The Covid-19 pandemic prompted the largest disruption to American education in living memory. At the onset of the crisis in spring 2020, nearly every K–12 school, public and private, closed its doors. At the start of the next school year (see “Pandemic Parent Survey Finds Perverse Pattern,” features, Spring 2021), the decision to reopen for in-person instruction or to continue operating remotely varied widely among regions of the country, across school sectors—traditional district, charter, and private—and even from school to school in a given community. By the end of the 2020–21 academic year, most K–12 students were back in their classrooms (see “Parent Poll Reveals Support for Covid Safety Measures,” features, Winter 2022), but the emergence of new variants of the virus and strict quarantine rules continued to disrupt the day-to-day business of teaching and learning well into the 2021–22 school year.

Many observers and pundits opined that the great disruption could usher in an era of sweeping changes to the American education system. Would families flee the public sector in droves? Would homeschooling emerge as a viable option for many more children? Or would the crisis prompt greater investments in public education, increasing spending and expanding the publicly funded K–12 infrastructure downward in age to pre-kindergarten and upward to community college?

The pandemic also revealed that the partisan differences that define much of contemporary American politics run even deeper than many imagined, as opinions on Covid-related public-health measures—school closures, vaccines, face masks, and more—became inextricably tied to one’s political identity. Would the politics of education in the United States, with its long history of fractious but not necessarily partisan disagreements, be swept into the broader current of perpetual conflict between Democrats and Republicans? Did the last few years mark a great pivot point, signaling the emergence of two distinct, and distinctly partisan, views of how best to serve students?

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The results of the 16th annual Education Next survey, conducted in May 2022 with a nationally representative sample of 1,784 American adults (see the methodology sidebar for more details), complicate many of these grand prognostications. While last year’s survey revealed sharp changes in support for a variety of education reforms (see “Hunger for Stability Quells Appetite for Change,” features, Winter 2022), public opinion on most issues has since rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. There are, however, some important exceptions to this pattern. Americans’ perceptions of local school quality have declined since 2019, and support for homeschooling has risen over the course of the pandemic. Public enthusiasm for universal pre-K has increased dramatically, and support for higher teacher salaries is at its highest level in the survey’s history.

The Education Next survey also tells a more complex and nuanced story about the shifting relationship between political partisanship and public opinion on education issues. First, attitudes toward a series of longstanding debates are increasingly organized around political-party identification. Using Education Next survey data from 2007 to 2022, we reveal that the average difference in opinion between the two major parties has grown larger on many of the items we have tracked over the years. Second, we are witnessing the emergence of new issues that reflect exceptionally large partisan splits. Over the past two years, we have introduced questions about schools’ responses to the pandemic and recent debates about how to teach about the role of race in America’s past and present. In contrast to many of the education-policy topics that we have explored in prior iterations of the survey, respondents’ positions on these issues appear to map more directly to their partisan identities. However, there are notable exceptions to both patterns, resisting a simple narrative. Although rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans have diverged over time in their attitudes toward charter schools, members of the two parties continue to converge in their attitudes toward annual standardized testing. While the pandemic ushered in intense partisan disagreement over the benefits of face masks in schools, it enhanced bipartisan interest in the option for high school students to take some classes online. To say that the politics of education is increasingly partisan is not to say that it is exclusively partisan.

Public Opinion During the Pandemic

The Education Next survey found that certain school reforms, such as various forms of school choice, lost some favor at the peak of the pandemic but subsequently bounced back in the public’s esteem. Other concepts, such as mandatory standardized testing, have maintained favorability throughout. A majority of respondents now support increasing teacher salaries, even when they are told the average earnings of teachers in their state.

Perceptions of school quality. Despite the unprecedented disruptions to K–12 education, public evaluations of local and national school quality remained robust at the height of the Covid-19 crisis. In spring 2020, when schools across the country closed at the onset of the pandemic, 58% of Americans gave their local public schools a grade of an A or a B—only 2 percentage points down from the recent high of 60% in 2019, a statistically insignificant difference. Furthermore, 30% of Americans gave an A or a B grade to the public schools nationwide, the largest proportion recorded in the history of our survey. Two years later, as the pandemic and its attendant challenges persist, the public’s perceptions of school quality have slipped below pre-pandemic levels. Today, 52% of Americans give their local public schools an A or a B grade, and 22% give all schools nationwide a similarly high mark (see Figure 1).

School reform. Coinciding with these declines in confidence in the schools, support for various school reforms has ticked up from a pandemic low. Last year, we reported decreased public enthusiasm for a range of issues that spanned the ideological spectrum. Support for various forms of school choice dropped, as did support for free tuition to public colleges and universities. We concluded then that the public was still reeling from the enormous shock of the efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus and that the appetite for policy change of any kind was muted. As the public school system returns to a semblance of its former self, we are seeing public opinion on a variety of issues also returning to its pre-pandemic contours.

For example, support for charter schools ticked back up to 45% after lows of 39% in 2017 and 41% in 2021. Similarly, support for both universal vouchers (50%) and vouchers for low-income families (48%) has recovered from its 2021 levels (45% and 43%, respectively). Meanwhile, scholarships for low-income families funded by tax credits, which had 55% support in 2017 and 56% support a year ago, now enjoy the backing of 61% of Americans. On the opposite end of the political spectrum, support for making all public four-year and two-year colleges free to attend leapt back to 61% (from 43% in 2021) and 66% (from 60% in 2021), respectively.

Public enthusiasm for another pair of school choice reforms has also grown. Fifty-four percent of Americans favor allowing parents to homeschool their children, compared to 45% in 2017. Similarly, 47% of Americans now support education savings accounts—government-provided funds that can be used on educational expenses for families that choose not to send their child to a public school—compared to 37% in 2017.

Free preschool; online courses in high school. Back in 2014, we asked about government-funded universal pre-kindergarten (54% in favor) as well as government-funded pre-kindergarten for low-income families (62% in favor). Since then, support for both policies has risen: 71% of respondents back universal pre-K in 2022, and 72% support pre-K for low-income families.

A sizable majority of respondents (65%) say they would be willing to have a child of their own go through high school taking some academic courses online, although that support has declined from a high of 71% in spring 2020. The 2022 favorability rating, though, still represents a noteworthy increase from 2013, when 56% of respondents indicated their willingness to have their child take online high school classes.

Standardized testing.Throughout the pandemic, public support for annual standardized testing remained strong. In 2019, 74% of survey takers supported a federal requirement that all students be tested in math and reading each year in grades 3 to 8 and once in high school. Support for this requirement held steady at 71% and 72% in 2021 and 2022.

Social and emotional learning. The public’s opinions on the relative emphasis schools should place on academic performance has shifted sharply. In 2019, when asked how much schools should focus on students’ academic performance versus their social and emotional wellbeing, the public supported a 66% to 34% split in favor of academic performance. In 2021, as the pandemic continued to disrupt regular school operations, Americans divided almost evenly down the middle, with 52% preferring academic performance and 48% favoring social and emotional wellbeing. As some version of normalcy returns for most Americans, views on this question in 2022 have bounced back to 65%, nearly their pre-pandemic levels.

Education spending and teachers unions. Each year, we conduct a pair of survey experiments in which some respondents are randomly assigned generic questions intended to gauge their attitudes toward education spending in general and teacher salaries in particular, while other respondents, before answering the same questions, are randomly assigned to receive information about average per-pupil expenditures in their districts or average teacher salaries in their states. As seen in previous years, support for increased spending in general and support for higher teacher pay declines among respondents who receive information about current expenditures: to 48% from 59% with respect to overall spending and to 60% from 72% with respect to teacher salaries. In surveys before 2019, informing respondents of actual spending and salaries typically shifted support for boosting these spending categories from a majority to a minority position. Since 2019, however, support for increased teacher salaries—even when respondents are informed of actual compensation levels—has exceeded the majority threshold and is now at the highest level observed since our first survey in 2007. In contrast, positive evaluations of teachers unions remain unchanged since 2019 (43% in 2022). Much like public opinion regarding various reforms, attitudes toward increased spending and salaries and toward teachers unions dipped in 2021 but have since rebounded.

Specialized magnet schools. This year, we also asked two new questions about specialized public high schools for high-performing students, such as Stuyvesant High School in New York City or Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Northern Virginia, whose admissions policies have attracted considerable attention and debate (see Figure 2). A majority (55%) support specialized public high schools, with 27% opposed and 17% expressing no opinion. Fully 62% of Americans think a test should be one factor among many in admissions decisions in places with such high schools. Only 17% think a test should be the sole factor, and a mere 7% think tests should play no role in the admissions process.

Mask mandates; teaching about racism. We also asked respondents for their opinions on two recent controversies: face mask mandates in schools to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 and the heightened attention in K–12 classrooms to racism as a part of the historical and contemporary American experience (see Figure 3). Neither support for (45%) nor opposition to (35%) face masks commands a majority, with the remainder taking a neutral position. Attitudes toward teaching about racism are also broadly distributed. A plurality of 39% thinks their local public schools are placing about the right amount of emphasis on slavery, racism, and other challenges faced by Black people in the United States. However, 35% of Americans think their local public schools place too little emphasis on these issues, while 27% think there is currently too much emphasis placed on them.

Both topics are subject to exceptionally large partisan disagreements. About 65% of Democrats support face mask mandates in schools, with 15% opposed. Among Republicans, the breakdown is essentially the reverse: 19% in support and 63% opposed. With respect to teaching about racism in the classroom, there is no meaningful distinction between the proportions of Democrats (37%) and Republicans (39%) who are content with their local schools’ current approach. The partisan difference appears when we consider those who are displeased with the status quo. Fully 54% of Democrats think their local schools are placing too little emphasis on racial matters, compared to 10% of Republicans. Meanwhile, 51% of Republicans think there is currently too much emphasis on racial matters, compared to 9% of Democrats.

Partisanship and Public Opinion over Time

While the divides between Democrats and Republicans on face masks and teaching about racism are eye-popping, they do not shed light on whether public opinion on education issues is growing more partisan in general or if these new issues are an exception to the rule. The Education Next survey offers a unique opportunity to explore the extent to which partisan differences have changed over time. We have a long tradition of repeating questions each year—with some items going all the way back to our inaugural survey in 2007—to track rising or falling public sentiment. We frequently pull from our polling archive to contextualize the current year’s results, and we described the long-term trends in detail in 2016 to mark the poll’s 10th anniversary (see “Ten-Year Trends in Public Opinion,” features, Winter 2017”). This year, we leverage this wealth of longitudinal public-opinion data to understand the evolving role of partisanship in the public’s attitudes toward education.

There are 15 survey items that have appeared in identical or near-identical forms over the course of at least 10 years. In Figure 4, we plot the absolute value of the partisan gap (the difference in support between Democrats and Republicans or the analogous difference for survey items that do not inquire about respondents’ support or opposition) for each item over time. We then fit a linear trend (the dotted line) to capture the average yearly rate of change in the partisan gap. The value m in the upper-left corner of each plot displays the slope of each line. This approach allows us to observe which issues have grown more partisan over time, which issues have held steady in this regard, and which issues have become less partisan.

Note that this approach does not provide evidence for or against the influence of a related—and often conflated—phenomenon: partisan polarization. Polarization refers to the extent to which people have adopted more extreme views relative to more centrist or moderate views (that is, a shift of opinion toward the poles at the expense of the middle). Growing partisan gaps could be the result of heightened polarization if Democrats and Republicans are systematically shifting from moderate positions (such as “neither support nor oppose” for many of the survey items) toward firm positions of support or opposition. However, growing partisan gaps could also be the result of greater internal consistency in each party (that is, rank-and-file Democrats increasingly expressing views that align with the conventional Democratic position, and likewise for Republicans), even if there is no greater tendency toward more extreme positions. The latter phenomenon is often referred to as partisan sorting.

The difference is not just academic. In the case of polarization, the potential middle ground is truly vanishing. In the case of sorting, the opportunity for compromise and consensus remains, but there may be strong institutional barriers to achieving it. Because our analysis here does not distinguish between the two, we argue only that public opinion on education is growing increasingly partisan.

Teachers and their unions. The biggest shifts in partisanship show up on the survey items that inquire about teachers and their unions. Democrats tend to be more supportive of higher salaries for teachers and typically view teachers unions more favorably than their Republican counterparts do. The partisan gap on teacher salaries has increased substantially over time. In the version of the question in which respondents are told the average teacher salaries in their states, the gap has increased by about 1 percentage point annually. In the version of the question without salary data, the gap has increased by about 0.9 percentage points per year.

Attitudes toward teachers unions have diverged even more dramatically. The partisan gap on views of teachers unions has seen a yearly increase of about 1.4 percentage points on average. In 2022, the difference between Democrats and Republicans in positive evaluations of teachers unions is nearly 40 percentage points (see Figure 5). As we consider the role of partisanship in relation to many of the longstanding debates in the politics of education, the largest changes appear to revolve around Democrats’ and Republicans’ shifting attitudes toward teachers, how much they ought to be compensated, and how much influence they ought to have over schools.

National academic standards. The political battle over the Common Core State Standards peaked as the Obama administration came to a close and the 2016 presidential election campaign began in earnest. Although support for the standards declined across the board as they encountered political resistance, Democrats remain more supportive of the Common Core than Republicans. However, the intensity displayed in debates over this issue—as exhibited by the large partisan gaps in the 2014, 2015, and 2016 iterations of the survey—was consistently more muted when we asked a question that did not mention the Common Core “brand” but simply referred to K–12 academic standards that were the same across states.

We can observe the same dynamic from a different perspective by examining the changing partisan gaps for the two versions of this question. In 2012 and 2013, before the standards became entangled in national politics, the partisan gap in support for the Common Core was only a few percentage points wide. However, over the next few years, this gap increased by about 0.9 percentage points annually. By contrast, the partisan gap for the generic question about national standards started smaller and only increased by about 0.2 percentage points per year.

Education spending. Our analysis also reveals moderate increases in partisanship for questions about overall education spending (which Democrats are more likely to want increased) and charter schools (which garner more support among Republicans). On the version of the education-spending question in which respondents are told average per-pupil expenditures in their local school districts, the partisan gap has increased by about 0.6 percentage points per year. On the version of the question that does not supply this information, the partisan gap has increased by a similar rate of about 0.7 percentage points per year.

Charter schools. The partisan gap on charter schools is growing slightly faster: about 0.8 percentage points annually. This conspicuous increase is unique among the various school-choice initiatives we have tracked over the years. However, support for the general concept of school choice is highly divisive, with 60% of Republicans, but only 41% of Democrats, expressing a favorable position.

Opinion on school quality. The public’s perceptions of school quality in their own communities and nationwide are also more partisan than they were in the first few years of the Education Next survey. Historically, the proportions of Democrats and Republicans who award their local public schools a grade of an A or a B have differed little or not at all. However, respondents’ assessments of their local schools have diverged along party lines by about 0.2 percentage points per year on average, with most of that change concentrated in the last two years as Republicans evaluated their local schools less positively than their Democratic counterparts.

By contrast, views of schools nationwide have shown larger differences along party lines over the years, with a slightly higher proportion of Democrats giving the nation’s schools an A or a B grade. The national assessments have diverged by about 0.3 percentage points per year on average. Although the annual shifts are modest, they reveal a growing role for partisanship over time in the public’s evaluations of the public school system.

Stability and convergence. Not every longstanding debate is increasingly shaped by partisanship. The partisan gap on annual testing—which has the support of more than 70% of both Democrats and Republicans—has actually been decreasing by about 0.3 percentage points per year on average. We also observe slight reductions in the partisan gaps on tax credit scholarships (0.2 percentage points per year) and universal vouchers (0.1 percentage points per year), as well as trivial increases in the partisan gaps on online classes in high school (0.1 percentage points per year) and low-income vouchers (0.1 percentage points per year).

In short, although partisanship may be playing an increasingly important role in public opinion on many education issues, this dynamic is not universal. With respect to attitudes toward online learning and some forms of school choice, the differences between Democrats and Republicans remain largely unchanged over the last decade. Attitudes toward annual testing have even begun to converge.

Newer topics. For some issues examined in our survey we have fewer historical data points, and the current magnitude of the partisan gap varies considerably among these issues. We observe relatively modest differences between Democrats and Republicans in their support for specialized high schools (4 percentage points), education savings accounts (6 percentage points), and how much schools should focus on students’ academic performance versus their social and emotional well-being (an 8-percentage-point difference in the average value assigned to academic performance). On the other end of the spectrum, we see potent partisan disagreements in support for face-mask mandates in schools (46 percentage points), free public four-year and two-year college (44 and 40 percentage points, respectively), teaching about racism in K–12 classrooms (a 42-percentage-point difference in the proportion indicating that local schools currently put “too much” emphasis on the issue), teachers’ right to strike (36 percentage points), low-income pre-K (36 percentage points), and universal pre-K (32 percentage points). Many of these issues are relatively new to the mainstream political agenda in the United States, suggesting that some elements of the contemporary debate have shifted toward territory that may be less amenable to the cross-party consensus building that has characterized education policymaking over the last few decades.

Conclusions

After holding steady during the last two disruptive and difficult years, the public’s perceptions of school quality—both close to home and around the country—have declined slightly. This shift has corresponded with an uptick in support for a variety of reforms that may have lost some of their luster during the pandemic as communities struggled to maintain even the status quo. As the country anxiously seeks to put the worst of the crisis behind it, public opinion on many of these proposed initiatives has reverted back to form.

But not everything is as it used to be. New issues have moved to the forefront of the education-policy debate, garnering unusually partisan reactions. Among the issues that have hardened the political battle lines are:

• the role of teachers unions
• Covid-19 mitigation measures
• efforts to expand the range of fully publicly funded education downward to pre-K and upward to college
• the form and content of K–12 instruction regarding race and racism

The rising role of partisanship in education politics is not merely a function of the recent emergence of exceptionally politicized issues. The public’s attitudes toward many longstanding education debates have also grown gradually but undeniably more partisan over the last two decades. There are exceptions to this pattern, and, as a whole, the field of education still appears to be riven by smaller partisan divides than many other domains of public policy and debate. However, despite the education-policy community’s long history of trying to keep political pressures at arm’s length, public opinion on education issues seems to be increasingly drawn into the powerful current of partisanship in contemporary American politics.

David M. Houston is assistant professor of education policy at George Mason University. Paul E. Peterson is Henry Lee Shattuck professor of government at Harvard University, director of Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG), and senior editor of Education Next. Martin R. West, the academic dean and Henry Lee Shattuck professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is deputy director of PEPG and editor-in-chief of Education Next.

More from the 2022 Education Next Survey: “Parental Anxieties over Student Learning Dissipate as Schools Relax Anti-Covid Measures“

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Houston, D.M., Peterson, P.E., and West, M.R. (2023). Partisan Rifts Widen, Perceptions of School Quality Decline: Results from the 2022 Education Next survey of public opinion. Education Next, 23(1), 8-19.

“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” commented former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, while seeking a return to office in 2021. His Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, wove McAuliffe’s remark into a campaign that was making education its centerpiece. When Youngkin defeated McAuliffe in an upset, many pundits declared parent activism to be a deciding factor.

Virginia was hardly the only place where controversies over parent rights boiled over in the past year. Activists fed up with school closures, masking policies, and curricular choices interrupted school-board meetings around the nation. The National School Boards Association complained about threats directed at board members, provoking an investigation by the U.S. Attorney General. Three school-board members in San Francisco were defeated in a recall election after voting to rename Abraham Lincoln High School and eliminate the exam requirement for admission to prestigious Lowell High School (see “School Board Shakeup in San Francisco,” features, Fall 2022).

The parental protests, together with school responses to the Covid pandemic, acquired a partisan edge. Republican and Democratic governors regularly disagreed about the necessity of mask wearing, social distancing, and vaccinations for the young. The districts that kept school doors closed longest were usually located in Democratic-leaning places the media labels blue. The 18 states that enacted school-choice legislation in 2021 and 2022 are mostly tinted red, or Republican-leaning (see “School Choice Advances in the States,” features, Fall 2021).

How have American parents at large responded to these conflicts? Have measures designed to slow the Covid pandemic antagonized them? Have progressive attempts to introduce concepts rooted in Critical Race Theory into school curricula weakened parental attachments to district schools? Are more parents fleeing to alternative forms of schooling? Have education policy and practice become more partisan? We asked about these matters in the Education Next survey administered online to a nationally representative sample of parents of school-age children in May 2022 (for survey details, see methodology sidebar in our companion essay, “Partisan Rifts Widen, Perceptions of School Quality Decline,” features).

Our findings are mixed. On one hand, parents’ distress about their children’s academic and social-emotional wellbeing subsided sharply in spring 2022 from the heights reached in fall 2021, when many schools closed classrooms and shifted to online learning. For example, the percentage of children who have parents who say they are “very satisfied” with the instruction and activities provided by their child’s school increased to 48% from 31% between fall 2020 and spring 2022. We also find that parents of nearly two thirds of all schoolchildren are satisfied with their school’s approach to teaching about slavery, race, and racism. On the other hand, the percentage of parents giving their local schools a grade of A or B declined to 59% in 2022 from 64% in 2020. During this same period, the percentage of parents choosing an alternative to the traditional public school increased, and parents expressed higher levels of satisfaction with their child’s school if their student was attending a private or charter school rather than a district school.

Partisanship is fully apparent when parents report on their children’s behaviors, school policies, and their assessments of how measures taken by schools to combat Covid are affecting their children’s academic and social wellbeing. Children of Democratic parents in states that Joe Biden won in the 2020 election are more than twice as likely to be vaccinated than children of Republicans in states won by Donald Trump. Similarly, children in blue states were more likely than those in red states to be told they must wear a mask during the 2021–22 school year. According to their parents, children of Republicans were more likely than those of Democrats to have suffered, rather than benefitted, both academically and socially, from measures taken by schools to combat Covid. Children in blue states are more likely to attend a school where parents view fighting and bullying as a problem than those in red states. Republican parents are more likely to complain about how their child’s school approaches the topics of slavery and racism if they live in a blue state than a red state. The reverse is true for Democrats.

Signs of restlessness on the part of some families notwithstanding, the overall picture shows less change than media reports portray. A wholesale mass exodus from traditional public schools has not occurred. And despite partisan differences in responses to Covid, the parents of children in states both blue and red report less anxiety about their children’s academic and social progress than was the case two years earlier.

Student Enrollment by School Sector

“Where are the students? For a second straight year, school enrollment is dropping.”

“Declining enrollment clobbers California’s schools.”

“Enrollment Declines Haunt School Districts.”

These headlines from national and statewide news media are not misleading. The U.S. Department of Education, which releases enrollment data two to three years after events have occurred, says a decline of 1.6 million traditional-public-school and public-charter-school students occurred between fall 2019 and fall 2020. Burbio, an organization that tracks districts that account for 90% of all enrollments and on a faster timeline, reports that “nationally, middle school (grades 6–8) shows a 2.2% decline for 2021/22 versus 2020/21.”

Several factors are contributing to enrollment decline. The U.S. birth rate fell between 2014 and 2019, though a growth in immigrant families partially offsets that trend. Some parents kept preschool, kindergarten, and 1st-grade children at home when infection fears were rampant and school buildings were closed. A larger than typical share of adolescents dropped out when schools went digital and job opportunities proliferated.

Even among students who remained in school, the traditional public sector lost ground. Our polling data indicate that district-operated schools lost 4% of student enrollments to other types of schooling between 2020 and 2022. In spring 2020, 81% of schoolchildren were said by their parents to be enrolled in district schools. In November 2020, at the pandemic’s height, that percentage had tumbled to 72%. This 9-percentage-point drop might partly have been the result of actual sector shifts, but it is also likely that some parents were uncertain of how best to classify their child’s school when teaching was online. For whatever reason, the district share bounced back to 77% by the time of Education Next’s spring 2021 poll, when most district schools had resumed in-person instruction. Now, our current survey shows no further change in district enrollment as of spring 2022, leaving the district share 4 percentage points below what it had been two years earlier (see Figure 1). If that percentage is accurate, it means that nearly 2 million students have shifted from traditional public schools to alternative school arrangements.

All three of the alternatives to district schools—charter, private, and homeschool—appear to have gained from the shift away from the district school. The private-school share ticked up to 10% in 2022, as compared to 8% in spring 2020. The charter-school share climbed to 7% from 5% over the same period, while the homeschooling share edged upward to 7% from the surprisingly high 6% level registered in 2020, which itself had constituted a doubling of the 3% share in 2016 reported by the U.S. Department of Education. These percentages are all subject to survey error, but consistency over Education Next’s three most recent surveys, coupled with reports of enrollment declines from state and district agencies, as well as growth signals from the private, charter, and homeschooling sectors, suggest that a modest but significant shift is occurring in the choices families are making about the schools they want their children to attend. Still, there is no indication of wholesale abandonment of the traditional public school.

Parent Satisfaction and Assessment of Learning Loss

Some of the public rhetoric would have one think otherwise. “Now, there’s a new interest group—parents. They are never going to unsee what they saw in 2020 and 2021, and they’re going to fight to make sure they never feel powerless when it comes to their children’s education again,” opines Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children. Across the country, parent organizations are fighting to improve educational opportunities and outcomes for low-income students (see “Beyond Bake Sales,” features, Fall 2022). Former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, in her 2022 book Hostages No More, asserts that the “visionaries who have fought [the] fight [for education freedom] have gained potent new allies: the millions of American parents who are fed up with being considered nuisances and dismissed by the public school establishment.” It is true that, at the height of the pandemic, parental anxiety about their children’s education had intensified. But apprehension receded substantially by spring 2022.

Parents’ concerns likely diminished in part because schools relaxed policies designed to minimize Covid spread. Although parents of nearly 80% of children said they were required to wear masks at some point during the 2021–22 school year, by May 2022, only 11% of children were required to do so, according to their parents.

However, 44% of children still had not received a Covid vaccination by that time, according to their parents. The percentage who remained unvaccinated ranged from a high of 58% for children in kindergarten through 2nd grade, to 48% for those in 3rd through 5th grade, to 40% for those in middle school, down to 31% for high school students.

Differences in vaccination rates also varied with the political coloration of the child’s home state. Only 36% of students who have Republican parents and live in a red state had been vaccinated, as compared to 47% of those with Republican parents in a blue state, 63% of those with Democratic parents in a red state, and 77% of those with Democratic parents in a blue state (see Figure 2). The difference between a typical Republican in a red state and a typical Democrat in a blue state is greater than two-to-one.

Mask mandates also varied dramatically by partisanship: 34% of students whose parents are Republicans and live in red states were never required to mask up in the 2021–22 school year, as compared to 20% of those in blue states, 21% of those with Democratic parents living in red states, and 5% of those with Democratic parents living in blue states. However, mask mandates declined rapidly by the end of the school year nationwide. Only 14% of children of blue-state Democrats and 2% of children of red-state Republicans were said by their parents to be attending a school that still had a mask mandate as of May.

The relaxation of Covid measures coincided with a marked improvement in parents’ assessments of their children’s wellbeing. In November 2020, Education Next polling data revealed widespread parental worries about the learning loss, social isolation, emotional distress, and physical inactivity induced by school closures, online learning programs, and other measures designed to prevent Covid spread. By spring 2022, however, parental distress had subsided. At this time, only 30% of parents said they thought their child was learning “somewhat” or “a lot” less because of the pandemic, down from 60% in the fall of 2020 (see Figure 3). Similarly, the percentage of parents who thought the measures in place to prevent Covid spread were adversely affecting their child’s academic knowledge and skills fell to 24% in spring 2022 from 36% in fall 2020 (see Figure 4). In 2022, the parents of only 9% of students say they are not confident their child will “catch up” from Covid-related learning loss within a year or two; the parents of the rest either are confident the child will catch up (49% of students) or perceive no learning loss in the first place (43% of students).

Along these same lines, the percentage of students whose parents say Covid-mitigation measures are adversely affecting their child’s social relationships fell to 33% in 2022 from 51% in 2020. Parent perceptions of negative effects on emotional wellbeing fell to 31% of students from 41% over the same period. For physical fitness, the drop was to 26% from 44% of students.

When asked for a more general assessment, parents of 48% of students say in 2022 they are “very satisfied” with the instruction and activities provided at their child’s school, as compared to just 31% in late 2020. The percentage “somewhat” or “very” dissatisfied with the child’s schooling shrank to 11% from 23%.

Even so, Republicans remain considerably less sanguine than Democrats about the ongoing effects of measures taken by schools to fight Covid. Forty-four percent of the children of Democratic parents are said to have benefitted academically from these measures during the 2021–22 school year, and only 18% are said to have suffered from them. But among the children of Republican parents, only 24% are said to have benefitted, and 33% are said to have suffered. A similar pattern obtains for social relationships, emotional wellbeing, and physical fitness in blue states and red states alike. These partisan differences of opinion are especially striking given that the places where large numbers of Republicans reside tended to have less-aggressive mitigation measures in place. In short, the political orientations of parents shaped their assessments of the effects of school measures taken to mitigate Covid on their own children’s academic, social, emotional, and physical wellbeing.

Parent Perceptions by School Sector

Although parental anxiety about potential learning loss during the pandemic declined across the board over the past year, their residual concern varies with the type of school their children attend. Parents of 26% of district children say their children’s academic skills were adversely affected by anti-Covid measures, as compared to parents of 19% of children in private schools and of 15% in charter schools. According to parents, only 14% of private-school children were learning less because of the pandemic during the 2021–22 school year, as compared to 27% of children attending charter schools and 33% of children in the district sector. Small percentages of children have parents who do not think their child will catch up—10% of those at district schools, 5% at charters, and an even smaller percentage at private schools. Children of parents reporting negative effects on their social relationships range from a high of 35% for those in district schools to 29% and 28% for those attending private and charter schools, respectively. A similar pattern appeared when we inquired about the impact of anti-Covid measures on their child’s emotional wellbeing—33%, 29%, and 24% across the three sectors (ordered in the same way). Negative impacts on physical fitness are indicated by parents of 27% of district children, 23% of those in private schools, and 25% of those in charters.

Mask requirements also varied by sector. Only 19% of children in district schools were not required to wear a mask at any point during the school year, but 33% of those in private schools and 26% attending charter schools avoided that requirement. District schools had more-stringent mask requirements, even though they had higher vaccination rates than private schools. Parents report that 59% of district and charter students were vaccinated, but only 48% of those in private school were.

Bullying and Fighting in Schools

With many educators reporting an uptick in violence within schools as in-person instruction resumed, we also asked parents about their experiences with their own children’s schools. The parents of 40% of students say “fighting or bullying” was a problem at the child’s school in 2022, while the parents of 9% say it was a “serious” problem. Children living in blue states are more likely than those in red states to have parents who express concerns about fighting and bullying at school. According to parents, 43% of blue-state children face this problem, as compared to 35% of red-state children. This pattern is similar for children of both Republican and Democratic parents.

The parents of Black and Hispanic students are more likely than those of white students to view fighting and bullying as a problem in their child’s school. For 45% of Hispanic students and 44% of Black students, parents report fighting and bullying as a problem at their school, as compared to 37% of white students. For 16% of Black students, parents report that bullying and fighting are a “serious” problem, a rate nearly twice as high as those for Hispanic and white students.

There are also large differences across school sectors in the perception of fighting and bullying as problems. The parents of only 18% of private-school students report that they are problems, as compared to 30% of charter-school students and 43% of district students.

Instruction on Race

Allegations that Critical Race Theory had leapt from the academy into K–12 curricula stirred considerable controversy during the Virginia gubernatorial race, and many school districts across the country are reconsidering their approaches to teaching about slavery and race relations. To see what parents think, we asked them the following question:

“Some parents think their child’s school places too little emphasis on slavery, racism, and other challenges faced by Black people in the United States. Other parents think their child’s school places too much emphasis on these topics. What is your opinion?”

Most parents seem to be satisfied with the approach taken by their local school: The parents of 64% of children say their school gives “about the right amount” of emphasis to the topic. However, the parents of 25% of students think the topic is given “too little” emphasis and the parents of 11% of students think it is emphasized “too much.” The parents of half of Black students think the topic needs more attention, a view shared by parents of only 25% of Hispanic students and 17% of white students. An even larger difference was between students with Democratic parents and students with Republican parents; 37% of the Democratic parents think this topic is emphasized too little, while 19% of the Republican parents think it is given too much attention.

Parents with children in private schools are more likely than others to believe their child’s school has struck the right balance in this area. The parents of 76% of private-school students report that their child’s school places about the right amount of emphasis on this topic, as compared to 58% and 63% in the charter and district sectors, respectively. The parents of the 42% of charter-school students who are dissatisfied with their school’s approach are evenly split between those wanting more and those wanting less emphasis on this topic. As for district students, the parents of 26% want to see greater emphasis, while the parents of 11% want less.

Parental Support for School Choice

Over the past two years, at least 18 states enacted new laws introducing or expanding school-choice options, including relaxation of constraints on charter-school expansion and new and more-expansive tax-credit-funded scholarship and education-savings-account programs. These legislative shifts are echoed by certain shifts in parental opinion. Support for scholarships for low-income children funded by tax credits edged upward by 7 percentage points between 2019 and 2022 to reach 66% of parents. Education savings accounts, too, gained some ground. We inquired about education savings accounts by asking parents whether they favored state policies that provide parents who do not send their children to public school “with money they can spend only for educational expenses, such as private school tuition, tutoring and transportation.” The proportion of parents favoring the policy increased from 45% to 51% between 2017 and 2022. During this same period, support for charter schools rose from 44% to 51% and backing for a universal private-school voucher program increased from 52% to 57%. However, the gains for charters and vouchers predate the onset of the pandemic. When we asked parents whether they favor “school choice” in general (rather than any specific program), a 52% majority said they do and only 29% said they do not, with the remainder not taking a position either way.

In short, no major shifts in parental opinion with respect to school choice have occurred since the onset of the pandemic. Although tax credits and education savings accounts have gained traction, opinion with respect to charters and vouchers, the more familiar forms of school choice, remain much as they had been before Covid. Even in an age of pandemics and political unrest, change comes slowly in American education.

Conclusions

By spring 2022, schools in America had returned, for the most part, to normal practices. Schools were generally open for in-person learning, and masks were usually left at home. Parent satisfaction with schools had risen; parents were less fearful that their children were suffering learning loss. They were less concerned about how Covid-mitigation measures were affecting their children’s social relationships, emotional wellbeing, and physical fitness. They expressed satisfaction with the amount of attention schools were giving to the contentious issues of slavery, race, and racism.

Yet the educational system’s response to the pandemic had left a mark. School districts appear to have lost 4% of their share of K–12 enrollment—a sizable decline. Each of the other school sectors has been less severely disrupted by anti-Covid measures, and, perhaps for this reason, each gained a slightly larger slice of the enrollment pie. Public support for school-choice measures, especially tax-credit-funded scholarships and education savings accounts, increased modestly, though charter schools and vouchers registered no such gains. In other words, gradual change in education has taken place, and partisanship colored parental reaction to Covid measures in various ways, but changes in parental views about the schooling of their children have been nowhere near as dramatic as protagonists in the public debate over the American school would have one believe.

Paul E. Peterson is Henry Lee Shattuck Profes­sor of Government at Harvard University, director of Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG), and senior editor of Education Next. David M. Houston is assistant professor of education policy at George Mason University. Martin R. West, Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is deputy director of PEPG and editor-in-chief of Education Next.

More from the 2022 Education Next Survey: “Partisan Rifts Widen, Perceptions of School Quality Decline: Results of the 2022 Education Next Survey of Public Opinion“

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Peterson, P.E., Houston, D.M., and West, M.R. (2023). Parental Anxieties over Student Learning Dissipate as Schools Relax Anti-Covid Measures: But parent reports indicate some shift away from district schools to private, charter, and homeschooling alternatives. Education Next, 23(1), 20-27.

Calamities often disrupt the status quo. After the influenza pandemic that began during World War I and lasted two years, many Europeans turned to socialism, fascism, and Bolshevism. In the United States, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 followed by the Great Depression induced many people to reject laissez-faire capitalism in favor of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, with its social safety-net programs, public-works projects, and government regulations.

Yet not all such catastrophic events lead to an appetite for change. After World War I, Americans, unlike Europeans, longed for a return to what President Warren G. Harding termed “normalcy.” The immigration door slammed shut, isolationism raged, and popular fear of Communism led to the Red Scare.

The 15th annual Education Next survey investigates how Americans are responding to the worst pandemic since 1919. In the realm of education, a desire for sweeping reform might well be expected, given the pandemic’s particularly severe toll on K–12 schooling. While few children suffered serious illnesses, the effects of the pandemic on the nation’s youth were nonetheless dramatic. Schools across the country were shuttered for months, some for more than a year. State-mandated testing, a tool for holding schools accountable, was largely abandoned. Remote instruction, implemented under crisis conditions, failed to live up to the claims of virtual-learning enthusiasts. Learning loss was severe, especially among children from low-income families. According to parents, children’s friendships and social ties suffered. Even their physical fitness was put at risk. Obesity, drug abuse, mental health challenges, and teenage suicides appeared to be on the rise. In desperation, some parents shifted their children from district schools to private schools, homeschooling, and other options that provided more in-person learning.

In the political sphere, expectations for large-scale innovation are running high. Conservatives hope to restrict union power, reinstate test-based accountability, and expand school choice. Legislators in seven states have created new programs offering parents alternatives to the traditional system, making 2021 the most successful year on record for school-choice advocates (see “School Choice Advances in the States,” features, Fall 2021). Progressives are pushing for higher teacher pay, free college, and preschool for all.

What, then, is the state of public opinion as parents and school leaders nationwide transition back to in-person schooling? Is the public demanding innovation that can make up for educational losses over the past year? Or do people want a quiet return to the familiar?

This survey is a continuation of our long-standing annual poll of public attitudes on education issues. This year, we interviewed a nationally representative sample of 1,410 adults in late May and early June. Our survey repeats many questions asked in past surveys, making it possible to see how the pandemic has affected public opinion. As in previous years, the survey contains a number of experiments in which we split the sample into two or three groups at random and then ask each group a variation on the same question. These experiments allow us to gauge how different question wordings and the provision of additional information affect participants’ responses (see sidebar on survey methodology).

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Opinion Shifts

Our survey results should temper expectations for major shifts in any political direction—and perhaps post a warning to advocates of any stripe. At least when it comes to education policy, the U.S. public seems as determined to return to normalcy after Covid as it was after the flu pandemic a century ago. To find out, we compare public views on 15 policy questions in June 2021 with views on the same questions two years earlier—before anyone had heard of Covid-19 (see Figure 1). On 10 of the 15 items, support for the proposed policy declines by 5 percentage points or more—a statistically significant difference. Drops in support are evident regardless of whether the policy is backed by those on the right or those on the left. In one case—the idea of making four-year public colleges free to attend—the drop is as large as 17 percentage points. On four additional policy items, support levels fall, but the change is not statistically significant. On one item—in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants who graduate from a state high school—we find no change. On no policy item do we identify a positive shift in support between 2019 and 2021. We do show an increase in approval for universal preschool between 2014 and 2021, but in the absence of information on opinion in 2019, we are unable to say whether the upward jump took place before or during the pandemic.

While many of the policies we asked about already exist in pockets around the country, in most places they represent a change to the status quo. In the one case where the policy is now universal (maintaining the federal requirement that students take annual state tests), we do not observe a statistically significant change. The following illustrates the shifts in public opinion between 2019 and 2021 on policy items for which the same question was posed on both occasions.

Support for increasing school expenditures in respondent’s district

• Among respondents informed of current per-student expenditure level: Down 11 points (to 39% from 50%)
• Among those not informed of current per-student
  expenditure level: Down 5 points (to 57% from 62%)

Support for increasing teacher salaries in respondent’s state

• Among those informed of current average teacher
  salary in their state: Down 3 points (to 53% from 56%)
• Among those not informed of current average state
  salary: Down 5 points (to 67% from 72%)

Support for free or reduced-cost education

• Preschool programs for all four-year-olds (2014 to 2021): Up 13 points (to 67% from 54%); Caveat: Increase in support
  for universal preschool may have occurred prior to 2019.
• Free four-year public colleges: Down 17 points (to 43% from 60%)
• Making immigrants eligible for in-state tuition: No change (44%)

Support for school accountability measures

• Common Core Standards: Down 7 points (to 43%
  from 50%)
• Similar standards across states: Down 7 points
  (to 59% from 66%)
• Requiring testing in grades 3–8 and high school:
  Down 3 points (to 71% from 74%)
• Merit pay for teachers: Down 1 point (to 46% from 47%)

Support for school choice

• Charter schools: Down 7 points (to 41% from 48%)
• Universal school vouchers: Down 10 points (to 45%
  from 55%)
• School vouchers for low-income families only:
  Down 6 points (to 43% from 49%)
• Tax-credit scholarships: Down 2 points (to 56%
  from 58%)

In Short: The public seems tired of disruption, change, and uncertainty. Enthusiasm for most, perhaps all, policy innovations has waned. The shifts are not large enough to be statistically significant for some items: in-state tuition for immigrant children, higher salaries for teachers when the respondent is informed of current pay levels, testing students for accountability purposes, tax-credit scholarships, and merit pay. On other items, such as preschool education, the survey does not include information on the state of opinion in both 2019 and 2021, but we find no evidence of a surge in demand for change and reform. All in all, the public appears to be calling for a return to the status quo.

Grading Schools and Other Public Services

Public institutions came under severe stress in 2020. Schools switched from in-person to online instructional modes; post offices faced ever-increasing competition from digital messaging and private-delivery systems; demonstrators and police battled across the country in the wake of reported brutalities against Black people, including the horrific murder of George Floyd.

Public-sector unions did not escape harsh criticism during the course of these controversies. Teachers’ organizations were accused of placing educators’ safety ahead of students’ educational needs. Police unions were attacked for protecting officers accused of criminal abuses. Postal unions were criticized for inefficiencies in the mail-delivery system.

How has the public responded to these events and the controversies they have spawned? Do people think schools, police, and postal officials are doing the best they can? Or have they become more critical of the public entities they count on to provide basic services in every city and town? Does the public blame public-sector unions for hampering the effective and unbiased delivery of services?

To find out, we asked survey respondents to evaluate schools, police, and post offices on the same A-to-F scale traditionally used to evaluate student performance. We asked them to assess the performance of these institutions in both their local communities and the “nation as a whole.” Some questions are identical to those posed in 2008 and again in 2018, letting us see whether intervening events have altered people’s assessments. In 2021, we also asked respondents whether they think public-sector unions in these three realms are having a “generally positive” or a “generally negative” impact on the public services provided by the relevant public agency—a question we had previously posed only about teachers unions.

We find that the public holds both public agencies and their unions harmless for any deficiencies in service delivery that have occurred either as the result of the pandemic or of deteriorating race relations. For the most part, public evaluations are at least as positive in 2021 as they have been in the past. However, Black Americans have become more critical of the police force since 2008, even as their views of schools have greatly improved.

Public schools. The way American public schools have res-ponded to the Covid-19 pandemic has not yet had dramatic effects on what people think about their quality, either in their local communities or across the country. When asked to grade the quality of their local public schools, 55% of respondents give an A or a B (see Figure 2). This approval percentage falls about midway between the 2019 peak (near 60%) and the 51% who gave A or B grades in 2018. It is well above the 40% of respondents giving local schools these “honor roll” grades in 2008.

When asked to grade public schools across the country, survey participants are more critical. Twenty-three percent give an A or a B grade in spring 2021. That share is lower than the percentage giving these grades in spring 2020 (30%) but about the same as in 2018 (24%) and higher than in 2008 (20%).

Assessments of schools within ethnic groups have changed over time (see Figure 3). Among Black respondents, the percentage giving schools in their community an A or a B increased to 46% in 2021 from 24% in 2008, registering a jump of 22 percentage points. Among Hispanic respondents, the increase is to 60% from 39%, amounting to a rise of 21 percentage points. Among white respondents, the upward climb is to 57% from 44%, representing a smaller though still sizable increment of 13 percentage points. Black Americans remain more skeptical of local schools than either Hispanic or white Americans, though this difference across groups is considerably smaller in 2021 than it was 13 years ago.

When it comes to rating schools nationally, Hispanic Americans give out the highest marks. Forty-four percent say the nation’s schools deserve either an A or a B, up from 23% in 2008. That upward jump is not matched among either of the other two major ethnic groups, who continue to assign much lower grades to the nation’s schools. Twenty-four percent of Black respondents and 18% of white respondents are willing to put the nation’s schools on the honor roll.

In Short: We see some fluctuation in public assessments over the years, but evaluations of public schools in 2021 are very close to what they were a year ago and just prior to the pandemic.

Teachers unions. Teachers unions have been actively engaged in conversations about when and how to reopen schools. What impression have their actions left on the public’s views of teachers unions, both in the context of the pandemic and more generally? We asked respondents 1) if teachers unions made it easier or harder to open schools both in their own community and across the country, and 2) whether teachers unions had a “generally positive” or “generally negative” impact on schools.

With respect to the first question, the public seems reluctant to draw strong conclusions. A plurality of Americans (50%) say unions made it neither easier nor harder to reopen schools in their community. Perhaps the respondents in this group perceive unions as neutral in this context, or maybe they are simply unaware of what the unions did locally to help or hinder reopening. Still, just 15% of survey takers say that unions made it easier for local schools to reopen, while more than twice as many (35%) think they made it harder.

Opinion looks similar when we consider parents only: 34% indicate unions made it harder for local schools to reopen; 22% say they made it easier; and 45% report they made it neither easier nor harder. Perhaps surprisingly, teachers are most likely to say that unions hindered reopening efforts in their local communities. A plurality (43%) say unions made it harder for local schools to reopen, while 18% say they made it easier.

The public sees more evidence of union resistance to reopening when viewing their actions across the country. When asked about teachers-union activity nationwide, 48% of American adults think the unions made it harder for schools to reopen and 12% say they made it easier. Parental views are similar. As for teachers themselves, 41% report that unions made reopening more difficult across the nation, though 28% think the unions made it easier.

Although many Americans believe that teachers unions made it harder for the nation’s schools to reopen, overall impressions of unions’ effects on school quality have not changed by a significant amount. Respondents split almost evenly on this question. Thirty-five percent say unions have a positive effect on schools, and 37% say they have a negative effect, with the rest undecided. When asked a longer version of this question that includes arguments people often make for or against unions, these numbers are very similar: 37% positive, 35% negative (see Figure 4). Democrats’ views of teachers unions are more positive than those of Republicans (see Figure 5). Half of Democrats say teachers unions have a positive effect on school quality, and 20% say they have a negative effect. These numbers are nearly the reverse for Republicans. Fifty-eight percent of them think teachers unions have a negative effect, with 17% believing they have a positive effect.

In Short: A large share of parents and the public say unions neither hindered nor helped the reopening of local schools, with more teachers responding that unions made it more difficult for local schools to open. Both parents and the general public see teachers unions nationwide as complicating the task of reopening schools, but this has not noticeably altered views on how teachers unions influence school quality.

Postal service. As mentioned earlier, the 2021 poll asked survey participants to grade their local post office as well. Unlike the upward trend for schools between 2008 and 2021, the trend for the post office is slightly downward, from 70% in 2008 to 68% in 2018 and 65% in 2021.

In 2021 (but not in earlier years) we also asked respondents to evaluate the post office in the nation “as a whole.” Half of respondents give an A or a B to post offices across the country, 15 percentage points less than the share willing to award these honor-roll grades to the post office in their community. The national-local difference is less than half that for the grading of schools, where the margin between national and local assessments is 32 percentage points. It could be that the public receives less negative information about post offices than about schools nationwide, which could account for the smaller disparity in ratings of the postal service. But the smaller local-national gap might also reflect the generally more positive assessment of post offices than schools in both contexts. The percentages giving one of the top two grades to the community’s post office run 10 percentage points higher than for local public schools and 27 percentage points higher for postal than educational services nationwide.

Partisan differences in assessments of the post office are not as large as for the nation’s schools. Sixty-two percent of Republicans award an A or a B to local postal service, as compared to 68% of Democrats. For post offices across the country, the percentages are 46% and 54% for the two parties, respectively.

Postal-workers unions command modestly more respect among the American public than do teachers unions. A plurality (39%) say postal unions have a positive effect on the quality of postal service, while 29% say they have a negative effect.

Police. Despite the negative press coverage directed at police in recent years, evaluations of the “police force in your local community” improved somewhat between 2008 and 2021. The percentage giving an A or a B rose from 64% in 2008 to 69% in 2018 to 70% in 2021. For ratings of the police force nationwide, we are unable to make similar comparisons over time, but in 2021 we found a major gap of 26 percentage points in evaluations of the police, depending on whether the focus was on the local level or on the nation’s police. Seventy percent of Americans grade their local police force with an A or a B as compared to 44% giving these honor-roll grades to the “police force in the nation as a whole.” That is not dramatically different from the gap between assessments of local schools and schools across the country. But at both national and local levels, police receive higher evaluations than those given to schools. The share of the public giving one of the two top grades to local police is 15 percentage points higher than for local public schools and 21 percentage points higher for the police force nationwide than for schools nationwide. Yet police unions are less well respected than teachers organizations. A 40% plurality of the public thinks police unions have a negative effect on the quality of policing, while 30% believe they have a positive effect.

Further, sharp differences over policing have emerged across both ethnic and partisan divides. Among Black Americans, 48% give local police forces an A or a B grade, down from 55% in 2008. By comparison, 75% of white survey participants put police on the A–B honor roll, up from 67% in 2008. In other words, the racial divide with respect to the police increased by 15 percentage points. Meanwhile, Hispanic American evaluations of the police—73% of them give an A or a B—are little different from those of white Americans and are up 9 percentage points from their 2008 level of 64%.

The difference between Black and white respondents’ evaluations of local police (27 percentage points) is more than twice as large as the margin between their ratings of local public schools (10 percentage points). The discrepancies are even starker when considering opinions of police forces across the country. Just 15% of Black Americans award an A or a B grade to police forces nationwide, while 51% of white and 48% of Hispanic respondents do. By 9 percentage points, a smaller share of Black Americans give the nation’s police force one of the two high grades than do so for the nation’s schools, but a larger share of white Americans are willing to assign one of these honor-roll grades to the police than to the schools—by a margin of 26 percentage points. In a nutshell, Black Americans are more critical than others of the nation’s police, white Americans are more skeptical than others of the nation’s schools, and Hispanic Americans grant both schools and police quite similar evaluations, with 44% and 48% willing to award an A or a B to the nation’s schools and police forces, respectively.

In Short: Schools receive lower evaluations than do either the police force or the post office—both when survey takers offer assessments of operations in their local community and when they size up these services on the national scene. But evaluations of local schools have improved substantially since 2008, while evaluations of the local police force have barely ticked upward, and assessments of local postal service have drifted downward. In all cases, survey participants are more likely to give higher grades to public services when asked about them in a local rather than a national context. Yet the size of the local-national gap is not uniform across services. For schools, the gap in 2021 is 32 percentage points, for police it is 26 points, and for post offices it is 14 points. This variation suggests that more is involved than the tendency to favor the familiar over the distant. Very likely, differences are a function of more-extensive negative media coverage given to the nation’s schools and police forces than to the postal service. It is also possible that people simply think the post office delivers higher-quality services than either the police or the schools do, though that theory does not account for the slip in public ratings of postal services since 2008.

Colleges and universities. We also asked survey participants to grade public and private colleges and universities in their state (not every local community has a college or university) and across the country. Both public and private colleges fare better than public K–12 schools. Seventy percent of respondents give public colleges and universities in their state an A or a B grade (15 percentage points higher than for local public K–12 schools), and 57% award one of these honor-roll grades to public colleges and universities across the country (34 percentage points higher than public K–12 schools). Americans rate private colleges in their state similarly to public colleges; 74% give private institutions an A or a B (19 percentage points higher than for local K–12 public schools). When evaluating higher education on the national scene, they tend to see private colleges as better than public colleges. Sixty-five percent give private institutions nationally an A or a B (42 percentage points higher than for public K–12 schools).

Partisan Divide

Survey participants are divided along party lines in both their assessments of educational institutions and their opinions about education policy. Republicans tend to be more critical of schools and colleges on the national level. They are also likelier to embrace merit pay for teachers, charter schools, and universal-voucher programs. Democrats are more favorably inclined than Republicans toward boosting school expenditure levels, lifting teacher salaries, and offering free preschool and college. Moreover, partisan differences on several (but not all) of these topics seem to be expanding.

Evaluating schools and colleges. In assessments of local K–12 schools, for instance, a new partisan gap has emerged. In 2019, 59% of Democrats said their community’s schools deserved either an A or a B, compared to 62% of Republicans. Two years later, 51% of Republicans award honor grades to their local schools while Democrats hold steady at 59%. Assessments of schools “in the nation as a whole” are not nearly as positive and are even more divided across party lines. In 2019, 20% of Republicans and 26% of Democrats gave America’s schools one of the two high grades. In 2021, those percentages are 17% and 28%, enlarging the partisan divide by 5 percentage points.

Public evaluations of four-year institutions of higher education are considerably more positive than views of elementary and secondary schools, but a partisan divide is nonetheless apparent. In 2019, 81% of Democrats but 73% of Republicans gave four-year colleges and universities within their state an A or a B. In 2021, that division deepens. Only 62% of Republicans, as compared to 77% of Democrats, are willing to assign in-state four-year colleges a top grade, widening the assessment gap by 7 percentage points over the two years. Evaluations of four-year colleges and universities in the nation as a whole reflect even greater partisanship, with 46% of Republicans but 67% of Democrats awarding them an A or a B. However, the size of the divide did not change significantly over the past two years.

Assessments of private colleges and universities are somewhat less partisan, but when respondents are asked about these institutions “in the nation as a whole” the differences between Republicans and Democrats widens. In 2021, 74% of Democrats but 56% of Republicans give the nation’s private colleges and universities a grade of A or B, a gap 10 points larger than in 2019. When survey takers are asked about private colleges within the state, partisan differences are smaller: 78% of Democrats and 70% of Republicans hand out one of the two highest grades, leaving the gap essentially unchanged from 2019.

In Short: Evaluations of both schools and colleges are more divided along party lines when respondents are asked about institutions “in the nation as a whole” rather than their local counterparts. Partisan differences are also more dramatic when the survey taker is asked to evaluate public colleges and universities as opposed to private ones.

Accountability measures. When it comes to the practice of testing students to hold schools accountable, rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans are in basic agreement. Seventy-two percent of adherents to both parties back the current federal law requiring statewide testing of students in grades 3 through 8 and again in high school. There is less consensus on the Common Core State Standards, however (se Figure 6). The Common Core undertaking was originally bipartisan, and Republican support continued in some quarters even after vigorous criticism by the Trump administration. In 2019, 46% of Republicans, only a few points less than the 52% of Democrats, said they favored the “Common Core, which are standards for reading and math that are the same across the states . . . to hold public schools accountable for their performance.” But now, in 2021, partisan differences are skyrocketing. Only 31% of Republicans, as compared to 54% of Democrats, “strongly” or “somewhat” support Common Core, a 23-percentage-point divide.

The Common Core question was posed to a random half of survey respondents. The other half were asked the same question with the words “Common Core” deleted. By dropping that phrase, we are able to ascertain whether respondents are reacting to the label or to the underlying idea of “standards for reading and math that are the same across the states.” When the question is phrased without reference to Common Core itself, we observe in 2021 higher levels of support and less of a divide between Democrats and Republicans: 62% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans express strong or somewhat strong support for the policy. That level of support is only modestly down from the 66% and 67% levels registered in 2019 on the part of Democrats and Republicans, respectively.

School choice. In Congress and state legislatures, school-choice policy typically evokes a strongly partisan response. Though neither party is completely united on all aspects of school-choice policy, Republican legislators are generally more likely to support choice legislation than are Democratic lawmakers. Among the public at large, the patterns are more complex. Republicans are, as expected, much more likely than Democrats to support charter schools; the tally is 52% to 33%, a difference that is about the same as it was just prior to the pandemic in 2019 and in prior years (see Figure 7). Republicans are also more likely than Democrats to support vouchers for all who wish to attend a private school, 50% to 44% (see Figure 8). But Democrats express more approval for vouchers for students from low-income families, 47% to 38%. Partisan differences have not changed significantly since 2019.

Opinions have shifted across party lines on one school-choice policy—state tax deductions for individual and corporate donations to foundations that give low-income students scholarships to attend private schools. Typically, such programs allow donors to deduct the full amount of their donation from their state tax bill. In 2021, legislatures in several states, including Indiana, Florida, Arkansas, Kansas, Iowa, and Nevada, either enacted or expanded a tax-credit scholarship program. In state legislatures, Republicans have been the most forceful advocates for such programs, yet Republican survey participants are less likely to endorse tax credits than the Democrats are. Among Democrats, support for the idea increased from 56% to 61% between 2019 and 2021, but among Republicans, backing declined from 65% to 53%. President Joe Biden, a Democrat, signed into law congressional bills expanding tax credits for families with children, which could help explain this surprising partisan reversal in partisanship on this topic. Whatever the cause, shifts in public opinion are quite the opposite of legislative trends in state capitals.

School spending. Respondents were split into two equally sized, randomly selected groups when asked about their views on school expenditures. One half was given no information about current spending while the other was told the level of per-student expenditures in the district in which they lived. In both groups, support for higher school spending fell between 2019 and 2021, but the downward shift did not significantly alter the partisanship gap (see Figure 9). Within the group given no information, Democrats continue to be 25 percentage points more in favor of increased spending in their local district than Republicans are (68% to 43%). Among those given information on per-student expenditures in their district, half the Democrats favor increased spending, down from 59% in 2019. Among Republicans in that group, 27% back more spending, down from 38% in 2019. In other words, information about current levels of spending reduces an inclination to spend more on schools among both Democrats and Republicans, and enthusiasm for spending has declined over the past two years, but partisan difference remains essentially unchanged from 2019.

To find out whether information had similar effects on opinions about teacher salaries, we again split the sample into two randomly selected groups. Among those not told average teacher salary levels in their state, support for teacher pay hikes remains nearly as high in 2021 as in 2019, with 78% of Democrats and 56% of Republicans favoring increases. When respondents are informed of current teacher salaries, Democratic support falls to 65%, and Republican approval to 37%, enlarging the partisan gap evident in 2019 by six percentage points.

Merit pay for teachers, in-state college tuition for immigrants, free college, and universal preschool. Partisan gaps have remained generally consistent in the level of support for merit-based pay for teachers, in-state tuition rates for undocumented immigrants, and free public college (both two-year and four-year). Fifty-three percent of Republicans but only 41% of Democrats support “basing part of the salaries of teachers on how much their students learn.” For Republicans and Democrats alike, the favorability level for this idea has not shifted since 2019. Nor has opinion by adherents to either party moved much between 2019 and 2021 on the question of “allowing undocumented immigrants to be eligible for the in-state college tuition rate” (21% among Republicans and 64% among Democrats in 2021).

Attitudes toward making all public two-year colleges free to attend have bifurcated somewhat: Republican support declined to 36% from 47%, while Democratic support saw a smaller drop to 80% from 85% (see Figure 10). Enthusiasm for “making all public four-year colleges in the United States free to attend,” by contrast, took a major tumble across the board. Among Democrats, the percentage favoring the policy dropped to 63% from 79% between 2019 and 2021; among Republicans, the decline was to 20% from 35%.

We also see large partisan differences on universal pre-kindergarten, for which we lack trend data between 2019 and 2021. Eighty-five percent of Democrats support government funding for all four-year-olds to attend preschool, compared to 44% of Republicans.

In Short: Partisan differences on education policy are as vivid as ever and, in some cases, appear to have intensified since the start of the pandemic. But the degree of partisanship varies with the issue. On topics such as school spending, teacher salaries, merit pay, Common Core, free college, and college tuition for undocumented immigrants, partisanship reigns. On student testing for school accountability and on school choice, partisanship is less intense among the rank-and-file members of the two political parties than among many representatives active in state legislatures and in Congress.

A New President’s Influence

The pandemic wasn’t the only new factor in the national political landscape over the last year. We also elected and inaugurated a new president. In prior surveys, Education Next has measured how much a president’s views sway public opinion by dividing the sample into two randomly chosen segments, only one of which is told the position the president has taken on the issue. By comparing the stances of those told the president’s position with the views of the uninformed group, we can estimate that president’s power to influence opinion on that issue. In 2009 and 2010, we gave a random half of survey participants Barack Obama’s positions on charter schools, merit-based pay for teachers, and a variety of other issues. In 2017 and 2020, they were told Donald Trump’s positions on many of the same issues. The results were remarkably consistent. Participants who shared a partisan identity with the president tended to become more supportive of policies that the president endorsed, while participants from the other party tended to become less supportive of those policies. The one partial exception was the first year of the Obama presidency, when this president, particularly popular at the time the survey was administered, seemed to influence opinion in the same direction across the political spectrum.

In this year’s poll, we repeat this experiment on presidential power by asking participants to indicate their support or opposition with respect to two issues on which President Joe Biden has taken a clear public stance. Although Biden has generally remained silent or ambivalent on many of the more controversial questions in education policy, preventing us from making direct comparisons with prior presidents on some issues, the administration has taken a strong position on two large contemporary issues: government funding for universal preschool and free tuition at public two-year colleges. To estimate the influence of the president, we assigned participants to two randomly chosen segments, only one of which was told Biden’s position on these two policy questions.

The impact of Biden’s endorsements is more muted than those of the two prior presidents, perhaps because Republicans and Democrats already disagree sharply about both preschool education and free community college. Among Democrats, support for government funding for preschool and community college is a robust 85% and 80%, respectively. But those percentages do not differ significantly between those informed of Biden’s views and those left uninformed. Perhaps Democrats already knew Biden’s position and therefore the information did not convey anything new to the survey respondents, or maybe the percentage favoring the policy is already so high that it is difficult to shift it higher. But it is also possible that Biden is not a particularly influential president with respect to public opinion—even among his own partisans.

The picture is much the same for Republicans, who are generally opposed to both policy proposals. Among Republicans, 44% favor universal preschool and 36% endorse the idea of free community colleges. Their views do not shift in a more negative direction once they have been told Biden’s position on the issue. Once again, it is possible that Republicans already know the president’s views, and the survey does not convey new information. In prior experiments, respondents to the survey were told presidential positions on certain issues—charter schools and merit pay for teachers—that matter a lot to activists but are relatively invisible to many Americans. Universal preschool and free community college may be more salient topics for the public in general.

Or it may be the case that Biden is a less polarizing president, or that partisanship is less potent in the post-pandemic era, though other survey data contradict that interpretation. In the end, we are unable to interpret definitely the difference between the impact of the Biden presidency and that of his predecessors.

In Short: Informing the public about President Biden’s position on the two education issues on which he has been most vocal—universal preschool and free community college—does not notably affect the balance of opinion or the already yawning partisan divide on those issues.

Rethinking School Board Elections

As a result of municipal reforms at the beginning of the 20th century, school board elections are often held “off-cycle”—that is, at a time other than the “on-cycle” elections in November of even-numbered years. Advocates of off-cycle elections argue that separating school board elections and general elections keeps politics out of education, potentially creating the conditions for more stable and expert-driven governance of schools. Critics of off-cycle elections contend that the unusual timing of school board elections results in low voter turnout, an unrepresentative electorate, and outsized influence of special interests.

We wanted to know what the American public thinks about the merits of off-cycle versus on-cycle school board elections. We divided our sample into three equally sized sections and asked the first group whether they think school board elections should be held on the same day as national elections or on a different day. Fully two-thirds support holding school board elections on the same day as national elections. When we offer a rationale for on-cycle elections (“Some people argue that holding school board elections on the same day as national elections would increase the number of people who turn out to vote for the school board”), the results are unchanged. When we offer a rationale for off-cycle elections (“Some people argue that holding school board elections on a different day than national elections helps keep politics out of education”), support for holding school board elections on the same day as national elections falls to 57%

In Short: Even among those who receive an argument in favor of off-cycle elections, a majority still supports on-cycle school board elections. School board election timing is the rare instance in this year’s survey where the public would seem to favor a departure from the status quo rather than a return to normalcy.

Michael B. Henderson is associate professor of political communication and director of the Public Policy Research Lab at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication. David M. Houston is assistant professor at the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University. Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University, director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, and senior editor of Education Next. Martin West is academic dean and Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and editor-in-chief of Education Next.

More from the 2021 Education Next Survey: “Parent Poll Reveals Support for School Covid-Safety Measures Despite Vaccine Hesitancy, Partisan Polarization“

This article appeared in the Winter 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Henderson, M.B., Houston, D.M., Peterson, P.E., West, M.R. (2022). Hunger for Stability Quells Appetite for Change: Results of the 2021 Education Next Survey of Public Opinion. Education Next, 22(1), 8-24.

The 15th annual Education Next survey, conducted in June 2021, yields a host of specific results that reveal one large fact about the current state of public opinion on American education: The public is cautious—extremely cautious. In the presence of a still-circulating Covid-19 virus, a large percentage of parents and the broader public want schools to take strong measures to keep children safe as they return to school. Yet many parents are not ready to risk the injection of a Covid vaccine into their child’s arm, even as government agencies testify to its safety and effectiveness.

In this article, we report on the 2021 follow-up survey to polls of parents of school-age children that we administered in May and November 2020, enabling us to track children’s schooling experiences over the course of the pandemic. In late May and June—at the tail end of what was surely the most unusual school year in our nation’s history—we interviewed a representative sample of 2,022 parents with children in kindergarten through 12th grade. Every parent then answered a series of questions about each of their children. We oversampled Black and Hispanic parents, as well as parents with children in private and charter schools, which allows us to make more-precise comparisons between racial and ethnic groups and between school sectors. In addition to reporting on their children’s schooling experiences, parents answered some of the questions included in our parallel survey of a nationally representative sample of adults, the results of which are discussed more fully in a companion article that also provides details on the methods for each survey (see “Hunger for Stability Quells Appetite for Change”).

Vaccine Hesitancy

We asked our nationally representative sample of parents whether they planned to have each of their school-age children vaccinated “when Covid-19 vaccines become available for children.” At the time we fielded our survey in early June, the Federal Drug Administration had recently approved the use of the vaccine for children aged 12–17, but not for those 11 and younger.

Parents of a bare majority of children under the age of 18 (51%) say they “probably” or “definitely” would have their child vaccinated (see Figure 1). The parents of another third (34%) say they “probably” or “definitely” would not. The parents of 15% of children say they don’t know. If these sentiments expressed in June 2021 remain stable, the road to universal vaccination will be bumpy.

Parental plans are influenced by the age of the child. Though the data aren’t yet definitive, some public health officials have said that younger children seem to be less likely than older ones to contract a Covid infection, and that if they do, they are less likely to have a serious illness. For children in elementary school, the percentage whose parents expect to have their child vaccinated is less than half (46% for the youngest grades, 47% for older elementary school students). Older children are also unlikely to be seriously affected by the virus, especially when compared to those over the age of 65. About 6 out of 10 high school students (59%) are slated by their parents to receive vaccinations; 52% of middle school children (grades 6 to 8) have a parent who reports such plans.

With one exception, the responses do not differ much by school sector: 52% of children at district schools are likely to get the vaccine, as compared to 60% at charter schools and 54% of those attending private schools. However, those who report home-schooling their children are more hesitant. Unless parents change their views, 32% of home-schooled children will probably or definitely be vaccinated. Hispanic parents’ openness to vaccination is slightly greater than that of Black or white parents. The percentage of children for whom parents plan vaccinations is 56% for Hispanic children, 49% for Black children, and 47% for white children.

The major divide on the issue of child vaccination falls along party lines. Despite the fact that the Covid-19 vaccines were developed and approved for use in adults under President Donald Trump, Republicans are far less likely than Democrats to say that they will have their children vaccinated. For children whose parent identified as a Republican, the parents of a majority (51%) report that they definitely or probably will not have their child vaccinated; the parents of 35% say that they definitely or probably will. For children whose parent identified as a Democrat, those percentages are flipped. The parents of 66% of children say they will have their child vaccinated, while the parents of 18% say they will not.

In Short: Parents of about a third of children think the risks of vaccination outweigh the benefits for children, and another 15% of parents are unsure. Vaccine hesitancy is more pronounced for parents of younger children. With the exception of home-schooled children, differences across school sectors are small. Differences by political party, however, are quite large. Those who view universal vaccination as a prerequisite to a full reopening of American schools and the broader economy appear to be facing a serious challenge—especially in red states.

Safety First: Masking and Distancing in Schools

Many parents support measures to protect their children from infection at school even though some of the protections—masking and social distancing—could interfere with the learning process. Nearly half (47%) of parents favor requiring students to wear masks when schools open in the fall, and about a third (35%) oppose the practice, with the rest taking a neutral position. The views of the broader public largely mirror those of parents, with 44% favoring mask wearing and 36% opposed (see Figure 2).

Parents are somewhat less supportive of social distancing at school, perhaps because they recognize that keeping children apart from one another is far from easy. Fewer than a third (32%) of parents think students should maintain a certain distance from one another, with 42% saying no such rule should be imposed; the rest say they are “not sure.” Among parents who support social distancing in schools, a slight majority of 54% say that students should be kept six feet apart, with 40% indicating that three feet or less would be appropriate. Once again, the views of the broader public on the issue of social distancing are very similar to those of parents (see Figure 3).

Parents also favor giving families the option of not sending their children to school this fall, in marked contrast to the historic practice of requiring in-school instruction unless a family is home-schooling. Nearly two thirds (64%) of parents say high school students should have the option of learning fully online, and nearly half (48%) say the same for elementary school students. The public as a whole is less enthusiastic about the prospect of permitting remote instruction, however, with 51% supporting a remote option for high school students and 41% endorsing that choice for elementary school students (see Figure 4).

Opinion on Covid-prevention measures divides sharply across party lines. Among Republicans, 21% approve of mask requirements, while 64% of Democrats do. When it comes to social distancing, nearly two thirds (66%) of Republicans oppose any minimum-distance mandate, as compared to 22% of Democrats. All high school students should have the option of learning online, according to 41% of Republicans and 60% of Democrats. The choice should be available for elementary school students, say 33% of Republicans, but 49% of Democrats.

A mask requirement is more popular in the minority community than among white adults. Sixty-nine percent of Black adults and 59% of Hispanic adults favor mandatory masking, but only 33% of white adults do. When it comes to social distancing at school, 51% of white adults say “no rule is needed,” but that position is taken by only 21% of Black adults and 32% of Hispanic adults. Conversely, 60% of Hispanic adults and 54% of Black adults favor providing students a remote-learning option, as compared to 46% of white adults.

In Short: The public remains fairly risk-averse about schools reopening. But caution is much more prevalent among Democrats than Republicans, showing once again how politicized the response to the pandemic has been. If school districts are responsive to social and political attitudes, one might expect school practices to vary widely across the country, depending on the racial and ethnic composition of the local populations and the partisan balance of power.

Parental Assessments

Parents report differences in the schooling situation between November 2020 and June 2021. By June, the parents of more than half (52%) of students say their child is going to school entirely in person rather than taking classes remotely (27%) or in a mix of the two formats (21%). Those percentages are the near reverse of those from November 2020, when 28% of children were going to school in person full time, 53% of them were attending school remotely, and the rest were learning in the hybrid format, according to their parents. March seemed to be the halfway point in the process of returning to in-person education. As of that month, 43% of students were said to be going to school fully in person, 35% were entirely remote, and 23% were experiencing a blend of both. In November 2020, parents reported a high incidence of adverse consequences for their children as a result of measures taken by schools to stem the spread of Covid-19. Children were suffering learning loss, impairment of academic instruction, social isolation, emotional distress, and inadequate physical exercise, parents said. Despite all of these reported problems, parents overwhelmingly indicated that they were satisfied with their children’s schools, suggesting that parents believed the schools were doing about as well as they could under the circumstances. Parents were more positive about a child’s experiences if the child was attending school in person rather than online and if the child was enrolled in a private rather than a district school.

Pandemic impacts. In our June 2021 survey, we asked parents several of the same questions about pandemic impacts that we also posed in November 2020. Parental responses to these questions are remarkably similar to those given earlier, despite the fact that disruption had continued for an additional eight months. What parents said about their children’s educational experience in November they continue to say the following June. Matters have not improved, according to parents, but neither have they worsened.

Despite the move toward in-person learning between November and June, parents’ assessments of Covid’s impacts on their children remain essentially unaltered. At the end of the school year, parents of 57% of the students say their child is learning somewhat or a lot less this school year than “they would have learned if there had not been a pandemic,” about the same as the 60% who gave this response the previous fall. The percentage of children perceived to be experiencing a somewhat negative or strongly negative impact on their “academic knowledge and skills” reached 39%, slightly (but not significantly) higher than earlier in the school year. Negative impacts on social relationships are observed for 49% of the children, hardly different from the 50% figure registered in November. The 41% of children for whom negative effects on emotional wellbeing are identified remains exactly the same in the two surveys. The percentage of children whose physical fitness has been adversely affected ticks downward from 45% to 42%, an insignificant change. Altogether, the data show parental assessments remain unchanged from November to the end of the school year.

One important shift among parents during the pandemic is their focus on some of the nonacademic aspects of schooling. Back in 2019, we asked survey takers to assign percentages to the amount that schools should “focus on academic performance versus student social and emotional wellbeing.” Among parents, the average response to “academic performance” was 62%, compared to 38% for “social and emotional wellbeing.” Two years later, parents now advocate for a 50–50 split between the two (see Figure 5). It appears that after a particularly challenging school year, parents are more attuned to schools’ potential contributions to students’ nonacademic needs.

One might think parents would become increasingly unhappy as the year progressed without seeing much improvement in their child’s academic, social, emotional, or physical wellbeing. But the percentage of children whose parents say they were “very satisfied” or “somewhat satisfied” with “the instruction and activities provided” by their child’s school increased slightly, from 73% to 78%. It appears that a large majority of parents continue to believe that their children’s schools are doing the best they can under extremely adverse circumstances.

In Short: Although parents continue to report severe negative impacts of school measures taken in response to the pandemic, especially for children not attending school in person, they still express satisfaction with their child’s school, even after a full year or more of disrupted education.

Sector enrollments. In another sign of return to normalcy, the size of each of the four school sectors—district, private, charter, and home-school—has largely returned to the level reported by parents in spring 2020. In November 2020, the size of the district sector appeared to be declining, as parents reported shifting to charter, private, and home-schooling options. That finding seems to have been a short-term aberration that might be related to parents’ uncertainty as to how to identify a child’s school sector during the pandemic, in the absence of in-person school attendance. Our survey data are subject to sampling error, which can be substantial when the sector is small, as are the private, charter, and home-schooling sectors, so all estimates remain somewhat uncertain. However, enrollment in the district sector, which comprises approximately 80% of all students, can be estimated within a 3-percent margin of error. And results for all four sectors show a consistent “return to normalcy” pattern.

Specifically, the share of students reported by parents to be attending schools in the district sector declined by 9 percentage points (to 72% from 81% of total enrollments) between spring and fall 2020. But by June 2021, the end of the school year, the percentage of students in the district sector climbed back up to 79%, not significantly different from the 81% level in spring 2020. Enrollments in the other sectors also returned to much the same levels reported in spring 2020: Private-sector enrollments rose to 11% from 8% of total enrollments between spring and fall 2020, but they returned to the 8% level by spring 2021. Charter enrollments, which had increased to 8% from 5% between spring and fall 2020, fell back to 6%; and the share of students whose parents say they are being schooled at home, which had increased to 8% from 6% of all enrollments between spring and fall 2020, returned to the 6% level in spring 2021.

These home-school estimates differ from the 3% calculated in 2019 by the U.S. Department of Education and the 11% estimated by the U.S. Bureau of the Census in 2020. Our figure of 6% is a “Goldilocks” estimate that falls in between those from the two government agencies. In our survey, when parents indicated that their child was being home-schooled, we offered them the chance to clarify their answer. Some indicated that their child is “enrolled in a school with a physical location but is learning remotely at home.” We did not categorize these students as being home-schooled, which may help explain the differences between the two federal estimates and our own.

In Short: The shares of children attending school in the district, charter, private, and homeschooling sectors showed little change between May 2020 and June 2021. The apparent migration away from the district to the other sectors observed in our November 2020 survey may have been in response to school disruptions in 2020 or to uncertainties that arose when parents were asked about their child’s school at a time when children were learning online from their home.

Sector differences. Differences in students’ experiences between the district, charter, and private-school sectors, however, persisted along much the same lines between November 2020 and June 2021. The percentage of children in private school who were said to be attending full-time in-person classes climbed to 79% by the end of the school year, from 60% in November. At district schools, that percentage rose to 50% from 24%; at charters, to 36% from 18%. The percentage of private-school students taught remotely declined to just 8% from an already low 18%. At district schools, the percentage receiving all instruction remotely fell to 28% from 57%; in the charter sector, it drops to 43% from 66%. In other words, in-person learning became increasingly common across all three sectors, but differences persisted: Students attending private schools came back to the school door more rapidly than students at either district or charter schools, as reported by parents in November, a difference that continued until spring. Also, children at charters were more likely to learn remotely than children at district schools in both November and June.

The greater incidence of in-person instruction in private schools as compared to district schools may account for sector differences in parental assessments of their children’s experiences. Thirty-eight percent of children attending private schools suffered learning losses, parents say in June, but that percentage rises to 60% if the child attended public school and 51% if the child was in a charter school (see Figure 6). Similarly, measures taken “to limit the spread of Covid-19” had a less adverse effect on students’ academic knowledge and skills for children attending private schools, parents say (see Figure 7). Of the private-school children, 23% are reported to have suffered somewhat or strongly negative effects from these measures, while the corresponding figure for those attending district schools is 42%. Parents indicate that 28% of students attending charter schools suffered negative impacts on their academic knowledge despite the relatively low incidence of in-person instruction. Either charter schools mounted a better remote educational experience or charter parents were more optimistic in their assessments.

The perceived differences across sectors of the effects of Covid-mitigation measures on social relationships were even greater. Parents report that these measures had negative impacts for 30% of the children in private school but for 52% of those in district schools and 43% of those in charter schools. The measures took their toll on the emotional wellbeing of 28% of children at private schools and 32% of those at charters, but 43% of those at district schools, parents say. When it comes to physical fitness, these percentages are 29%, 38%, and 44% for the three sectors, respectively.

Despite all these negatives, parents across all sectors register a high level of satisfaction with the instruction and activities provided by their child’s school during the pandemic year. No less than 76 percent of district-school children had an experience that caused their parents to feel somewhat or very satisfied, a percentage that rose to 92% and 81% for children attending private and charter schools, respectively.

In Short: According to their parents, a smaller share of children attending private schools, as compared to those attending district schools, are suffering adverse effects on their academic, social, emotional, and physical wellbeing as a result of school measures taken in response to the pandemic. The share of charter-school students reported by their parents to be suffering these effects falls somewhere in between those of children in the district and private-school sectors.

Michael B. Henderson is associate professor of political communication and director of the Public Policy Research Lab at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication. David M. Houston is assistant professor at the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University. Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University, director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, and senior editor of Education Next. Martin West is academic dean and Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and editor-in-chief of Education Next.

More from the 2021 Education Next survey: “Hunger for Stability Quells Appetite for Change: Results of the 2021 Education Next Survey of Public Opinion“

This article appeared in the Winter 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Henderson, M.B., Houston, D.M., Peterson, P.E., West, M.R. (2022). Parent Poll Reveals Support for School Covid-Safety Measures Despite Vaccine Hesitancy, Partisan Polarization: Private-school parents report less learning loss, greater satisfaction with pandemic schooling. Education Next, 22(1), 26-36.

For 14 years, the Education Next annual survey has tracked American opinion on education policy. We have gauged people’s views through the throes of the Great Recession, dramatic changes in partisan control in both Washington, D.C., and state capitols, and attendant shifts in the direction of federal and state education policy. None of that compares to the disruption that unfolded this spring, as the Covid-19 pandemic closed schools nationwide and brought the American economy to its knees.

This year’s survey, administered in May 2020, provides an early look at how the experiences of the past few months may shape Americans’ views on education policy going forward. The survey’s nationally representative sample of 4,291 adults includes an oversampling of teachers and of those who identify themselves as Black and Hispanic. (All results are adjusted for non-response and oversampling; see methods sidebar for details.)

In a companion essay, we report parents’ perspectives on their children’s educational experiences during the lockdowns (see “What American Families Experienced When Covid-19 Closed Their Schools,” features). Here we examine public opinion on issues at the core of education-policy debates as we head into the height of the 2020 presidential campaign. We start with a summary of the survey’s top findings.

1. Teacher Pay. Support for teacher pay hikes remains nearly as high as it has been at any point since 2008, when we first surveyed the public on the issue. Among those given information about current salary levels in their state, 55% say teacher salaries should increase—essentially the same as last year and a jump of 19 percentage points over 2017. Among those not given salary information, 65% back an increase.

2. School Spending. Americans are split on whether to increase overall investment in public schools. Among those told current expenditure levels, 45% say that K–12 school spending should increase. This level of support is 5 percentage points lower than last year’s, but it still registers 6 points higher than in 2017. Democrat (56%), Black (63%), and Hispanic (55%) respondents are more likely to back a boost in funding than are Republican (31%) and white (39%) respondents.

3. Online Education. Americans’ interest in online schooling is on the rise. In 2020, 73% of parents say they are willing to have their child take some high school courses via the Internet—a jump of 17 percentage points over 2009. Parents who report more positive experiences with remote instruction when schools closed this spring are more likely to support online education.

4. School Choice. Support for school-choice reforms either holds steady or declines modestly since last year. The policy of giving tax credits to fund private-school scholarships for low-income students—a concept backed by the Trump administration and recently given a boost by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue—draws the most support, including from 59% of Republicans and 56% of Democrats. Attitudes toward charter schools divide along party lines: 54% of Republicans support charters, compared to only 37% of Democrats. Vouchers to help pay private-school tuition continue to command strong support among Black (60% for universal vouchers; 65% for low-income vouchers) and Hispanic (62% for universal vouchers; 59% for low-income vouchers) respondents. Universal vouchers are more popular among Republicans than Democrats (56% to 47%), but the reverse is true of vouchers targeted to low-income students (45% to 52%). Neither type of voucher polarizes public opinion as much as charter schools do.

5. Opinion on Public Schools and Teachers. The challenges to schools wrought by the pandemic have not shaken Americans’ confidence in their public schools. Levels of approval remain at or near peak. Fifty-eight percent of respondents give their local public schools a grade of A or B (down 2 points from last year), and 30% give the nation’s public schools a similar grade (the highest level the survey has recorded). The public also gives teachers high marks during this difficult time. On average, respondents rate 61% of local teachers as either excellent or good—a 5-percentage-point increase since 2018. They rate 14% of teachers as unsatisfactory.

6. Free College. Fifty-five percent of Americans endorse the idea of making public four-year colleges free to attend, a dip of 5 percentage points since last year. The concept divides Americans along party lines, with 74% of Democrats but just 29% of Republicans expressing support.

7. Trump Effect. On five issues—Common Core, charter schools, tax-credit-funded scholarships, merit pay for teachers, and in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants—we told a randomly selected group of respondents the president’s position while asking other respondents the same question without mentioning his views. Generally, information about Trump’s positions polarizes opinion, moving Republicans toward the president and pushing Democrats away. These shifts among partisans often offset each other and leave little discernible change in overall public opinion.

8. Populism and Education Policy. To explore the implications of populist sentiment among the American public, we posed a set of questions gauging the extent to which respondents agree with claims such as “elected officials should always follow the will of the people” and then identified the most- and least-populist respondents. We find that populism is a distinctive brand with adherents in both parties. Though 56% of Republicans rank above the median in terms of populism, so do 46% of Democrats. Moreover, populism is a strong predictor of education-policy views: The most-populist Americans assign lower grades to public schools locally and nationally and express greater approval for measures to expand school choice.

Teacher Pay and School Spending

This past spring, Education Next conducted its annual public-opinion survey during an unprecedented economic shutdown wrought by the coronavirus pandemic. The national unemployment rate had peaked in April at a seasonally adjusted 14.7%. State and local tax revenues were in free fall. The National Bureau of Economic Research announced that the nation had entered recession in February.

A dozen years ago, when the nation experienced a similar economic contraction at the outset of the Great Recession, public support for raising teacher pay and spending on education fell sharply. Support for increasing teacher pay dropped to 40% in 2009 from 54% in 2008, when we administered our survey at the peak of the housing bubble and just prior to the financial crisis that followed its rupture. Support for higher school spending also dropped by 14 percentage points, to 37% in 2009 from 51% in 2008. The downturn had long-lasting effects on public opinion: only in the past two years, after nearly a decade of steady economic growth, did support for increased public investment in education recover to match or exceed pre-crisis levels.

Will the Covid-19 recession have similar consequences? If so, they had not materialized as of mid-May, when the survey was conducted. Indicators of support for higher teacher salaries and more spending did tick downward in 2020 compared to last year. These changes are small, however, and often within the survey’s margin of error. School systems will undoubtedly face heightened competition for resources in the years to come. Yet the schools seem to maintain the public’s backing as that struggle begins.

Teacher salaries. We asked all survey respondents whether they thought that salaries for public-school teachers in their home state should increase, decrease, or stay about the same. As in past years, before asking this question we first told a random half of respondents what teachers in their state actually earn. Among those provided this information, 55% say teacher salaries should increase—essentially even with the 56% who gave that response last year (see Figure 1). Thirty-nine percent of “informed” respondents say teacher salaries in their state should remain about the same, while just 7% say they should decrease. In short, the share expressing support for increasing teacher pay is up 19 percentage points since 2017 and nearly as high as it has been at any point since 2008, when we first surveyed the public on the issue.

More Democrats than Republicans favor increasing teacher salaries, and that divide appears to have widened modestly over the past year. Support rose to 66% this year from 64% in 2019 among Democrats, and fell to 40% from 43% among Republicans. Meanwhile, teachers are even more convinced about the merits of increasing their own salaries, with 81% of them registering support, up from 76% last year.

Among those who are not first informed of what teachers currently earn, an even larger proportion of the public favors increasing teacher salaries. Sixty-five percent of this segment say that salaries should increase, 30% say they should remain the same, and 5% say they should decrease. These numbers reflect a modest 5-percentage-point decline in support since 2019, when 70% of “uninformed” respondents supported an increase. The higher level of endorsement for boosting teacher salaries among the “uninformed” respondents reflects the fact that most Americans believe that teachers are underpaid and earn far less than they actually do. When asked to estimate average annual teacher salaries in their state, respondents’ average guess came in at $42,816—30% less than the actual average of $61,018 across the participants in our survey.

School Spending. We also asked survey respondents whether government spending on public schools in their local district should increase, after first informing a randomly chosen half of respondents about current spending levels. Forty-five percent of those given this information say that spending should increase. This represents a 5-percentage-point decline since last year, but still leaves support up 6 percentage points over 2017. Forty-six percent of “informed” respondents say that spending on their local schools should stay about the same, while 10% say that spending should decrease.

As in the case of teacher salaries, the partisan gap in support for spending more on local schools widened a bit in the past year. Support for higher spending fell by just 3 percentage points among Democrats, to 56% in 2020 from 59% in 2019. Meanwhile, support dropped to 31% from 38% among Republicans, increasing the partisan gap to 25 percentage points. Fifty-nine percent of teachers favor spending more on their local schools, a 3-percentage-point increase since 2019.

Americans continue to underestimate dramatically what the government already spends on their local schools. On average, respondents to our survey guessed $8,140 per pupil annually—44% less than the average $14,504 actually spent.

Consistent with this, respondents not given information on current spending are more enthusiastic about spending more. Among the “uninformed,” 59% favor a boost in spending, 34% say it should stay about the same, while just 7% think it should decrease. The 59% of the public supporting an increase represents a modest decline of just 3 percentage points since 2019.

Support by race and ethnicity. The question of investing more money in the schools clearly divides respondents along racial and ethnic lines. While strong majorities of Black and Hispanic respondents support raising teacher salaries and spending more on their local schools, white respondents are less enthusiastic (see Figure 2). For example, 63% of Black respondents who are told current spending levels favor an increase, as do 55% of Hispanic respondents. The corresponding figure for white respondents is just 39%. Similar differences emerge among “uninformed” respondents on both school spending and teacher pay.

Online Education and Homeschooling

Online schooling. Americans’ openness to online education has increased in recent years (see Figure 3). In 2009, 56% of American parents said they would be willing to have their child take some academic courses online during high school. This share edged up somewhat to 61% in 2010 and remained at that level in 2013. In 2020, however, 73% of parents say they are willing to have their child take some high school courses online—a 17-percentage-point jump since 2009. The growth in approval for online schooling for secondary school students is even more dramatic among the public as a whole, for whom the share willing to have a child take such courses rose to 71% from 54% during the past 10 years.

We also approximated the extent of this support by asking how many courses a high school student should be allowed to take for credit online. Typically, students must complete 24 courses in high school to graduate. On average, Americans say that high school students should be allowed to take 11 courses online. This is a 22% increase from the average response of 9 courses in 2017. The pattern is identical when focusing on parents only—an increase to 11 courses from 9.

Does Americans’ growing support for online schooling reflect their recent experiences when most schools closed amid the pandemic? Our data do not offer conclusive evidence that these experiences changed attitudes, but those parents who reported more-positive experiences during school closures are more likely to support online schooling.

The 2020 Education Next survey included a battery of questions asking parents of children in kindergarten through 12th grade whose schools closed during the pandemic about their children’s experiences during the closure (see “What American Families Experienced When Covid-19 Closed Their Schools”). According to these parents, 88% of students primarily participated in their school’s remote instruction or activities on a computer, tablet, or similar device (as opposed to in other ways, such as using workbooks or worksheets). Among parents whose children primarily participated digitally in instruction during the closure, those who report more satisfaction with this instruction also express greater willingness to have their child go through high school taking some academic courses online. Among the top quartile in satisfaction, 85% are willing to have their children take such courses; among the bottom quartile, 58% are willing.

Furthermore, the parents who were least satisfied with instruction during the closure say high school students should be allowed to take 9 online courses, on average, for graduation credit, while the most-satisfied parents say high school students should be able to take 11 courses for such credit.

Homeschooling. Support for homeschooling has remained stable in recent years. Approximately half (49%) of Americans are in favor of allowing parents to educate their children at home instead of sending them to school; 35% of Americans say that they oppose that practice. In hopes of gauging what people think about homeschooling generally (as opposed to having children learn from home during a pandemic), we specifically referred to “ordinary circumstances when schools are open” when asking this question in 2020. The 49% approval share is statistically indistinguishable from the 45% who supported homeschooling when we last asked about it in 2017. The share of Americans who think parents should be required to receive approval from their local school district to homeschool their children was 54% in 2017 and is 54% in 2020. The share of Americans who support requiring parents to notify their local school district if they intend to homeschool their children was 73% in 2017 and is 70% in 2020.

School Reform

Common Core. In every annual survey since 2014, we have conducted a simple experiment to understand public attitudes toward the Common Core State Standards. We ask some respondents about their views on the Common Core, while other respondents receive the same question about a generic set of national math and reading standards. After rising to 50 percent in 2019, support for the Common Core (explicitly named) has dipped again to 43 percent (see Figure 4). This level of support aligns more closely with the results from the three years preceding 2019, perhaps suggesting that last year’s uptick was the result of chance rather than representing a true change in public opinion. An alternative explanation for this year’s decline in approval is that language in the question noting that the standards would be used to “hold public schools accountable for their performance” may have been a turn-off, given people’s awareness of the challenges schools have faced during the pandemic.

Among subgroups, neither teachers (37%) nor Republicans (36%) are particularly enthusiastic about the standards. Black (54%), Hispanic (52%), and Democratic (49%) support remains somewhat more robust. When we ask about generic national standards—the Common Core “brand” holds negative connotations for some people—support among the general public rises to 53%, but this too is a substantial decrease from the 66% favorability we observed last year.

School choice. Support for school choice reforms either holds steady or declines modestly from last year. Support for “the formation of charter schools” among the general public has slipped to 44% from 47% last year. Opposition to charter schools has also declined, however, to 37% from 40%. Meanwhile, the share of respondents who say they neither support nor oppose charters has grown to 19% from 13%. One way of looking at this is that more than 60% of people either support charter schools or may be open to persuasion on the topic.

Democrats and Republicans remain sharply divided on the issue of charter schools (see Figure 5). A policy that has enjoyed steady support from presidents of both parties, charters are now supported by only 37% of Democrats compared to 54% of Republicans.

Among the Black community, only 48% now favor charter schools, down from 55% in 2019 (see Figure 6). Yet opposition to charters has also declined, to 27% from 30% last year. One in four Black respondents now say they neither support nor oppose charter schools, perhaps reflecting continuing debate on the issue among civil rights groups. Hispanic respondents favor charter schools by a 45% to 32% margin, with 22% taking a neutral stance. White respondents are more evenly split, with 44% in support and 39% opposed.

Compared to charters, publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools command slightly higher support from adherents of both parties and from the public as a whole. A slim majority (51%) favor a “universal” voucher program that extends the benefit to all families with children in public schools—and 48% support offering vouchers exclusively to low-income students. Vouchers continue to draw strong approval from Black respondents (60% for universal vouchers; 65% for low-income vouchers) and Hispanic respondents (62% for universal vouchers; 59% for low-income vouchers). Universal vouchers are more popular among Republicans than Democrats (56% to 47%), but the reverse is true of vouchers targeted to low-income students (45% to 52%). Perhaps surprisingly, neither type of voucher program proves to be as polarizing as charter schools.

Tax credits to subsidize donations to private-school scholarship funds—which recently received a strong boost from the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue—continue to be the most popular school-choice reform investigated in our survey. Fifty-seven percent of the general public favor such credits. Black (68%) and Hispanic (70%) Americans form key constituencies of this policy tool. Tax credits also span the political divide, commanding majorities from adherents of both parties (56% of Democrats and 59% of Republicans).

Teacher policies. Merit-based pay, the practice of compensating teachers in part on how much their students learn, garners support from 47% of the public—identical to last year and statistically indistinguishable from the two years prior. Parents are somewhat more skeptical of this approach, with 42% in support. Meanwhile, only 15% of teachers favor structuring their pay along these lines. Merit pay maintains majority support among Republicans (55%) compared to only 41% of Democrats.

Coinciding with the teachers strikes for higher pay over the last few years, positive views of teachers unions rose to 44% in 2019 from 32% in 2016. In 2020, this enthusiasm ticked downward slightly, to 41%. Teachers themselves are considerably more likely to say that their unions have a positive effect on local schools (66%), but nearly one in five educators hold negative views of teachers unions (18%).

Higher education. During the Democratic presidential primary campaign, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders called for making all public four-year colleges tuition-free. Many of his competitors advanced similar proposals for increasing college affordability. Last year’s Education Next survey, administered at the height of this debate, found that fully 60% of Americans agreed with Sanders’s position. Now that the Democratic nomination process is effectively over and the political conversation has shifted to other topics, support for free public college has slipped to 55% (see Figure 7). This proposal is considerably more popular among Black (76%) and Hispanic (75%) respondents than white (44%) respondents. Fully 74% of Democrats favor free public college, compared to only 29% of Republicans.

We also asked respondents whether they support allowing undocumented immigrants—including the “Dreamers” recently protected by the Supreme Court’s decision in Department of Homeland Security v. University of California—to be eligible for in-state college tuition rates if they graduate from a local high school. Forty-six percent of respondents say they do favor this policy (see Figure 8). Support is notably higher among Hispanic respondents (73%) than among white respondents (37%). Democrats (66%) are also more favorably inclined toward granting in-state tuition rates to undocumented immigrants than are Republicans (22%).

Grading Schools, Colleges, and Universities

K–12 public schools. The Education Next survey has asked Americans to “grade” their public schools every year since 2007. Never before have our survey respondents been asked to make this assessment during a global pandemic that has shuttered nearly every school building, sending educators and families scrambling to piece together workable distance-learning options. How do Americans think their public schools performed during this extraordinary moment of upheaval?

Despite the challenges, confidence in public K–12 schooling remains at a record-high level. Fifty-eight percent of respondents give their local public schools a grade of A or B (see Figure 9). This level of approval is only 2 percentage points lower than it was in 2019, when it reached the highest point in the history of the survey. Americans have long viewed their local public schools more positively than they do public schools in the nation as a whole. This holds true in 2020, but the opinion gap has narrowed. This year, 30% of respondents give the nation’s public schools a grade of A or B. This rating represents a 6-percentage-point increase from 2019 and is the highest level the survey has ever recorded, reducing the local-national opinion gap by 8 percentage points.

We also asked respondents to evaluate the quality of teachers in their local schools by assigning a percentage of them to the following four categories: excellent, good, satisfactory, or unsatisfactory. In 2018, the last time our survey featured this question, respondents categorized 56% of teachers as either excellent or good and 16% of teachers as unsatisfactory. In 2020, the public’s view of teachers ticks upward. Respondents categorize 61% of teachers as either excellent or good and 14% as unsatisfactory. Views about teacher quality are generally consistent across racial/ethnic, economic, and political lines. Only teachers themselves place a meaningfully larger proportion into the excellent or good categories (71%) and a smaller proportion into the unsatisfactory category (9%).

Does this robust confidence in the schools reflect stalwart support for the institution of public education, or does it perhaps indicate something else—an enthusiasm for the alternative modes of learning that the pandemic has suddenly introduced to a larger audience? Our data suggest that both interpretations may contain an element of truth. From our analysis of parents who experienced school closures, we know that satisfaction remains strong despite widespread perceptions that students are learning less at home than they would have if schools were open as usual. At the same time, we observe that support for online learning is also up. What is overwhelmingly clear, however, is that Americans’ views of their public schools are undimmed by the unprecedented challenges wrought by the school closures.

Colleges and universities. In the early days of the coronavirus crisis, prominent universities like Harvard and Stanford made headlines by closing their campuses and sending students home to finish the semester online. Nearly all colleges and universities eventually followed suit, resulting in a massive interruption of the college experience of students across the country. The survey allows us to discover how attitudes toward institutions of higher education have shifted in the wake of the pandemic.

Last year, we introduced a new set of questions asking respondents to evaluate four-year colleges and universities in the same way they evaluate elementary and secondary schools for the survey. Respondents are randomly assigned to receive one of four possible versions of the question, focusing on either public or private institutions and either institutions in their state or in the nation as a whole. As with K–12 education, Americans hold more positive views of nearby institutions than those in the nation as a whole. However, these views may be converging. The percentage of respondents giving in-state public colleges and universities an A or B dropped to 69% in 2020 from 78% in 2019. The analogous response for in-state private colleges and universities fell to 74% from 79%. Meanwhile, for institutions of higher education nationwide, the pattern reversed. The proportion of respondents giving an A or B to public and private colleges and universities in the nation as a whole both rose by 4 percentage points this year to 62% and 70%, respectively. Since this time last year, Americans appear to have grown more critical of in-state institutions but more supportive of their counterparts around the country.

The Trump Effect

The Trump era has seen ever-widening fissures between members of America’s two major political parties. Just as previous Education Next surveys have measured how the contemporaneous president’s views might shape those of the electorate, we once again set about examining this topic—this time looking at the possible influences of both President Donald Trump and former President Barack Obama.

To assess these influences, we examined the results from a series of experiments in which we randomly divided our survey sample into groups who received slightly different versions of the same question. One group of respondents was simply asked to register an opinion on an issue, while another group was first told Trump’s position on it. We conducted these experiments on five topics: Common Core, charter schools, tax credits, merit pay for teachers, and in-state college tuition rates for undocumented immigrants who graduate from high school in the respondent’s state. Trump opposes the Common Core and allowing undocumented immigrants to be eligible for in-state college tuition rates, but he supports the other three policies. We conducted similar experiments with Trump’s views in 2017 as well as with former President Barack Obama’s positions in 2009 and 2010, allowing us to compare the persuasive effects of presidential views over time.

Generally, information about Trump’s positions polarizes opinion—as it did in 2017 and as similar information about Obama did a decade ago. For example, there is no overall difference in support between those who are informed of Trump’s stance (45%) and those who are not (44%)—but this finding masks important crosscutting effects. Information about Trump’s position suppresses support for charter schools among Democrats by 7 percentage points (to 30% from 37%) while boosting support among Republicans by 11 percentage points (to 65% from 54%). As a result, the 17-percentage-point gap between Republicans and Democrats without information about Trump’s position doubles to a 35-percentage-point gap among those who receive this information (see Figure 10).

The same pattern holds for attitudes toward tax credits for donations to fund scholarships for low-income students to attend private schools. In this case, there is no discernible difference between Democratic support (56%) and Republican support (59%) when respondents are not informed of Trump’s support for this proposal. Information about Trump’s support decreases Democratic support to 46% and increases Republican support to 67%, opening a gap of 21 percentage points between parties. These shifts among partisans offset each other and leave no discernible change in overall opinion.

In other cases, information about Trump’s position widens the gap between Democrats and Republicans by shifting opinion among followers of one party but not the other. For example, information about Trump’s opposition to the Common Core standards reduces overall support by 7 percentage points, to 36% from 43%, but the drop is almost entirely among Republicans, whose support falls by 14 percentage points, to 22% from 36%. By contrast, Trump’s opposition to the Common Core has no significant effect among Democrats. As a result, the gap between party adherents widens from 13 percentage points among respondents not told of Trump’s position, to a 25-percentage-point difference. Among the public at large, support for Common Core drops to 36% from 43% when respondents are told about Trump’s position.

On the issue of merit pay, Trump’s support repels Democrats, whose approval drops to 23% from 41%. Yet, the president’s position has no significant effect among Republicans, 55% of whom support merit pay without information about Trump’s position and 59% of whom support it with this information. The partisan gap expands to 36 percentage points from 14 percentage points among respondents informed about Trump’s position. Among the population overall, this information depresses support to 40% from 47%.

On only one issue—a policy allowing undocumented immigrants to be eligible for the in-state college tuition rate if they graduate from a high school in the state—does information about Trump’s position fail to influence the attitudes of Democrats or Republicans. In fact, learning of Trump’s stance on this policy makes no statistically discernible impact among Democrats, Republicans, or the public as a whole.

We conducted four of these experiments in the 2017 Education Next survey—for charter schools, tax credits, Common Core, and merit pay. With the exception of the Common Core (where Trump’s position had no statistically identifiable effects for either party), the 2020 results parallel those from 2017, indicating that information about Trump’s positions are as polarizing in the fourth year of his administration as it was in the first year.

How does the Trump effect on public opinion compare to that which Obama exerted? In 2009 and 2010 surveys, we conducted a similar experiment with information about former President Barack Obama’s position on merit pay. In his first year in office, information about Obama’s support for merit pay boosted approval among both Democrats (+16 percentage points) and Republicans (+11 percentage points). However, by the next year, this information moved Democrats and Republicans in opposite directions. Democratic support for merit pay grew by 7 percentage points when they were told of Obama’s position, while Republican support dropped by 11 percentage points.

In the 2020 survey, we set out to compare the Trump effect and the Obama effect more directly. In addition to randomly assigning some respondents to be informed of Trump’s position, we randomly assigned a third group to be told Obama’s position and a fourth to learn both presidents’ positions. The Obama effect is a mirror image of the Trump effect. Information about Obama’s support for merit pay boosts support among Democrats by 9 percentage points but decreases Republican support by 20 percentage points. When respondents are told both Trump’s and Obama’s position, the effect for adherents of each party closely resembles the effect we observe when respondents are told just the position of their co-partisan president. Democrats increase support by 8 percentage points, similar to their 9-percentage-point boost, when they are told only Obama’s position. The difference among Republicans is 5 percentage points, similar to the 4-percentage-point difference among them when they are told only Trump’s position. In other words, it appears partisans tend to gravitate toward the position of a leader from their own party more than they move away from the position of a leader from the opposite party.

Populism and Education Policy

The American Revolution was a populist affair. Colonials tossed tea into Boston Harbor, erected liberty poles in town squares, and dragged a statue of King George III to the ground. The new nation’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, banned delegates from serving in Congress for more than three years out of six. That legacy has proved enduring. The Twenty-Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution restricts presidents to two terms, and many states have placed term limits on governors, members of state legislatures, and even their federal Congressional representatives.

Political observers in both the media and academia have noted a rise of populist movements and leaders in American and global politics over the past decade. While definitions of populism differ somewhat, most pundits agree that it involves a belief that political leaders too often neglect the interests of “the people.” In the United States, the current rise of populism is most often associated with President Trump, but some observers also point to Democrats Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as populist voices. Is the rise of populism shaping the politics of American education?

To find out, we asked respondents whether they thought “elected officials should always follow the will of the people,” whether the “people, not elected officials, should make our most important policy decisions,” whether they “would rather be represented by an ordinary citizen than by an experienced elected official,” and three more such questions. To all of them, large majorities give an affirmative response.

Still, some respondents are more emphatically populist than others. A sizable share “strongly agree” with many of the items, while others give a more moderate “somewhat agree” response or say they neither agree nor disagree. A small percentage—often less than a quarter—disagree. We constructed a “populism scale” based on the responses to these questions, and then divided respondents into four quartiles according to their rankings on that scale. This technique allowed us to look at how the opinions of the most- and least-populist respondents differ on various education-related topics.

Who are the populists?

The demographics of populism are in many ways consistent with conventional thinking about this emerging political force in American politics. The older, less-educated, lower-income, Evangelical segments of the population are more likely to be suspicious of elected officials than the younger, more educated, affluent, and secular segments. Only 45% of those under the age of 30 rank above the median of the distribution on the populism scale, as compared to 59% over the age of 60. Fifty-four percent of those without a bachelor’s degree rank above the median, while only 43% of those with a college degree share that degree of populist fervor. Similarly, only 46% those who report an income of $75,000 or more rank above the median on the populism scale, while 51% of those who report incomes below $25,000 and 56% of those who report incomes between $25,000 and $75,000, are found in the top two populist quartiles. Fifty-five percent of those who say they have been “born again” are populist, as compared to 48% who do not report that religious experience.

Some demographic segments, however, defy the conventional portrait. For one thing, ethnic differences are not great, and do not necessarily occur in the direction one might predict. Hispanic Americans are more populist (55% rank above the median) than white Americans (50%) or Black Americans (48%). Even more surprising is the fairly modest correlation between political ideology and populism. While it is true that 57% of conservatives score above the median in their populist orientation, so do 43% of liberals. And even though 56% of Republicans fall into the more populist categories, so do 46% of Democrats. In other words, populism seems to form its own distinctive brand. While it overlaps Republican conservatism, its principles do not wholly align with the conventional fault lines of party and ideology. Finally, it is incorrect to view populists as alienated outsiders who want nothing to do with contemporary political battles. On the contrary, populists are just about as likely to be engaged in politics as others. While 51% of those who say they never or almost never participate in politics affirm a more populist position, so do 47% of those who say they are sometimes or often engaged in politics.

What do populists think about schools and school policy?

To see whether populists hold distinct views on policy, we compared the survey responses of those in the highest and lowest quartiles of the populist distribution. We found that the most-populist group is more critical of schools, thinks less well of Common Core, and is more in favor of school choice. In other words, populists are applying their more general political beliefs to the educational issues of the day.

Populists are less happy with public schools. The Education Next survey asked respondents to assign grades of A to F to public schools in the nation as a whole. Among those in the most-populist quartile, only 23% give schools a grade of A or B, while 31% assign them a D or fail them. In the least-populist quartile, 35% award the nation’s schools one of the top two grades, while only 13% stick them with one of the worst two (see Figure 11). Populists give higher grades to schools in their local communities, but even in this instance populists are more critical than others. Among those in the most-populist quartile, 50% of respondents award a grade of A or B, while 19% give them a D or an F. By comparison, 61% of those in the least-populist quartile gave schools in their community one of the two highest grades, while only 10% found them worthy of no better than a D. The conventional wisdom that populists are unhappier with the status quo seems vindicated.

Populists support school choice. Since populists are less happy with the state of public schools nationwide, they might be expected to support school choice. To see if that is so, we looked at responses to questions related to vouchers, charters, tax credits and homeschooling. In every case we found that the most-populist quartile is much more supportive of greater school choice than the least-populist quartile. The differences in the level of support is 21 percentage points for charter schools, 17 percentage points for tax-credits for scholarships for low-income students, 16 percentage points for allowing parents to educate their children at home, 15 percentage points for vouchers for all, and 12 percentage points for vouchers for low-income students. Among respondents who are told that Trump favors charters and tax credits, the differences enlarge only marginally. In other words, populists seem willing to translate their ideals into actions. Just as they want the people to govern, so are they more likely to think people should have options when it comes to their children’s education.

Finally, on all the choice questions, the least-populist respondents were the most likely to take a neutral position, saying they neither favored nor opposed a policy. The average difference between the least-populist and the most-populist groups on all these questions was a sizable 12 percentage points. Those who are less likely to insist that elected officials respond to the will of the people are also less likely to take one side or the other on educational issues. Just as populists are consistent in thinking that the people should be in charge, those who are not populist are more willing to let others make the call.

Populists register more opposition to Common Core standards but more support for generic national standards. If populists distrust elites, they can be expected to oppose reforms they perceive as mandates from higher tiers of government. To see if this thesis applies to populists’ views on education policy, we asked randomly assigned respondents one of three variations on a question about common academic standards. The first version inquired about Common Core standards. Surprisingly, 42% of those in both the most-populist and least-populist quartiles say they favor the standards. However, opposition to the Common Core is much higher among the most populist (47%) than among the least populist (32%). Further, the least populist are more likely to say they neither support nor oppose the Common Core (26% to 11%), still another example of their reluctance to take a position on one or another side of an issue.

In the second version of the Common Core question, another randomly chosen group of respondents was told that Trump opposes the Common Core. That information reduces levels of support for the policy to 35% among both those in the highest and lowest quartiles on the populism scale, but it has little effect on opposition to the policy. Forty-four percent of the most populist register disapproval, as do 34% of the least populist, about the same as responses to Common Core when the president’s views go unmentioned. Again, the least-populist respondents are more likely to choose the neutral position.

In the third version of the common standards question, the name “Common Core” is omitted while everything else in the question remains the same. Levels of support for common standards soars among the most-populist group to 61%, while those in the least-populist group remain more or less unchanged (at 46%). Either populists think that such policies are better left to the states, or the Common Core brand continues to be especially toxic for them. Once again, the least-populist group is more likely to hold a neutral position.

In sum, populism is an identifiable set of ideas that help shape an individual’s policy positions. Populist sentiments are widespread, but those who hold them with the greatest intensity also view American schools more critically at both the national and local levels. They are more likely to support all forms of school choice, and they are more likely to disapprove of Common Core, but not of generic national standards. The least populist are more likely to say they neither support nor oppose a policy, a position that is consistent with their quite un-populist readiness to defer to the leadership of elected officials.

Michael B. Henderson is assistant professor at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication and director of its Public Policy Research Lab. David M. Houston is assistant professor of education policy at George Mason University. Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck professor of government at Harvard University, director of Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG), and senior editor of Education Next. M. Danish Shakeel is a postdoctoral research fellow at PEPG. Martin R. West, William Henry Bloomberg pro­fessor of education at Harvard University, is deputy director of PEPG and editor-in-chief of Education Next.

This article appeared in the Winter 2021 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Henderson, M.B., Houston, D.M., Peterson, P.E., Shakeel, M.D., and West, M.R. (2021). Amid Pandemic, Support Soars for Online Learning: Results from the 2020 Education Next survey of public opinion. Education Next, 21(1), 6-21.

This article appeared in the Winter 2021 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Henderson, M.B., Houston, D.M., Peterson, P.E., and West, M.R. (2021). What American Families Experienced When Covid-19 Closed Their Schools: Parents report little contact with teachers and less student learning, but also broad satisfaction; charter and private schools provide more opportunities for student-teacher interaction. Education Next, 21(1), 22-31.

This article appeared in the Winter 2020 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Henderson, M.B., Houston, D.M., Peterson, P.E., and West, M.R. (2020). Public Support Grows for Higher Teacher Pay and Expanded School Choice: Results from the 2019 Education Next Survey. Education Next, 20(1), 8-27.