Public Sector Collective Bargaining After the COVID-19 Pandemic

In 2020, the state of Virginia passed a law repealing a prohibition on public sector employee’s collective bargaining rights. Collective bargaining rights are now spreading across the state district-by-district, including among public school teachers. Education policy scholars Beth Schueler and Melissa Arnold Lyon will take advantage of this natural experiment to investigate how district factors, such as teacher working conditions and district responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, are associated with collective bargaining among K-12 public school teachers in Virginia. They will conduct media analysis and interviews and will analyze data from the Virginia Department of Education, the federal Common Core of Data, and the American Community Survey/Census for their study.