Blue states with strong teachers’ unions have lower student literacy levels: study shows

Blues states with strong teachers’ unions overwhelmingly have worse student literacy scores than Republican states where educators don’t have as much say over policy, a shocking new analysis found.

At least eight of the ten states where students had the worst literacy scores were liberal strongholds with politically powerful teachers’ unions, while just five were Republican and one was a swing state, a recent assessment from the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) found.

New York — where more than half of third to fifth students failed their reading proficiency exams this year — was among the worst-performing states, and also had some of the strongest teachers’ unions.

A group of teachers’ union members rallying outside a Massachusetts elementary school. Boston Globe via Getty Images

The top performing states, meanwhile, were overwhelmingly conservative and had less politically powerful unions — of the 23 top performing states, 13 were Republican majority and just 4 were Democratic hubs.

Even with the findings stretched out to the top 32 best-scoring states, a mere 7 were Democratic states and only four of them were ranked in the 25th percentile for teachers’ union power, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The assessment was conducted by the PPI’s Director of Education Policy, Rachel Canter, who spent nearly two decades in Mississippi advocating for systemic reforms, which transformed the state’s students from having among the lowest literacy rates in the nation to having some of the highest

And Canter’s study found one overwhelming and shocking throughline — the stronger the state’s teachers’ union the worse its student literacy scores were, results which did not exclusively follow party lines but strongly trended that way and often to the detriment of Democrats.

“Democrats, however, don’t often ask me how to replicate Mississippi’s success,” Canter said. “They ask if it’s possible at all, given the power of teachers’ unions in their home states.”

One reason for the disparity, Canter argued, is that states where teacher unions have a strong grip are slower to enact better program.

She looked at 18 literacy policies recommended by ExcelinEd and found Democratic states had undertaken nine of them on average, while Republican and swing states had adopted an average 13.5.

“States dominated by Democrats have been slower to embrace similar reforms,” Canter said. “Organized labor might explain some of this gap.”

Canter’s successes were a meteoric transformation of Mississippi’s students — in 2013 the state had some of the worst test scores for middle and elementary students in the country, but by 2024 they had climbed to seventh in literacy and 13th in math.

Missouri students board a school bus. The state used widespread reforms to revitalize their student literacy scores. AFP /AFP via Getty Images

It was widespread reforms to the Mississippi education system which fueled those changes, Canter argued — including requiring third graders with the lowest literacy scores to repeat the year while extra training for teachers at the worst-performing elementary schools was also mandated.

Mississippi schools also mandated literacy screenings for students three times a year between kindergarten and third grade, with parents being informed if their child was performing below normal.

Numerous states across the South — Republican strongholds each — adopted similar policies, and tended to dominate Canter’s comparison of student literacy scores and teachers’ union power.

“We found a strong, negative correlation between the two — the more powerful the unions, the fewer literacy policy principles the state had adopted,” Canter said.

Her study drew on a June ranking of teachers’ union power by the education nonprofit Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and literacy score data from the ExcelinEd education advocacy group.