The Effects of Teacher Strike Activity on Student Learning in South African Primary Schools

Gabrielle Wills

No 01/2014, Working Papers from Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper investigates whether teacher strikes affect student achievement at the primary school level in South Africa. A cross-subject analysis with student fixed effects is used to eliminate sources of endogeneity bias at the school and student level. Results indicate that teacher strike participation negatively affects learning for students in the poorest three quarters of schools in South Africa. A negative effect size as large as ten per cent of a standard deviation is observed. There is also evidence that more marginalised students, both in terms of socio-economic status and academic performance, are affected most negatively by strike action. However, application of a technique by Altonji, Taber and Elder (2005) indicates that it is not possible to rule out that measured strike effects may be driven by omitted variable bias. The student fixed effects strategy fails to adequately control for unobserved teacher characteristics that may influence both a teacher’s decision to strike and student achievement.

Keywords: teachers; strikes; trade unions; student achievement; South Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J24 J51 J52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-edu and nep-ure
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ekon.sun.ac.za/wpapers/2014/wp012014/wp-01-2014.pdf First version, 2014 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sza:wpaper:wpapers206

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Melt van Schoor ().