COMMENTARY: If your kid can read this, don’t thank teacher unions

In this year’s political campaigns, union-label governors-elect such as Rob Sand of Iowa and David Crowley of Wisconsin, along with a host of Big Labor federal politicians such as senators-elect James Talarico of Texas and Josh Turek of Iowa, gratefully accepted endorsements and ground support from teacher unions. Union-endorsed candidates Dan Osborn in Nebraska and Angie Nixon in Florida were less successful, with voters rejecting their agenda.

By doing so, Sand, Crowley, Talarico, Turek, Osborn, Nixon and many other politicians of their leanings are effectively siding against America’s children and parents, siding instead with the single most powerful force against genuine school reform and improved educational performance across the country.

Wielding the extraordinary power they are afforded by laws in most states that allow them to co-determine with elected public officials and/or their appointees how K-12 educators are compensated and managed, leaders of the giant National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers unions and their subsidiaries do a great deal of damage.

One simple and telling illustration is the “strong, negative correlation” across the 50 states between the power of union leaders and the adoption of “science of reading” principles and policies that have proved to be highly effective in improving learning outcomes.

Rachel Canter of the Progressive Policy Institute recently documented how and why states where a higher share of educators are unionized, and teacher union officials enjoy monopoly privileges, have been slower to adopt effective pro-literacy reforms than right-to-work states such as Mississippi and Arkansas.

In a September op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Canter explained how the Magnolia State got the “science of reading” ball rolling with its Literacy Promotion Act of 2013. It requires children with significantly subpar reading performance to be “held back at the end of the third grade,” and also requires “training and coaching” for teachers and school administrators at the “lowest-performing elementary schools.”

With these and a handful of other reforms in the Literacy Promotion Act, Mississippi’s National Assessment of Educational Progress fourth-grade scores have soared from tied for last among the 50 states in reading and math in 2013 to tying for seventh in reading and 13th in math in 2024. Other states that have enacted similar reforms, such as Alabama and Louisiana, have seen substantial improvements in their students’ NAEP reading scores.

Despite mounting evidence that the “Mississippi model” for reading instruction could greatly increase the share of schoolchildren nationwide (of all racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds) who achieve proficiency, union-dominated states New Mexico, Maryland and Massachusetts delayed adopting it for years. Other union strongholds continue to allow government schools to ignore what has been proven to work for reading instruction.

Consider New York. As freelance author Steven Yoder noted, a law signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2024 handed over $10 million to “the main state teachers union, New York State United Teachers,” to “use in developing” a new course instructing educators in how to teach reading. Unfortunately, according to literacy experts interviewed by Yoder, the course the union developed “promotes a teaching strategy that’s been found ineffective and could actually impede students’ progress.”

Diminishing and ultimately eliminating the coercive legal power of the teacher unions ought to be key objectives for any public servant sincerely interested in improving educational outcomes while keeping taxpayer costs for government education from spiraling out of control.

But Sand, Crowley, Talarico and Turek owe their shirts to the NEA and AFT. No one should expect them to do right by schoolchildren and parents

Mark Mix is the president of the National Right to Work Committee. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.