Collective bargaining is common in American public education, but its consequences are poorly understood. We focus here on key contractual provisions—seniority-based transfer rights—that affect teacher assignments, and we show that these transfer rights operate to burden disadvantaged schools with higher percentages of inexperienced teachers. We also show that this impact is conditional:It …
Koski and horng argue that our study of seniority-based transfer rules is narrow and that its findings only apply under limited circumstances. They say that their own study, by contrast, takes a broad frame—so broad that, as detailed in their 127-page technical report, they estimated 40 different models. They argue that the bigger picture that emerges from their more extensive analysis is th…