Teacher Collective Bargaining

In 2010, Strunk and Reardon introduced a potentially transformativemethod for analyzing teacher collective bargaining agreements (CBAs). We extend Strunkand Reardon’s work by assessing whether the Partial Independence Item Response (PIIR)approach can be applied to subsets of provisions from CBAs, data that may be morefeasible for researchers to collect. Utilizing a new data set derived from allprovisions in all active CBAs in Washington state, we find that estimates calculatedfrom a subset of high-profile provisions are moderately highly correlated with estimatescalculated from the full range of provisions, as are estimates calculated from severalcategories of provisions. This suggests that researchers can still draw importantconclusions by applying the PIIR method to readily available data on teacherCBAs