Teacher strikes have a profound and often unrecognized role in national politics, a new working paper suggests: They put education front and center in Congressional campaigns and advertisements.
Holding a strike more than doubles the likelihood that a Congressional candidate will air an education ad in the area where the labor action occurred, write the authors of the paper, which has not yet been peer reviewed.
The upshot is that despite the risky nature of shutting down schools, strikes may elevate the importance of education issues, and ultimately could give teachers’ unions more power in the national arena.
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“We were really interested in some of these broader political effects of teacher strikes,” said Melissa Arnold Lyon, a co-author of the study and a postdoctoral research associate at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. “Teachers’ unions have increasing prominence as national actors in education politics.”
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