2013/08/01 by Michael Baker · 1 citation
Decision Sciences · Social Sciences · #Educational Assessment and Improvement #Evaluation and Performance Assessment #School Choice and Performance
paper · doi:10.1111/caje.12035
openalex publication_date 2013/08/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
Abstract Many jurisdictions ban teacher strikes on the assumption that they negatively affect student achievement, but there is surprisingly little research on this question. The majority of existing studies make cross‐section comparisons of the achievement of students who do or do not experience a strike. They conclude that strikes do not have an impact. I present new estimates of this impact of strikes using an empirical strategy that controls for fixed student characteristics at the school cohort level, and a sample of industrial actions by teachers in the province of Ontario. The results indicate that teacher strikes in grades 5 or 6 have a negative, statistically significant impact on test score growth between grade 3 and grade 6. The largest impact is on math scores: 29% of the standard deviation of test scores across school/grade cohorts.