Good day all. The title of this post is nice and bland. The devil is, as usual, in the details. An assessment has been done on states with major literacy issues and how strong their teacher’s unions are. The results do not put the unions in a good light.
For the last 60 years, since teachers were permitted to unionize, we have seen a slow degradation in test scores among children. It’s gotten significantly worse over the last few decades as colleges have had to lower their standards and actually teach students things they should have learned in high school, if not earlier. One of these is how to read. Now a report is out showing that states with a strong teachers union have lower literacy rates. Here are the details from Fox News:
States with stronger teachers’ unions tend to have weaker literacy performance and have adopted fewer of the policies credited with improving reading outcomes, according to a new analysis from a center-left think tank.
Eight of the 10 states to score among the worst in the Progressive Policy Institute’s (PPI) assessment of early-literacy policies were home to powerful teachers’ unions. Among the top 60% of states in terms of early-literacy policy scores, only four had strong teachers’ unions
The breakdown of the best and worst states and which political party is running things won’t surprise you at all.
Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina and Indiana, all Republican-leaning states with weak unions, were among the states with the best literacy outcomes. Maine, New York, Illinois, Hawaii, Washington and Rhode Island, blue states, were among the worst.
Now there are outliers. Maryland, which is a hard left state and kowtows to the teachers unions has posted decent reading scores. South Dakota, which is a Republican state, is having issues with their literacy scores.
Rachel Canter, PPI’s director of education policy, conducted the analysis with colleagues by comparing teacher-union strength rankings with states’ early-literacy policy scores. Canter is also one of the people behind the slate of educational reforms in Mississippi that propelled the state from among the worst in the country for educational outcomes to among the best.
I’ve heard about how Mississippi has turned things around. I don’t have the details, but this is something that other states should be looking into. The problem is not that states aren’t interested. It’s that the Teacher’s Unions are dead set against anything that might diminish their influence.
“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.”
Teachers’ unions, according to Canter, 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.
And that is the problem. The Democrats receive huge political donations from the Teachers Unions, both cash and “Volunteers,” and the unions expect to have their agenda pushed by the Democrats. The parents? They are irrelevant at best and obstacles to be removed when necessary. In states where the Republicans have control, they can reign in the unions to some extent.
Mississippi’s reforms, among other things, added kindergarten-through-third-grade screenings, literacy coaches, individual reading plans and held back third-graders who failed the state reading test. The state reinforced those measures with science-based reading instruction, increased teacher training and tougher licensing requirements.
Tweaks to teaching like these can be difficult to achieve in states with influential teachers’ unions, with labor reps arguing that the changes place undue burdens on educators.
And there is the problem. The Teachers Unions do not care at all about educating children. They want to indoctrinate them. They also see children as their property to use for social(ist) experiments to push their agendas.
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,” Canter said. “Organized labor might explain some of this gap.”
Multiple GOP-led Southern states have adopted educational reforms similar to those introduced in Mississippi. Those same states dominated the Progressive Policy Institute’s rankings of the states with the best student literacy.
It was a mistake to allow teachers to unionize. It is long past time to correct that mistake. This is going to take a multi-front campaign to either reduce their influence or break them entirely. You can start with ending mandatory union membership for teachers, and letting teachers restrict how their dues are used. This has been done in a few states and the damage to the unions was massive, with entire chapters basically going out of business.
I would also look into going after the unions directly. I’m thinking civil suits against local and national unions for things like, oh, I don’t know, child abuse? On the government front, when the unions start making their usual threats to strike, let them and then start replacing the striking teachers. That will take elected officials with spines of course, but if the parents back them, they could pull it off.
Another thing that could be done is setting up schools that are outside of the control of the Unions and “Professional Educators.” I believe these are called charter schools and as I understand it, they tend to be far better at educating children, primarily due to the teachers not being unionized. In any case, this information on how bad reading scores are in states with strong teachers unions can and should be used to nail them to the side of a barn. (Figuratively speaking of course)
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~
