district variation, we find a small but negative association between charter school prevalence and both math and English achievement. Based on our findings, it seems premature to emphasize the virtue of competition charter schools bring to public education, and allocating more resources into charter schools should be undertaken with great caution.

Recently, there has been a great deal of debate and consternation over the compensation of public-sector employees across the U.S. It has been asserted that state and local government employees are overpaid compared to workers in the private sector. In California government workers have been vilified as scandals and anecdotes pass as confirming evidence of exorbitant pay. This research is especially important given the outrage over the pay of municipal officials in Bell, California. The outrage over what happened in Bell is reasonable and just. Many of the players immediately resigned and on September 21, 2010 eight city officials were arrested.1 Those arrested include the former city manager of Bell, Robert Rizzo, who was making nearly $800,000 a year. Rizzo was charged with 53 counts. It is alleged that Rizzo, without approval from the City Council, actually wrote the conditions of his own contract—the case keeps growing in terms of scope and involved officials. It is clear by the arrests and scores of allegations that the situation in Bell was not in line with usual procedures.While anecdotes that stem from public-sector corruption capture much attention, it is a data-driven analysis of public-sector pay and compensation that is needed to answer the question: How do the pay and benefits of public sector workers compare to those in the private sector? This is a legitimate question that should not be answered anecdotally. The research in this paper investigates empirically whether California public employees are overpaid at the expense of California taxpayers.The results from this analysis indicate that California public employees, both state and local, are not overpaid. The wages received by California public employees are about 7% lower, on average, than wages received by comparable private sector workers; however, public employees do receive more generous benefits. An apples-to-apples comparison, or one that controls for education, experience, and other factors that may influence pay, reveals no significant difference in the level of employee compensation costs on an annual or per hour basis between private and public sector workers.Nonetheless, there are substantially different approaches to staffing and compensation between the private and public sector. Specifically, there are important workforce differences between the two sectors in terms of educational attainment. On average, California’s public sector workers are more highly educated. Of full-time workers, 55% hold a four-year college degree in the public sector compared to 35% in the private sector. Educational attainment is the single most important predictor of earnings—thus it plays a vital role in this analysis. On average, California state and local governments pay college-educated labor less than private employers. The earnings differential is greatest for professional employees, lawyers and doctors. On the other hand, the public sector appears to set a floor on compensation. The earnings of those with a high school degree or less is higher in state and local government than it is for similar workers in the private sector.There are other significant personnel differences between the public and private sector workforces. The age (median) of a typical worker in state and local government is 44 compared to 40 in the private sector. Furthermore, the state and local government workforce has more women (55%) compared to the private sector (40%).In general, better educated and older, more experienced workers earn more than less educated and younger workers while women earn less than men. Thus, comparisons between the two sectors must take into account these and other differences such as race and experience when making pay comparisons. Simply comparing average pay between the two sectors, without taking into account workforce differences, would be highly misleading.Benefits are also allocated differently between private and public sector full-time workers in California. State and Local government employees receive a higher portion of their compensation in the form of employer-provided benefits and the mix of benefits is different from the private sector. While some benefits may be more generous in the public sector, it is a serious error to imagine that comparability requires that each and every element of compensation be the same. When total compensation—both the cost of employer-provided benefits and direct pay—is taken into account state and local public sector workers in California are similarly compensated to workers in the private sector.Public employers contribute on average 35.7% of employee compensation expenses to benefits, whereas private employers devote 30% of compensation to benefits. Public employers provide better health insurance and pension benefits. Public employers contribute 11.8% to insurance, mainly health insurance, compared to a 7.7% contribution by private employers. Retirement benefits also account for a substantially greater share of public employee compensation, 8.2% compared to 3.6% in the private sector. Most public employees also continue to participate in defined benefit plans managed by the state, while most private sector employers have switched to defined contribution plans, particularly 401(k) plans. On the other hand, public employees receive considerably less supplemental pay and vacation time, and public employers contribute significantly less to legally-mandated benefits.Thus, the difference in workforce characteristics and benefit allocations between the public and private sectors is why a regression-adjusted analysis is employed in this research. The regression framework allows a comparison of similar workers controlling for factors which influence compensation levels. A standard wage equation produced a surprising result: full-time state and local employees are under-paid by about 7% compared to their private sector counterparts. However, a re-estimated regression equation of total compensation (which includes wages and benefits) demonstrates that there is no significant difference in total compensation between full-time state and local employees and private-sector employees.

Our research examines the relationship between teachers' unions, teacher compensation, employment conditions, and turnover in Southern US states that prohibit the collective bargaining of public school teachers. We assess union strength by meet-and-confer status and the teacher union density of districts and estimate union impact using propensity score matching. We find that teachers' unions are positively associated with teacher compensation and employment conditions, even in the absence of collective bargaining. Districts with strong unions have higher dismissals of nontenured teachers for poor performance and a lower attrition rate of qualified teachers, compared to districts with weak unions. This study shows that teachers' unions in the United States still organize without formal labor-management institutions and make a significant impact on teachers' work lives, even in a hostile legal environment toward unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of data from "Industry Wage Surveys of Machinery Manufacturers" on the skill levels of 57 machining jobs found that introduction of numerically controlled machine tools has resulted in a very small reduction in skill levels or no significant change, supporting neither the deskilling argument nor argument that skill levels increase with the introduction of technology. (SK)

The article discusses public sector collective bargaining and the book "The Unions and the Cities" by Harry H. Wellington and Ralph K. Winter, including information on industrial democracy and constitutional law in the U.S. Other topics include public employee unionism, the privatization of government services, and property tax increases under California's Proposition 13. The social costs of strikes and various dispute resolution processes are also mentioned.

The research reported in this article shows that public employees, both state and local government employees, are not overpaid and may be slightly undercompensated. Comparisons with the private-sector employees that control for education, experience, hours of work, organizational size, gender, race, ethnicity, and disability indicate that the public-employment compensation (wages and benefits) penalty is relatively small. On average there is a 3.7 percent penalty in total compensation for full-time state and local employees when compared to similar private-sector employees. The data analysis also reveals substantially different approaches to staffing and compensation between the private and public sectors. On average, state and local public-sector workers are more highly educated than the private-sector workforce; 54 percent of full-time state and local public-sector workers hold at least a four-year college degree compared to 35 percent of full-time private sector workers. For college-educated labor, state and local governments pay salaries on average over 25 percent less than private employers. The public sector appears to set a floor on compensation, particularly improving the compensation of workers with high-school educations, when compared to similarly educated workers in the private sector. Benefits are allocated differently between private- and public-sector full-time workers. State and local government employees receive a higher portion of their compensation in the form of employer-provided benefits. Public employers provide better health insurance and pension benefits. National polling data indicate that the public does not believe public employees are overpaid. They oppose pay and benefit cuts, but believe pay freezes and greater employee contributions to their health and pensions plans may be appropriate. Nevertheless, thirteen states revised their public-sector collective-bargaining laws, mainly weakening employee bargaining power or severely restricting or eliminating collective bargaining, while the majority of the public opposed those changes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]