States with strong teachers’ unions are the least likely to adopt policies that improve early-literacy outcomes, Progressive Policy Institute Education Policy Director Rachel Canter explains, reporting the results of the Institute’s analysis.
“Powerful teachers’ unions are an obstacle to reform. But Mississippi’s dramatic breakthrough proves that evidence-based literacy can succeed anywhere,” Canter writes in her Wall Street Journal article, “Mississippi Fixed Its Schools. Here’s How Other States Can Too.”
Canter presents the new policies that helped rocket Mississippi, from a last-place tie in fourth grade reading and math in 2019 to seventh in reading and 13th math in 2024, as a template for states looking to improve their early education results.
Many states haven’t adopted these policies, Canter writes, noting the differences between those states that do, and don’t, embrace the reforms – such as the degree of influence of teachers’ unions:
“Organized labor might explain some of this gap. In June, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute updated its state by state ranking of teachers union strength. Sure enough, blue states like California, Massachusetts and New Jersey top the list, with red states like Mississippi, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Arkansas at the bottom.
“When my colleagues and I compared the Fordham teachers union strength ranking to ExcelinEd’s early literacy tracker, we found a strong, negative correlation between the two—the more powerful the unions, the fewer literacy policy principles the state had adopted.”
“At least eight of the ten states where students had the worst literacy scores were liberal strongholds with politically powerful teachers’ unions,” The New York Post notes in an article reporting on the study.
“Teachers' unions exert massive amounts of influence over both educational policies and how those policies are implemented in the classroom. This can make schools in states with stronger unions slower to adapt to challenges or to adopt new, better methods,” Fox News explains, adding that Canter’s findings also show a connection to a state’s political party leadership:
“Many of the states that underperformed in the Progressive Policy Institute’s study also have Democratic leadership. Teachers’ unions spend hundreds of millions of dollars every electoral cycle on electing Democrats and pushing left-of-center policies.
“States dominated by Democrats have been slower to embrace similar reforms. Of the 18 key early literacy policies tracked by ExcelinEd, a national, nonpartisan organization for education policy and advocacy, blue states have adopted 9, on average, compared with about 13.5 for purple and red states, as of February 2026.”
Among the top 60% of states in terms of early-literacy policy scores, only four had strong teachers' unions, Fox News reports.
Still, state teachers’ unions can be won over, or even defeated, Canter concludes, detailing recent victories in Mexico, Maryland and Massachusetts, “where advocates built the political will to adopt reforms despite pushback from their unions.”
