New research published by the Center for American Progress suggests that union-management collaboration and teacher voice at the school level can have significant positive effects on student learning.

Using data from 26 schools in the ABC Unified School District in Southern California, researchers Saul Rubenstein and John McCarthy at Rutgers University recently looked at the impact of “partnership quality” on schools’ Academic Performance Index (API) scores during the 2011 and 2012 school years. Their methods of measuring levels of partnership within schools included surveying about 900 teachers on levels of communication and collaboration between staff and administrators at their schools, measuring the frequency of formal and informal contact between each school’s union representative and principal, and calculating the “density” of ties between teachers at the school.

Schools with the strongest scores on the study’s “partnership quality survey scale” were places where union representatives and principals talked frequently (i.e., daily or weekly) and informally, where there was more collaboration and communication among teachers (especially around mentoring, student data, curriculum, cross-subject and cross-grade integration, and instructional practices), and where teachers had greater opportunities to have a voice in decision-making.

The researchers found that when comparing schools, a one-point increase in partnership quality scores in 2011 corresponded with about 25 additional points on the school’s API score in 2012, and with about 15 points of improvement in school-wide achievement (controlling for poverty and for schools’ previous API scores). They concluded that “while poverty remains a key predictor of student achievement, the data suggest that student performance can be improved by institutional union-management partnerships and the school-level collaboration that results from them.”

The researchers suggested policy-makers, districts and schools could support partnerships and collaboration by providing technical and financial support to schools interested in piloting these practices, building learning networks within and across districts and convening conferences to highlight best practices.