States where teachers unions wield greater political influence have adopted fewer evidence-based early literacy policies and generally post weaker student reading results, according to a new analysis from the center-left Progressive Policy Institute.
Rachel Canter, PPI’s director of education policy, compared the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s June 2026 ranking of teachers union strength with ExcelinEd’s tracker of 18 recommended early literacy policies. The comparison showed a strong inverse relationship between union power and adoption of the policies.
“We found a strong, negative correlation between the two — the more powerful the unions, the fewer literacy policy principles the state had adopted,” Canter told The New York Post.
Democratic-leaning states had adopted an average of nine of the 18 principles as of February, compared with about 13.5 in Republican and swing states, according to Canter’s analysis.
“States dominated by Democrats have been slower to embrace similar reforms,” Canter said. “Organized labor might explain some of this gap.”
The pattern also appears in student performance. The New York Post reported that at least eight of the 10 states with the weakest literacy scores were Democratic strongholds with powerful teachers unions, while states with stronger results were more likely to be Republican-led and have weaker unions. Of 23 top-performing states cited in coverage of the analysis, 13 were Republican-majority and four were Democratic.
New York offers one example. The state ranked 10th in union strength in Fordham’s analysis, while preliminary 2026 state exam results showed more than half of students in several elementary grades falling short of reading proficiency. Fifty-seven percent of third-graders, 52 percent of fourth-graders and 57 percent of fifth-graders did not meet the standard. Across grades three through eight, 48 percent of students scored proficient in English language arts.
Canter contrasts those results with Mississippi, where she spent nearly two decades advocating for education changes. Fordham ranks Mississippi among the states with the weakest teachers unions.
In 2013, Mississippi ranked near the bottom nationally in elementary and middle-school reading. By 2024, its fourth-graders tied for seventh nationally in reading and ranked 13th in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The state’s overhaul included retaining third-graders who failed to meet reading standards, providing additional training to teachers in low-performing schools and screening students for literacy three times a year from kindergarten through third grade. Parents were notified when their children fell behind. Several other Southern states subsequently adopted similar policies and also appear among the stronger literacy performers in Canter’s comparison.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Canter said the reaction she receives from Democratic audiences often focuses less on how to reproduce Mississippi’s changes than whether similar reforms are politically possible in states with stronger unions.
“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.”
One question she has heard is: “You’ve done your work in a red state. Do you really think blue states can do this?”
The relationship is not uniform. Republican states with relatively weak unions, including Wyoming and South Dakota, still score poorly on ExcelinEd’s literacy-policy tracker. The most comprehensive adoption of Mississippi-style reforms — followed by years of implementation — has been concentrated in a smaller group of Southern states.
Fordham’s 2026 report ranked Vermont, California, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Hawaii as the states with the strongest teachers unions, while Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, North Carolina and Mississippi ranked among the weakest.
Next time politicians demand more money for schools, first check to see if that cash is going to classrooms or teachers’ unions.
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