Bargaining for retention: the pervasiveness of specific contract provisions and their bearing on teacher retention in high school districts in Illinois

In education today, qualified and experienced teachers are essential for student academic success. This dissertation explores the relationship between teacher retention, teacher working conditions, and school district demographics through the combination of the contents of virtually all high school district’s collective bargaining agreements in the state of Illinois and various publicly available school district demographic data. Through a comprehensive review of the available literature on teacher retention, this study identifies the factors influencing teacher retention with a focus on bargainable working conditions. I explore how factors such as workload, prep time, and collaboration opportunities combine to inform a teacher’s decision to stay with or leave a school district. I utilize a mixed methods approach to investigate the content of contracts through document analysis combined with available district demographic and teacher retention data. My results contribute to the literature by offering a rich data set of the content of actual contracts. I utilize this data set to examine the connection between the content of high school collective bargaining agreements in Illinois and teacher retention. Based on my results that showed few statistically significant correlations between bargainable working conditions and teacher retention, I encourage a more holistic approach to understanding the nuances of bargaining and teacher retention. Although my results do not support the inclusion or exclusion of any to the explored provisions, there are many other factors that should be considered.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ed.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Educ Policy, Orgzn & Leadrshp

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Ramos, Eric Joel

Contributors dc:contributor

• Bruno, Paul A
• Roegman, Rachel
• Herrmann, Mary
• Huang, Wenhao

• Collective Bargaining
• Education
• Teacher Retention
• Working Conditions
• Teacher Prep Time
• Teacher Collaboration
• Teacher Workload
• High School

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2024 Eric Ramos

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124274

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F124274