Study: Blue States with Strong Teachers Unions Influence Have, for Some Reason, the Lowest Student Literacy Rates in the Nation

You know those teachers unions only care about the kids.

It's all about the kids, you know. When they shut down the schools for a year and a half so that teachers could sit at home on their asses and literally phone in their lessons, that was all for the kids, too.

Their lazy, greedy stance has resulted in the worst literacy rates in the nation.

Blue states with strong teachers' unions overwhelmingly have worse student literacy scores than Republican states where educators don't have as much say over policy, a shocking new analysis found.

This is a novel use of the word "shocking" I wasn't previously aware of.

At least eight of the ten states where students had the worst literacy scores were liberal strongholds with politically powerful teachers' unions, while just five were Republican and one was a swing state, a recent assessment from the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) found.

New York -- where more than half of third- to fifth grade students failed their reading proficiency exams this year -- was among the worst-performing states, and also had some of the strongest teachers' unions.

The top-performing states, meanwhile, were overwhelmingly conservative and had less politically powerful unions -- of the 23 top-performing states, 13 were Republican majority and just 4 were Democratic hubs.

Even with the findings stretched out to the top 32 best-scoring states, a mere 7 were Democratic states and only four of them were ranked in the 25th percentile for teachers' union power, according to the Wall Street Journal.

...

And Canter's study found one overwhelming and shocking throughline -- the stronger the state's teachers' union the worse its student literacy scores were, results which did not exclusively follow party lines but strongly trended that way and often to the detriment of Democrats.

"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."

,,,

"We found a strong, negative correlation between the two -- the more powerful the unions, the fewer literacy policy principles the state had adopted," Canter said.

In New York state, they've decided they will just stop teaching students and, so parents won't know, they'll stop administering the Regents Exam, which tests for minimum educational achievement at graduation.

Not enough students from "different communities" were passing the minimum standards exam, while Asian students passed at a rate of 86% and white students at 87%.

So instead of solving the problem, or at least ameliorating it, they'll just destroy all records of their failure.

What is more shocking is that a board member of the Regents exam explains that asking black and Hispanic kids to pass a minimum-competency test is like... testing a fish to see if it can climb a tree. Fish can't climb trees, and therefore, she implies, black and Hispanic kids are just not capable of passing a minimum-standards test and should be excused from doing so.

But you're the Racists, Racists.

Neetu Arnold @neetu_arnold

New York Regents member Felicia Thomas-Williams on why she thinks students shouldn't have to take Regents exams to graduate:

"You don't assess a fish on climbing a tree because fish can't climb trees"

Maybe asking a student to read or do math on a test is a little more reasonable than asking a fish to climb a tree?

You see, "local communities" have "different assessments" so...

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 03:26 PM

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