5 Questions with Melissa Arnold Lyon on the Impacts of Teacher Strikes

By Indiana Nash  

ALBANY, N.Y. (March 11, 2026) — Teacher strikes may be more effective than previously thought and have little or no impact on student academic achievement, according to new research from Melissa Arnold Lyon.

Lyon, an assistant professor at Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, has been studying teacher strikes for years, and coauthored several research papers on the topic. She was awarded a prestigious Spencer fellowship to study strikes and $299,083 in funding from the William T. Grant Foundation to study the impact of school board election timing policies on educational equity.

A Memphis, Tennessee, native, Lyon studied political science at Rice University and went on to get her master's and PhD at Columbia University. She was a postdoctoral research associate at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University before coming to Rockefeller in 2022.

Her research is informed by the years she spent teaching middle school students at a charter school in Houston, Texas, where she was also an instructional coach. The job was demanding, in a school with a high turnover rate.

“Those experiences make me feel more driven to study education policy and politics of education. I do think that I'm probably much more sympathetic to teacher concerns, and it does shape, not what I find, but the questions that I feel are important,” Lyon said.

Lyon recently co-authored a paper on the public signaling effects of teacher strikes published in the Journal of Human Resources, and a working paper available at the National Bureau of Economic Research. The latter examines the effects of hundreds of teacher strikes around the United States between 2007 and 2024 and found that, on average, strikes lead to increased teacher salaries and declines in teacher-pupil ratios.

We recently caught up with Lyon to learn more about her latest findings and how they could reshape the way we think about teacher strikes.

What was it about teaching that interested you?

When I was a kid, I loved playing teacher. I really value the love of learning, and teaching seemed like a natural thing to do.

I had also grown up in public schools in Memphis, which were quite segregated in really obvious ways because of these school segregation structures that I think were problematic and still exist. They were also probably designed partly to have kids in the same building so that it looked like the schools were diverse, but actually, in my experience, children of different races were almost entirely separate.

Memphis is a strange place to grow up because it’s the place where Martin Luther King was assassinated, and that really left a major scar on the city in many ways. In school, we’d learn about these things in class, and there was this strange juxtaposition where you're learning about that Martin Luther King is a hero in a school that’s perpetuating systems where we clearly are still segregated.

I felt like that was a problematic part of my upbringing. I felt like this is a place where maybe I can make a difference.

When you started analyzing the data on teacher strikes, were you surprised by what you found?

Yes. We had to create an entirely new dataset of teacher strikes, essentially by hand, using a comprehensive and validated review of press releases and news stories. Part of the reason that we decided that it would be worth it to build out this whole data set is because there was a general sense that strikes, since the 1980s, have not worked. The small amount of literature that's on this topic would predict that there would be no impact on salaries. That literature, though, is based on the period from 1980 until the early 2000s. Also, the impression from international literature, which focuses on teacher strikes lasting several months, was that strikes harm student achievement. So, our initial thought was that there would probably be a negative effect of teacher strikes on students.

We didn't know how common it was to have these one- or two-day strikes, like the ones that were prominent in 2018. The typical strike we had in our mind was a long, drawn-out negotiation, maybe months long. But that's really not the typical teacher strike in the U.S. at all. The longest strike we found was 35 days, but the median strike is two days. Ninety percent of strikes lasted less than two weeks.  And, what we see is that teacher strikes are happening everywhere. Most of the strikes we find were actually in states where teacher striking is illegal.

How do you hope what you found will impact teachers and teacher unions?

I think the findings about short strikes are quite informative. Short strikes, meaning less than two weeks, have a very similar success rate for getting increases to salaries and benefits and per pupil expenditures, relative to longer strikes.

Also, the shorter strikes, five days or less, have a bigger signaling effect. Shorter strikes are more efficacious in terms of changing political discourse around education. In a short strike, you can have a clearer signal. Even if you end the strike without getting everything you wanted, if you can do it without angering the community, without generating backlash, then there could be long term benefits to getting and sustaining the wins that you wanted.

Teachers are in this unique position where those who have the most potential to be harmed by a strike are the students, and that's obviously not what the teachers want. And that's not what we find, honestly. The short strikes have no negative impact on student achievement. We do find a short-lived, negative impact on math achievement in teacher strikes that lasts more than two weeks. But a typical short teacher strike is able to maintain public support, avoid harming students and still gets wins.

Is there anything else you want people to know about your findings?

The magnitude of these effects is quite striking (pardon the pun). In the first study published in the Journal of Human Resources, we find that teacher strikes increase attention to education issues in a substantial way — teacher strikes increase the probability that political candidates prioritize education issues by 400%. In the working paper, we find that teacher strikes increase teacher compensation by 6%, about $7,629 annually. That’s a substantial increase in teacher salaries. And the money comes from new revenues, which means districts are figuring out ways to get new revenues in order to pay the teachers more. They are not reallocating from education budgets.

What’s something most people don't know about you?

I am super competitive, especially with board games. This is partly because my parents were super competitive, and my grandfather on my dad's side is super competitive with board games and would never, ever let you win. I have carried that on.