A center-left think tank found that eight of the ten worst-performing states on early-literacy policy are home to powerful teachers' unions, and the pattern maps neatly onto the partisan divide.
The Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington think tank with roots in the Democratic Party's centrist wing, compared teacher-union strength rankings against each state's adoption of proven early-literacy policies. The result was blunt: states where unions hold the most sway over education policy have been the slowest to embrace the reading reforms that are lifting scores elsewhere in the country.
Rachel Canter, PPI's director of education policy and one of the architects of Mississippi's widely praised reading overhaul, told Fox News that the correlation is hard to ignore. Among the top 60 percent of states on PPI's early-literacy scorecard, only four had strong teachers' unions. At the bottom, union power was the norm.
The states posting the weakest literacy policy scores read like a roster of deep-blue strongholds: Maine, New York, Illinois, Hawaii, Washington, and Rhode Island. The states at the top, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Indiana, are Republican-led and have comparatively weak unions.
Canter did not hold back about why the gap exists.
"Democrats, however, don't often ask me how to replicate Mississippi's success. They ask if it's possible at all, given the power of teachers' unions in their home states."
Mississippi's turnaround is the centerpiece of PPI's argument. The state was once synonymous with bottom-of-the-barrel education outcomes. It clawed its way up by adopting a suite of concrete, measurable reforms: kindergarten-through-third-grade screenings, literacy coaches embedded in schools, individual reading plans for struggling students, science-based reading instruction, tougher teacher-licensing requirements, and increased training.
The most politically contentious piece was a policy requiring third-graders who failed the state reading test to be held back rather than promoted. That kind of accountability measure tends to draw fierce opposition from organized labor, which often frames retention policies as punitive to children.
Gov. Tate Reeves has credited Mississippi's structured literacy laws and focused reading programs for transforming the state's educational system. Multiple Republican-led Southern states have since adopted similar reforms.
The pattern is consistent enough that Canter drew a direct line between partisan control and policy adoption.
"States dominated by Democrats have been slower to embrace similar reforms. Organized labor might explain some of this gap."
Teachers' unions spend hundreds of millions of dollars every electoral cycle electing Democrats and advancing left-of-center education policies. That financial muscle translates directly into influence over what happens inside classrooms. Canter's analysis argues that unions exert massive influence over both educational policies and how those policies are implemented, a two-layer grip that makes reform difficult even when the evidence for it is overwhelming.
The dynamic creates an obvious incentive problem. Unions exist to protect the working conditions and job security of their members. Policies like mandatory reading screenings, retention of failing students, and stricter licensing requirements add pressure and accountability that unions have historically resisted. When those unions also bankroll the campaigns of the lawmakers who create education law, the result is a feedback loop that prioritizes institutional comfort over student outcomes.
PPI's findings are especially notable because the think tank is not a conservative outfit. It sits on the center-left of the policy spectrum. When a Democratic-leaning organization publishes data showing that Democratic-aligned unions are the common thread among the nation's worst literacy performers, the indictment carries extra weight precisely because it comes from inside the house.
The analysis did flag outliers. Maryland, a solidly blue state with a strong teachers' union, has posted strong reading results. South Dakota, a red state with a weaker union, has struggled. No single variable explains every outcome in fifty states.
But exceptions do not erase the trend line. Eight out of ten of the worst-performing states on PPI's literacy scorecard had powerful unions. Only four of the states in the top 60 percent did. That is not a coincidence, it is a pattern, and it tracks with the political incentives that govern education policy in union-heavy states.
The open questions are worth noting. PPI's full methodology for ranking union strength has not been detailed in public reporting, and the specific metrics behind the "early-literacy policy scores" deserve scrutiny. Any honest analysis should welcome that scrutiny. But the broad finding, that union power and literacy reform move in opposite directions, lines up with what parents, governors, and reformers in red states have been saying for years.
The real cost is not political. It is human. Children in New York, Illinois, and other states at the bottom of PPI's rankings are not learning to read at grade level because the adults who control education policy in those states have chosen institutional loyalty over proven instruction methods. Mississippi showed that even the poorest state in the country can turn its reading scores around with the right reforms. The obstacle is not poverty. It is not funding. It is not a lack of evidence.
It is the people who stand between the evidence and the classroom, and the politicians who let them.
