Record:
Strunk, K., & Grissom, J. (n.d.). Do Strong Unions Shape District Policies?: Collective Bargaining, Teacher Contract Restrictiveness, and the Political Power of Teachers’ Unions. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 389-406.
The article can be found here
Summary:
In this study, Katharine O. Strunk of the University of California and Jason A. Grissom of the University of Missouri attempt to determine whether strong teacher unions actually shape district policies. Strunk and Grissom begin the study by going over what collective bargaining agreements (CBA’s) are and how they function. These contracts are negotiated between the school boards and the teacher unions and set constraints on organizational and individual actions.
The next section, entitled How Teachers’ Unions May Affect Local Policy Flexibility, as the title says, goes over the ways in which a teacher union may affect local policy. This section is broken into two subcategories, the first being Collective Bargaining Agreements as Local Policy, and the second being Union Strength and Collective Bargaining Agreement Restrictiveness. In the first subcategory, the authors discuss the origin of teachers’ bargaining rights, which was created for protection from “arbitrary and sexist treatment.” As well as discussing the origin, they also discuss some different aspects of CBA’s. The second subcategory goes even further into what CBA’s are, as well as discussing the power these can give to teacher unions.
The third section, Data & Methods, describes the different data collected and methods used during the study to get results. The data used by Strunk and Grissom was self-collected. It came from two different sources, the first being surveys from a sample of California school board members, and the second being teacher union-school district CBA’s. The data came from 113 different school districts. This section is broken into three subcategories. The first subcategory is titled Measures of Teachers’ Union Power. In this section, the authors discuss the methods with which they measured the power of teacher unions, which was done through a survey taken by school district board members during the 2005-2006 school year. The second subcategory is called Measures of School District Policy. In this subcategory, the authors go over the ways in which school district policy was measured. It was measured in three ways: “(a) the restrictiveness of the over-all collective bargaining agreement to the school district, (b) the restrictiveness of four subareas of the contract to the districts, and (c) the existence of specific policies found within the contract.” The third subcategory is called Estimating the Relationship Between Union Power and Contract Restrictiveness. This subcategory goes over the equation used to determine the relationship between union power and contract restrictiveness, as well as going over the variables used in the equation.
In the next section, Do Districts With Stronger Unions Have More Restrictive District Policies?, Strunk and Grissom the different conclusions they found when calculating their estimates.
In the last section, titled Discussion, Strunk and Grissom again go over the data and conclusions as well as the possibility of future research.
Appraisal:
This study was put together very well. The topic was interesting and covered a broad range of variables. Everything was explained well and in detail. The subcategories were well organized, and the many diagrams and data tables included helped to show what was done and how the data was used.
Overall, this was a very well put together study, and I have no complaints about it.
Education Research Reviews 