Over the past decade, many states enacted substantial reforms to teacher-related laws and policies. In Michigan, the state legislature implemented requirements for teacher evaluation based partly on student achievement, reduced tenure protections, and restricted the scope of teacher collective bargaining. Some teacher advocates view such reform as a “war on teachers,” but proponents argue these policies may have enabled personnel decisions that positively impact student performance. Evidence on this debate remains limited. In this study, we use detailed administrative data from all Michigan traditional public schools from 2005–06 to 2014–15. We estimate event study models exploiting the plausibly exogenous timing of collective bargaining agreement expirations. Across a variety of samples and specification checks, we find these reforms had generally null results, with some evidence of heterogeneity by cohort. We investigate several possible mechanisms and conclude that districts with more restrictive teacher contracts prior to reform and districts with more rigorous use of teacher evaluations experienced more positive impacts after reform exposure.

We examine the Los Angeles Unified School District's Public School Choice Initiative (PSCI), which sought to turnaround the district's lowest-performing schools. We ask whether school turnaround impacted student outcomes, and what explains variations in outcomes across reform cohorts. We use a Comparative Interrupted Time Series approach using administrative student-level data, following students in the first (1.0), second (2.0), and third (3.0) cohorts of PSCI schools. We find that students in 1.0 turnaround schools saw no significant improvements in outcomes, whereas students enrolled in 2.0 schools saw significant gains in English Language Arts in both years of the reform. Students in 3.0 schools experienced significant decreases in achievement. Qualitative and survey data suggest that increased support and assistance and the use of reconstitution and restart as the sole turnaround methods contributed to gains in 2.0, whereas policy changes in 3.0 caused difficulties and confusion in implementation, leading to poor student performance.

Increased spending and decreased student performance have been attributed in part to teachers' unions and to the collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) they negotiate with school boards. However, only recently have researchers begun to examine impacts of specific aspects of CBAs on student and district outcomes. This article uses a unique measure of contract restrictiveness generated through the use of a partial independence item response model to examine the relationships between CBA strength and district spending on multiple areas and district-level student performance in California. I find that districts with more restrictive contracts have higher spending overall, but that this spending appears not to be driven by greater compensation for teachers but by greater expenditures on administrators' compensation and instruction-related spending. Although districts with stronger CBAs spend more overall and on these categories, they spend less on books and supplies and on school board–related expenditures. In addition, I find that contract restrictiveness is associated with lower average student performance, although not with decreased achievement growth.

Professional development and teacher education policies have the potential to greatly affect teachers' abilities to teach and, as a result, students' abilities to learn. States can play varied roles in the provision of teacher education and professional development. This policy brief summarizes states' policy approaches to teacher professional development and education throughout teachers' careers. It explores what states are currently doing in the realms of pre-service education, induction and mentoring, ongoing professional development, and teacher evaluation, as well as the existing evidence regarding the effectiveness of such policies. We find that states play disparate roles in the provision of teacher education and professional development that fall along the regulatory spectrum from highly prescriptive to rather laissez-faire. Research on the effects of such policies is still in the early stages, and more attention is needed to determine the effectiveness of states' professional development policies.