Are Teachers' Unions Really to Blame? Collective Bargaining Agreements and Their Relationships with District Resource Allocation and Student Performance in California

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 354-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharine O. Strunk

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.

2014 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Luis Bazán ◽  
Márcia D. Branco ◽  
Heleno Bolfarine

1989 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 987-1000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Tenvergert ◽  
Johannes Kingma ◽  
Terry Taerum

MOKSCAL is a program for the Mokken (1971) scale analysis based on a nonparametric item response model that makes no assumptions about the functional form of the item trace lines. The only constraint the Mokken model puts on the trace lines is the assumption of double monotony; that is, the item trace lines must be nondecreasing and the lines are not allowed to cross. MOKSCAL provides three procedures of scaling: a search procedure, an evaluation of the whole set of items, and an extension of an existing scale. All procedures provide a coefficient of scalability for all items that meet the criteria of the Mokken model and an item coefficient of scalability of every item. A test of robustness of the found scale can be performed to analyze whether the scale is invariant across different subgroups or samples. This robustness test may serve as a goodness-of-fit test for the established scale. The program is written in FORTRAN 77 and is suitable for both mainframe and microcomputers.


Psychometrika ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 650-673 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wim J. van der Linden ◽  
Michelle D. Barrett

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