This week in the war on workers: Wisconsin union-busting law hurt teachers—and students
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Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Republicans in the state’s legislature rammed through Act 10, which directly attacked union rights for public workers, in 2011. Now that some time has passed, we know the law’s effects on schools—and they’re bad, for teThis week in the war on workers: Wisconsin union-busting law hurt teachers—and students
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Republicans in the state’s legislature rammed through Act 10, which directly attacked union rights for public workers, in 2011. Now that some time has passed, we know the law’s effects on schools—and they’re bad, for teachers and students. Teacher pay and benefits have dropped, with teachers losing out on an average $10,843 in compensation per year, according to a new report from the Center for American Progress. And Wisconsin schools lost out on experienced teachers, something that study after study has shown makes a difference in the classroom (though nothing makes as much difference as class and poverty): The percentage of teachers who left the profession spiked to 10.5 percent after the 2010-11 school year, up from 6.4 percent in the year before Act 10 was implemented. Exit rates have remained higher than before, with 8.8 percent of teachers leaving after the 2015-16 school year— the most recent school year for which data are available. The percentage of teachers with less than five years of experience increased from 19.6 percent in the 2010-11 school year to 24.1 percent in the 2015-16 school year. Average teaching experience decreased from 14.6 years in the 2010-11 school year to 13.9 in the 2011-12 school year, which is where it remained in the 2015-16 school year. And recent research seems to bear out the negative effect on students that could be predicted from those effects on teachers: [Florida State University doctoral student Jason] Baron finds that Act 10 resulted in a decline in average high school test scores in math and science by .15 to .18 standard deviations. Baron notes that the magnitude of the decline in student performance is nearly the same magnitude of the increase in test scores that studies have found come from a reduction in class size of eight students. Importantly, he finds that the decline in student performance is entirely driven by test scores falling further behind at schools that are already in the lowest half of the distribution of test scores. At these low-performing schools, test scores fell by an average of .3 standard deviations after Act 10’s implementation, with a larger effect in the second year after the law’s implementation than in the first. High-performing schools had no significant increase in test scores. So Act 10 didn’t hurt students randomly—it disproportionately hurt disadvantaged students. Which probably makes Scott Walker pretty happy, but that’s because he’s terrible, just like that result. Read more