The strength of teachers’ unions varies widely across states, a new analysis concludes. And unions face challengers for policy influence as new state-level organizations emerge, adding additional voices to education debates.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank that has been critical of teachers’ unions, released the report Wednesday.
Using a revised set of criteria, Melissa Arnold Lyon, a public administration professor at the University at Albany; independent researcher Sandy Frost Waldron; and Rebecca Jacobsen, an education policy professor at Michigan State University, updated the influential state-by-state rankings of teacher union strength Fordham created in 2012.
The report concludes that unions remain influential but somewhat less powerful in some states, thanks to the new voices and other shifts in labor law both nationally and in specific states.
Education policy, too, has dramatically changed in that time period, away from strong federal accountability and toward a more diffuse school choice landscape that includes many voucher programs and tax-credit scholarships.
The new criteria include 59 indicators related to five areas: resources and membership; political involvement; labor policies; policies that align with teachers’ union priorities, such as smaller class sizes; and perceived influence.
To gauge perceived political influence, for example, the researchers conducted a survey of at least three politicians, education leaders, and representatives from advocacy organizations in each state. Asked what organization had the most influence over education policy in their states, 33% of the 171 total respondents identified their state’s teachers’ union.
That may reflect the growth of state-level education reform organizations, the parent-rights movement, and other grassroots organizations that have emerged in recent years, Lyon said.
“There’s long been this perception that teachers’ unions are important actors in state education politics,” she said. “What we are finding is that they are still important, but they are not the only actors. In many cases, they are not even the primary actors.”
The analysis finds the strongest teachers’ unions are in blue states, with Democratic governors, that voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election: Vermont, California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Hawaii.
The states with unions ranked the weakest voted for President Donald Trump in 2024: Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Mississippi. Just one of those states, North Carolina, has a Democratic governor.
“Rather than treating teacher unions as a monolith, these rankings help us understand variation in the ways that teacher unions hold and exert influence across states, providing policymakers, advocates, and researchers with new knowledge on where and how teacher unions shape public education in the United States,” the researchers write.
Representatives from the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association did not comment on the report. The unions represent a combined 3.7 million active and retired teachers, paraprofessionals, public employees, and health workers.
Collective bargaining laws less influential
The researchers urge caution in drawing national conclusions from the analysis, which is intended to provide descriptive data for state-by-state comparisons and not to capture larger-scale changes over time, Lyon said.
The data do show relationships between some of the indicators and the report’s overall gauge of union strengths. The percentage of teachers who are union members, the percentage of voters who belong to teachers’ unions and workers in any union, and union revenues per teacher had the strongest correlation with overall rankings, the analysis shows.
Ninety percent of teachers in the 10 highest-ranking states are union members, compared with 60% of teachers in the remaining states and the District of Columbia, a school system where a large portion of teachers work in non-unionized charter schools. In 46 states and D.C., the percentage of teachers who belong to unions has declined since 2012, the analysis finds.
While the 2012 analysis emphasized the strength of state’s collective bargaining laws, they were not among the most important factors in 2026, Lyon said.
“They matter, but they are potentially not as decisive in shaping teachers’ union strength as they once were,” she said.
That’s likely because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Council 31, which determined that employees who are not union members do not have to pay “agency fees” to cover the cost of collective bargaining and other union activities, like lobbying.
On the other hand, Wisconsin had the largest decline in overall rankings between the two reports, falling from 18th in 2012 to 36th in 2026. That may be in part because of the effects of Act 10, a 2011 state law that limits collective bargaining there.
The effects of COVID, Red for Ed
Two other events that have occurred since Fordham’s first analysis 14 years ago have shifted dynamics for teachers’ unions in positive and negative ways, the authors write.
In 2018 and 2019, teachers held “Red for Ed” protests in conservative-leaning states including Arizona, Kentucky, and West Virginia to push for changes to school funding, education policy, and teacher pensions. The demonstrations and school walkouts helped strengthen policy coalitions and “demonstrated that even in weak union states, teachers could mobilize for collective action,” the authors write.
In 2020, schools across the country abruptly shifted to remote learning while the COVID-19 pandemic spread. As schools faced conflicting guidance about when and how to reopen their buildings, the perceived influence of teachers’ unions in those debates may have affected the public’s perception of the organizations, the report says.
“In some states, this moment strengthened the perceived influence of unions and may have helped them secure policy wins around working conditions,” the authors write. “In others, slow reopening timelines may have generated political backlash with long-term consequences for public support.”
While the highest-ranking states tended to score high in all indicators, and the lowest ranking states score low across the board, many states in the middle of the pack had outlying findings.
For example, Pennsylvania and Michigan had lower scores in policies favored by teachers’ unions and higher scores in every other indicator, perhaps a reflection of the historic influence of unions in the state, the authors write. Conversely, Maine ranked high in perceived influence but lower in all other indicators.
“States can have favorable laws but weak membership, or [they] can have strong perceived influence despite limited resources,” the analysis says.
