States with the most politically powerful teachers’ unions consistently produce the worst student literacy scores, according to a new analysis from the Progressive Policy Institute. At least eight of the ten lowest-scoring states were Democratic strongholds with strong union influence, while the top-performing states were overwhelmingly Republican and had comparatively weaker unions.
New York ranked among the worst performers, with more than half of third- through fifth-grade students failing their reading proficiency exams this year. Of the 23 top-performing states, 13 had Republican majorities and only four were Democratic. Even when the analysis extended to the top 32 states, just seven were Democratic, and only four of those ranked in the 25th percentile for union power.
Rachel Canter’s Mississippi Model
The study was led by Rachel Canter, director of education policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, who spent nearly two decades in Mississippi pushing systemic reforms. Her work helped transform Mississippi from one of the nation’s lowest-performing states in literacy to seventh in the country by 2024, along with 13th in math, up from near the bottom in 2013. Those gains came through policies such as requiring the lowest-scoring third graders to repeat the year, mandating extra teacher training at struggling schools, and conducting literacy screenings three times a year from kindergarten through third grade.
Canter measured how well states had adopted 18 literacy policies recommended by the advocacy group ExcelinEd. Republican and swing states had adopted an average of 13.5 of those policies, compared to just nine for Democratic states. teachers union literacy study Numerous Southern states, all Republican-leaning, followed similar reforms and dominated the top of Canter’s rankings.
Democrats Slow to Embrace Reform, Canter Says
Canter drew a direct line between union influence and the pace of policy change. “We found a strong, negative correlation between the two, the more powerful the unions, the fewer literacy policy principles the state had adopted,” she said. Her data came from a June ranking of union power by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and literacy figures from ExcelinEd.
“States dominated by Democrats have been slower to embrace similar reforms,” Canter said. “Organized labor might explain some of this gap.” She noted that Democratic officials rarely ask how to replicate Mississippi’s gains. “Democrats, however, don’t often ask me how to replicate Mississippi’s success,” she said. “They ask if it’s possible at all, given the power of teachers’ unions in their home states.”
The findings put pressure on Democratic governors and legislatures to move faster on literacy policy, particularly in large states like New York where reading failure rates remain high. Canter’s work suggests that adopting structured literacy screenings, grade retention policies, and targeted teacher training, regardless of political climate, is the clearest path to closing the gap.
