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.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 highestAnd 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 g...