The 2020 Education Next survey reveals a paradox related to what American parents think about the quality of the instruction their children received after schools closed their doors in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The parents of a substantial majority of school-aged children—71%—think their kids learned less than they would have in school. At the same time, parents of 72% of children say they are satisfied with the instruction and activities provided by schools during the closure (see Figure 1).

What experiences account for these seemingly contradictory opinions? And how did those experiences vary across social groups and the nation’s district, charter, and private school sectors? Since schools closed, commentators have used a variety of methods to understand the likely implications of this episode for student learning and what it bodes for the future, from analyzing school districts’ remote-learning plans to tracking reports of homeschooling on social media. Yet we lack a thorough and systematic picture of what American families experienced during the pandemic.

New data from our 14th annual public-opinion survey help to close this gap. We administered the survey to a nationally representative sample of 1,249 parents with children in kindergarten through 12th grade whose schools closed during the pandemic, including oversamples of parents who identify as Hispanic and parents who identify as Black (see sidebar for details on the survey methodology). These parents answered questions about each of their children whose school closed, including 2,147 children in total. We also gathered data from a nationally representative sample of 490 K–12 teachers whose schools closed because of the pandemic, enabling us to compare what parents reported receiving to what teachers said they delivered.

A New Learning Landscape

Despite early fears that schools would focus remote instruction on reviewing what students had already learned, parents’ responses suggest that the schools attended by 74% of students continued to introduce new content during the closure (see Figure 2). Most of the rest—schools attended by 24% of the children—are said to have provided instruction or activities that reviewed what students had learned prior to the closure. Parents of just 2% of students say that their child received no instruction or activities.

By large measure, most remote instruction was delivered online. The parents of 87% of children say that their child participated “primarily on a computer, tablet, or similar device.” This was the case for 73% of lower elementary students and for nearly all high school students (96%).

Responses vary more widely in regard to how often children heard from their teachers and schools (see Figure 3). While some parents say their child interacted regularly with their teachers during the closure, others say they went for long stretches with little or no contact. For example, the parents of nearly half of students (46%) say their child met with a teacher multiple times during a typical week for whole-class instruction delivered by videoconference or some other way. Another 24% are said to have done so just once a week, while about one in five students (19%) are said to have had no live whole-class instruction.

Students appear to have had even less one-on-one interaction with their teachers. Parents of just 19% of students report individual contact with teachers by video, phone, or some other way multiple times a week. The parents of 40% of students report that their child had no one-on-one contact with teachers.

The frequency of assignments also varied widely across students. Parents of 45% of students report that their child was assigned required work on a daily basis. Another 27% had required assignments several times a week. On the other hand, parents of more than 1 in 10 students say their child received no required assignments.

Required assignments were less common among students in kindergarten through 2nd grade. Twenty-one percent of these students had no required work, according to parent reports, as compared to 8% in middle and high school. The opposite pattern holds for voluntary assignments, which were most common in lower elementary grades and least common in high school.

About half of students (48%) received grades or other feedback on completed assignments several times a week or more. Another 21% received feedback just once a week, while 18% did not receive any feedback on their completed assignments during the closure.

Grades and feedback were most frequent in middle and high school, perhaps because of the greater frequency of required assignments in those grades. Parents of most middle and high school students say their child received feedback or grades at least several times a week. But parents of just 44% of upper elementary school students and 38% of lower elementary students say their kids got such feedback that often. One third of lower elementary school students are said to have received no grades or feedback on completed assignments.

According to their parents, American students on average spent 3.4 hours on schoolwork during a typical day during closures—a figure that varied across grade levels. Lower elementary students are said to have spent 2.9 hours, on average, while for high school students the number was 3.8 hours.

Parents, in turn, say they spent an average of 2 hours in a typical day helping with schoolwork. Those with multiple children at home bore the heaviest load: Parents with only one school-age child in their household report spending 1.6 hours on a typical day helping their child. For parents with four children, that number rose to 3.7 hours.

As noted above, the parents of 72% of students say that they are satisfied with the instruction and activities provided by their child’s school during the closure; 28% report that they are “very satisfied.” Despite this generally high level of satisfaction, there is evidence that they would have welcomed more instruction, assignments, and feedback. Across every measure we used—including the number of assignments students received, the time they spent on their schoolwork, and the frequency with which they interacted with teachers—parental satisfaction rose with greater intensity of instruction (see Figure 4). To provide just one example, the parents of 35 percent of children who reportedly received grades or other feedback multiple times of week say they are “very satisfied” with their school’s response. This number falls to 21 percent for the parents of children who reportedly received this kind of feedback once a week or less.

More to the point, the parents of fully 71% of students assert that their child learned less than they would have had their school not closed, with the parents of 29% saying the child learned “a lot less.” The parents of 17% of students say their child learned about the same, and the parents of only 12% of students say their child learned more.

Teachers’ Perspectives

We also surveyed a sample of 490 K–12 teachers who work in schools that closed during the pandemic. Our questions for teachers parallel those we asked parents. Generally, teachers’ responses are consistent with how parents describe their children’s experiences, but a few exceptions arise.

One exception concerns the frequency of one-to-one contact between teachers and students. According to parents, only 19% of students met with their teachers individually multiple times a week; 36% of teachers, however, say they met with their students that often. Teachers also report providing grades or feedback on assignments more often than parents say such feedback occurred. Fifty-nine percent of teachers say they provided feedback on completed assignments multiple times a week. These seeming discrepancies could reflect teachers having met with or provided feedback to some but not all of their students on a regular basis, or they could reflect differences in class sizes across teachers (that is, if teachers who maintained more contact with their students taught fewer students than teachers who had less contact with their students).

By contrast, teachers report providing fewer required assignments than parents say their children received. Whereas the parents of 72% of students say their child had required assignments multiple times throughout a week, just 55% of teachers say they assigned required work this often. American students may have had more flexibility in completing assignments than their parents perceived.

Parents and teachers hold similar opinions on how much students learned after their sudden immersion into the world of distance education. In fact, teachers are even more likely than parents to say children learned less than they would have if schools had remained open. Eighty-seven percent of teachers say their students learned less, including 48% who answered “a lot less.” By comparison, parents of 71% of the students say their children learned less, with 29% saying “a lot less.”

School Closures and Inequality

Many commentators have highlighted the potential for widespread school closures to exacerbate pre-existing racial, ethnic, and economic inequalities. In the absence of in-person schooling, the argument goes, advantaged students will be partially buffered from ill effects because their families generally have more time, flexibility, and resources to offset the reduction in formal instruction. By contrast, students of color and students from low-income families, who were already at a disadvantage before the crisis began, will disproportionately face the negative consequences of the shutdown.

The results from our survey partially corroborate this theory, but they also complicate it. Children of Black, Hispanic, and low-income parents were less likely than children of White and high-income parents to receive instruction from their schools that introduced new content (as opposed to reviewing material already covered), according to their parents. This disparity could lead disadvantaged students to fall further behind. On the other hand, parents of Black, Hispanic, and low-income students report that their children had more frequent interactions with their teachers and spent more hours a day on schoolwork than their White and more affluent counterparts. These same parents say they spent more time helping their children with schoolwork and were less likely to say their child learned less because of the closure. This pattern should not assuage concerns about inequality in the wake of the pandemic. It does, however, shine a spotlight on the hard work that many parents report doing to preempt this problem.

Based on parents’ reports, about 77% of the children of White respondents encountered mostly new instructional content rather than reviewing what they had already learned. By contrast, only about 67% of the children of Black respondents and 72% of the children of Hispanic respondents experienced the same. The difference was starker with respect to family income. About 80% of students in the top quartile of household income received mostly new content compared to only 64% of students in the lowest quartile.

On the other hand, teachers seem to have had more contact with the children of Black and Hispanic parents (see Figure 5). According to their parents, only 30% of the children of White respondents met one-on-one with their teachers at least once a week via phone or the Internet. These rates were noticeably higher for the children of Black respondents (49%) and the children of Hispanic respondents (55%). Similarly, 32% of students in the top income quartile are said to have met one-on-one with their teachers at least once a week, while 50% of students in the lowest income quartile are said to have experienced this same level of contact. This pattern also occurs with respect to the frequency of whole-class contact with teachers, but the differences by parents’ race/ethnicity and household income are less pronounced.

Black and Hispanic parents report that their children devoted substantially more time to schoolwork during the closures than do White parents (see Figure 6). White parents say their children spent about 3.1 hours a day on schoolwork while the schools were closed. Black and Hispanic parents report their children putting in 4.3 hours and 3.9 hours a day, respectively. Similarly, Black and Hispanic parents report spending more time helping their child with schoolwork—a difference that is not explained by variations in household size or family structure. Holding those variables constant, Black and Hispanic parents report spending 1.1 and 0.9 more hours than White parents, respectively. We do not observe differences in students’ time commitment by household income, but we do find that parents in the lowest income quartile report spending more time providing support.

According to their parents, larger shares of the children of White respondents (76%) and children in higher income households (73%) learned less than they would have if schools remained open than was the case for the children of Black respondents (54%), the children of Hispanic respondents (61%), and children in lower income households (57%; see Figure 7). It is not clear whether this is a result of lower expectations of schools in normal times or the result of compensatory efforts among low-income families, families of color, and the schools that serve them. At the same time, we do not observe notable differences in the share of students whose parents are satisfied with their schools’ responses by parents’ race/ethnicity or household income.

School Responses to Closures by Sector

The nation’s three K–12 educational sectors—district, charter, and private—seem to have responded differently to the challenges posed by the pandemic. Although serious disruptions occurred in all three sectors, there are several indications that charter schools and private schools were better able to adapt to the new learning environment than was the district sector.

Based on their parents’ reports, children in private or charter schools were more likely to receive instruction that introduced new content, as opposed to reviewing what they had already learned. The parents of 88% of private-school students and 86% of charter-school students give that response, as compared to the parents of 72% of district students.

Children in private or charter schools were also more likely to meet with their school or teachers along with their entire class by video, telephone, or in another way. Parents of nearly 70% of private-school students and 62% of charter school students say such meetings took place daily or several times a week, but parents of only 43% of district students give this response. Twenty percent of district students never met with their school or teachers as a class, as compared to 11% of students in the private and charter sectors.

Parents also indicate that charter school teachers had more frequent one-on-one interactions with their students. Parents of only 18% of district school students and 22% of private school students say their child was individually contacted daily or several times a week, but the parents of 42% of charter school students report that frequency of contact.

When asked the frequency with which required work was assigned, parents of 85% of private school students and 79% of charter school students say such assignments occurred daily or several times a week, while the parents of 71% of district students say that. Nor is it the case that district schools offset their tendency to provide required assignments less frequently by giving voluntary assignments more often. In fact, the three sectors were similar in their frequency of providing voluntary assignments: 47% of district school students, 50% of charter school students, and 52% of private school students had voluntary assignments multiple times a week, according to parent respondents.

Parents of 60% of charter school students say teachers graded assignments or gave other feedback daily or several times a week, but the parents of only 46% of district students report this degree of frequency. (The share among private school students is 56%, which does not differ significantly from either group.)

The parents of most students think their children learned less during the closure than they would have had schools not closed, regardless of sector. However, the share of students who learned less, according to their parents, is significantly lower in the charter sector. Parents of 54% of charter school students say their child learned less than they would have had their school not closed. By contrast, parents of 72% of district students and 66% of private school students say their child learned less. Remarkably, the parents of 30% of charter school students report that their child learned more as a result of the closure. For district and private school students, that number was 11% and 18%, respectively.

Finally, while parents of most students in each sector are satisfied with the instruction and activities that schools provided during the closures, there is some evidence of greater satisfaction in the charter and private sectors than in the district sector—particularly when focusing on the share of students whose parents say they are “very satisfied” (see Figure 8). Parents of 70% of district students are satisfied, but parents of only 26% of district students are very satisfied. However, parents of 81% charter school students are satisfied, and 45% of these students’ parents are very satisfied. Likewise, parents of 78% of private school students are satisfied with instruction, and parents of 39% of these students are very satisfied. In short, fewer students in charter and private schools than students in district schools have parents who think they learned less during the closure, and more students in charter and private schools than students in district schools have parents who are satisfied with instruction during the closure.

Taken as a whole, our findings highlight the risks to students’ educational well-being if schools do not reopen this fall. Overwhelming majorities of both teachers and parents report that students learned less when schooling went remote, with the parents of more than a quarter of students and just about half of the teachers reporting that students learned “a lot less.” Many other findings from our survey suggest that students did not receive the same face-to-face interactions (even on a screen) with their teachers that ordinarily take place inside the school building. Admittedly, a majority of parents say they are satisfied with the school’s response, but these expressions likely convey generosity toward educators who faced sudden and enormous challenges as the pandemic spread. If schools do remain closed, school districts would do well to look to the private and charter sectors for ways to strengthen school-student connections in remote settings. But even at charter schools, the parents of 54% of students said their child learned less via remote schooling than they would have otherwise. For most students, the best way to learn is very likely through in-person instruction and guidance from a teacher.

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’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG), and Senior Editor of Education Next. Martin R. West is the William Henry Bloomberg Professor of Education at Harvard University, Deputy Director of PEPG, and Editor-in-chief of Education Next.

With the 2020 presidential election campaign now underway, education-policy proposals previously at the edge of the political debate are entering the mainstream. On the Republican side, the Trump administration has intensified its campaign for school choice. U.S. education secretary Betsy DeVos is asking Congress to enact $5 billion in tax credits annually to encourage donations to state-approved organizations providing scholarships that, if the state allows, could be used to attend private schools. Meanwhile, several Democratic candidates are calling for tuition-free college, an idea proposed in 2016 by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont but rejected that year by the nominees of both political parties. Democratic candidates are also promising dramatic increases to the federal fiscal commitment to K–12 education. Responding to recent teacher strikes for higher pay, Senator Kamala Harris of California proposes federal funding of a $13,500 average pay raise for teachers over their current annual salaries—at an estimated cost to taxpayers of $315 billion over 10 years. Not to be outdone, former vice president Joe Biden has called for a tripling of federal funding for schools serving the economically disadvantaged.

The tenor of these provocative ideas is resonating with the American public. Support for increasing teacher pay is higher now than at any point since 2008, and a majority of the public favors more federal funding for local schools. Free college commands the support of three in five Americans. Support for school vouchers has shifted upward, and tax-credit scholarships along the lines proposed by the current administration now command the support of a sizable majority of adults.

These are just a few of the findings of the 13th annual Education Next survey of public opinion, administered in May 2019. The poll’s nationally representative sample of 3,046 adults includes an oversampling of teachers, African Americans, and those who identify themselves as Hispanic. (All estimates of results are adjusted for non-response and oversampling of specific populations. See methods sidebar for further details.) This year, for the first time, we also surveyed a sample of 415 high-school students and their parents (see sidebar, “What Do Students Think about Education Policy?”).

On several issues, our analysis teases out nuances in public opinion by asking variations of questions to randomly selected segments of survey participants. We divided respondents at random into two or more segments and asked each group a different version of the same general question. For example, we told half of the respondents—but not the other half—how much the average teacher in their state is paid before asking whether salaries should increase, decrease, or remain about the same. By comparing the differences in the opinions of the two groups, we are able to estimate the extent to which relevant information influences public thinking on teacher pay.

In this essay, we report and interpret the poll’s major findings. Detailed results are available here. Following are the survey’s top-10 findings:

1. Vouchers and tax credits. The percentage of American adults favoring vouchers that help low-income students cover the cost of private-school tuition has risen to 49% in 2019 from 37% in 2016, and support for tax credits for donations to organizations that give scholarships to low-income students has edged upward to 58% from 53% over this same time period.

2. Charters. Public support for charter schools has climbed back to 48% from a low of 39% in 2017. Sixty-one percent of Republicans currently espouse charter schools, but only 40% of Democrats do. Only 33% of white Democrats favor charters, though 55% of African American Democrats and 47% of Hispanic Democrats back them.

3. Teacher pay. Support for teacher pay hikes is now higher than at any point since 2008. Among those provided information about current salary levels in their state, 56% say teacher salaries should rise—a 20-percentage-point jump over the approval level seen just two years ago. Among those not provided this information, 72% say salaries should increase, 5 percentage points higher than in 2018.

4. Spending. Public support for higher levels of school spending has also grown over the past two years. Among those not told current levels of expenditure, 62% think K–12 spending should increase, 8 percentage points higher than in 2017. Although only 50% of those told current levels favor an increase, that level still constitutes an increase of 11 percentage points over 2017.

5. Federal, state, and local spending. The public is more supportive of K–12 expenditure by the federal government than by state and local governments. Two thirds of those informed of the share currently contributed by the federal government say it should foot more of the bill. But only 36% of those told how much the local district contributes think districts should ramp up their expenditures. Half thought the state should contribute more, once they were informed of current levels.

6. Common Core. Support for the Common Core State Standards is rebounding. Overall, 50% of Americans endorse use of the standards in their state, up from 41% two years ago. The resurgence in support is strongest among Republicans, leaping to 46% from 32% over the past two years.

7. Opinion on local schools. More Americans have a positive view of their local public schools than at any point since 2007. Today, 60% of respondents give their local public schools a grade of A or B, a 9-percentage-point rise over last year.

8. Free college. Sixty percent of Americans endorse the idea of making public four-year colleges free, and even more (69%) want free public two-year colleges. Democrats are especially supportive of the concept (79% approval for four-year and 85% for two-year). Only 35% of Republicans back free tuition for four-year colleges and 47% favor the policy for two-year colleges.

9. Opinion on colleges. Americans think more highly of U.S. public four-year colleges and universities than of K–12 schools. More than twice as many Americans grade public four-year institutions nationwide with an A or B (58%) than hand out the high marks to K–12 schools (24%). The nation’s private four-year colleges and universities draw even higher esteem, with 66% of the general public rating them with grades of A or B. The share of Republicans who grade public four-year colleges across the country with these top marks is 17 percentage points lower than for Democrats, at 49% and 66%, respectively.

The public is even more generous in its evaluation of higher-education institutions in their own state. Seventy-six percent of respondents grade public four-year colleges in their state with an A or B. Similarly, 79% grade private four-year colleges in their state with these top marks.

10. Student perspectives. Students have a lower opinion of their schools than do their parents. Seventy percent of parents give their local public schools an A or B grade, and a vast majority of 82% assign their child’s high school those top marks. Among students, these proportions drop by 15 percentage points for the local public schools and 13 percentage points for their own high school. However, students are less likely than parents to think that schools should take additional security measures. Seventy-seven percent of parents, but only 63% of their children, would install metal detectors at every school. Similarly, 81% of parents, but only 73% of their high-school students, would screen all students for severe emotional distress.

School Choice in the Trump Era

Though school choice was but a minor issue in the 2016 election, the Trump administration has sought to give it center stage in the national political debate over education. When the president nominated Betsy DeVos, chair of a pro–school choice advocacy group, as education secretary, her confirmation divided the Senate so evenly the vice president had to break the tie with a vote in her favor. DeVos has nonetheless become one of the longest-serving members of Trump’s cabinet and, far from retreating on the issue of school choice, she is backing a bill that would provide a federal tax credit for donations to organizations providing scholarships for private-school tuition or other state-approved educational expenses. DeVos says the law, if enacted, would give “hundreds of thousands of students across the country the power to find the right fit for their education.” The new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives makes it clear no such law will win a majority on their watch. Nor has the Republican-controlled Senate taken action on DeVos’s proposed school-choice legislation.

Has DeVos’s steadfast support for educational choice had an impact outside the Beltway? Have Democratic leaders succeeded in swaying public opinion against choice programs? Or, has opinion simply polarized along party lines?

To explore these questions, we looked at trends in public opinion between 2016 and 2019 on four school-choice policies: 1) targeted vouchers limited to students from low-income families; 2) universal vouchers for all families; 3) tax credits for contributors to organizations that give scholarships to low-income families; and 4) charter schools. We find, somewhat to our surprise, that public opinion about several school-choice policies has shifted closer to the views held by Betsy DeVos. But on one topic—charter schools—we see polarization along party lines (see Figure 1).

Targeted vouchers. The program to which DeVos devoted so much of her public life before becoming secretary is the least popular of the four school-choice programs. In 2016, a near majority of the public opposed “a proposal [to] give low-income families with children in public schools a wider choice, by allowing them to enroll their children in private schools instead, with government helping to pay the tuition.” Forty-eight percent said they were against targeted vouchers, and only 37% favored them. The remainder took a neutral position, saying they neither supported nor opposed the policy. A year later, approval for targeted vouchers rose to 43%, a 6-percentage-point bump. Now, in 2019, a near majority (49%) of respondents say they favor vouchers for low-income families, with just 41% expressing disapproval. On balance, support for targeted vouchers has gained 12 percentage points over the past four years, while opposition has gone down by 7 percentage points.

Both Republicans and Democrats are more in favor of targeted vouchers than they were three years ago. In 2016, a majority (54%) of Republicans opposed low-income vouchers, and less than a third (31%) liked the idea. By 2019, Republican approbation has jumped 13 percentage points upward to 44%, while opposition has fallen by 4 percentage points to 50%. The trend is the same for Democrats. Even in 2016, Democrats were more favorably disposed to targeted vouchers than Republicans, dividing between 42% in support and 43% opposed. Rank-and-file Democratic support for vouchers in 2018 rose to 47%, though opposition remained at 41%. Now, in 2019, Democratic approval for low-income vouchers has climbed to 52%, with disapproval receding to 37%. In short, criticism by Democratic elites has not stopped grassroots support from increasing by 10 percentage points and opposition from declining by 6 percentage points since 2016.

Universal vouchers. Although no state has ever implemented a universal voucher plan, the drift in public opinion in favor of such vouchers resembles that for targeted ones. In 2016, the public was equally divided over “a proposal [to] give all families with children in public schools a wider choice, by allowing them to enroll their children in private schools instead, with government helping to pay the tuition.” Forty-five percent of the adult population expressed support, with 44% opposed. A year later the level of support did not change significantly, but disapproval shrank to 37%. By 2018, a clear majority of 54% in favor of universal vouchers had emerged, with disapproval falling to 31%. The shift upward in approval has remained steady in 2019, with 55% in favor, though disapproval has returned to its 2017 level. Over the four years, the side endorsing universal vouchers has grown by 10 percentage points, while opposition has slipped 7 percentage points.

Republicans are more likely to back vouchers for all than those reserved for the poor. Even in 2016, 41% of Republicans liked the idea of universal vouchers, though 49% did not. With the Trump administration promoting the voucher concept, the mood shifted sharply in favor of universal vouchers in 2017 by a 54% to 33% margin. Now, in 2019, approval for such vouchers among Republicans has risen to 61%, with a third opposed. The change between 2016 and 2019 constitutes a 20-percentage-point shift upward in the level of Republican support for vouchers for all students. Democrats also like the idea of universal vouchers, but their opinions haven’t changed much since 2016. That year, Democrats backed the policy proposal by a 49% to 39% margin; in 2019, support has risen just slightly to 52%, with 40% against. In short, universal vouchers have gained in popularity among Republicans without losing ground among Democrats.

Tax credits. Tax credits for “individual and corporate donations that pay for scholarships to help low-income parents send their children to private schools” constitute the most popular of the school-choice programs, perhaps explaining why DeVos has built on this model for her proposed Education Freedom Scholarships legislation. Tax credits do not require any direct government outlay, and proponents can make the case to state legislatures that they save dollars for state taxpayers, as the cost of the scholarships permitted in many states is more than offset by the decrease in state aid to local districts. In Florida, a tax-credit initiative survived constitutional scrutiny when a voucher program did not, and, in Illinois, a deep-blue state, a tax-credit bill was signed into law in 2018.

These tax-credit success stories are rooted in continuing and bipartisan support among the public. Back in 2016, the concept commanded a 53% to 29% approval majority, with 18% taking a neutral position. Not much changed a year later, but in 2018 support edged up to 57%, with opposition slipping slightly to 26%. That level of endorsement has held steady in 2019 (58% to 26%). Even in an era of polarization, tax credits retain bipartisan favor. Sixty-five percent of Republicans like the idea, as compared to 49% in 2016. But the increase in Republican approval has not engendered polarization. In 2016, a 57% majority among Democrats favored the idea. That percentage has not changed materially in any subsequent year.

Nor does the public seem to care whether it is the state government that offers the tax credit, as in 18 current state programs, or if it is the federal government, as DeVos proposes. We learned this by asking half of the respondents a version of the question that said the credits would be offered by the feds. This version elicited a level of support—57%—that is statistically similar to what we observe when the federal government is not mentioned.

Charter schools. Charter schools are a small but increasingly entrenched part of the K–12 education system. Forty-four states and the District of Columbia have passed laws granting various entities—typically nonprofit organizations, government agencies, or universities—the power to authorize the formation of a charter school, and today charters serve about 6% of all students, not far behind the 10% share attending private schools. As judged by learning gains on state tests, a sizable number of charter schools are performing no better and possibly worse than neighboring public schools. Still, parental demand for charter schools is outstripping supply in many parts of the country. Some charters are generating impressive results, particularly in urban areas, and quite a few rank among the best schools in the country.

Still, the political environment for charters is shifting. For more than two decades after the first charter school opened its doors in Minnesota in 1992, charters seemed to be the one choice initiative backed by Democrats and Republicans alike. President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, oversaw the creation of a federal program to support charter-school growth, and his Republican successor, George W. Bush, sought to increase its funding. The Democratic administration of Barack Obama subsequently included charter expansion in its Race to the Top initiative.

In the 2016 election cycle, though, charter policy became an increasingly partisan issue. As a candidate, Democrat Hillary Clinton expressed doubts about whether charter schools serve the most disadvantaged students. In Massachusetts, teachers unions launched a vociferous campaign against charters and defeated a referendum that would have lifted a cap on the number of such schools in the state. In Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, unions have since secured agreements committing school boards to limit charter-school growth. The NAACP has called for a moratorium on charter schools.

Many candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 are adding their voices to the anti-charter campaign. Joe Biden, once a supporter of charters, now says “the bottom line is [that charters] siphon off money for our public schools, which are already in enough trouble.” Bernie Sanders has called for a halt to federal funding of charters. Even Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who welcomed charters to Newark when he was the city’s mayor, now takes an anti-charter stance: “I look at some of the charter laws that are written around this country,” he says, “and I find them really offensive. . . . They’re about raiding public education and hurting public schools, and that’s something . . . I will fight against.”

In the early days of the Trump administration, forceful attacks on charters seemed to influence public thinking. When respondents were asked in 2017 whether they favored the “formation of charter schools, which are publicly funded but are not managed by the local school board,” only 39% backed them, which was 12 percentage points lower than in 2016. Opposition had risen to 36% from 28% the year before. Charter support recovered modestly to 44% in 2018, with 35% opposed.

This year, support for charters has climbed back to 48%, essentially the same level as in 2016. However, disapproval, at 39%, remains as high as it was in 2017, with fewer people taking a neutral position. In sum, the potential collapse of public approval for charters that had appeared imminent in 2017 has not occurred, but opposition has solidified among a significant minority.

There are also signs of partisan polarization. On one side, Republicans are as committed as ever to charter schools. In 2016, 60% of party adherents backed charters. In 2017, as overall support for charters dipped, Republicans backed charters by a ratio of 47% to 30%. In 2018, Republican approval shifted back up to 57%, with just 27% in opposition. In 2019, the margin has widened, with 61% of Republicans backing charters while opposition remains at 27%.

Simultaneously, Democrats have backed away from charter schools. When Barack Obama held office in 2016, Democrats backed charters by a 45% to 33% margin. Those numbers nearly reversed themselves after the battles over the DeVos nomination, with just 34% of Democrats in favor and 41% against. By 2018, a plurality (42%) of the party’s adherents said they opposed the “formation of charters,” while just 36% were in favor. Democrats now oppose charters by a ratio of 48% to 40%.

Overall, the partisan divide in support for charter schools has widened to 21 percentage points from 15 percentage points between 2016 and 2019.

Knowledge of charter schools. Despite the spiraling controversy over charter schools, most Americans show a lack of full understanding about what they are and the policies that govern them, and people are no better informed in 2019 than they were seven years ago (see Figure 2). In 2012, our survey asked respondents if charters were allowed to charge tuition. Only 24% correctly said they could not; 32% answered incorrectly; and 44% admitted they did not know. The 2019 responses to that question are similar: only 26% give the right answer, 29% give the wrong answer, and 43% say they do not know. We also asked whether charters are allowed to hold religious services (they cannot). Only 22% give the right answer to this question in 2019, the same share that responded correctly in 2012.

We also asked respondents whether there is a charter school within their local school district. Twenty-eight percent say that they do not know. For the rest of the poll participants, Tyler Simko, research fellow at Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, checked the responses against data on charter-school locations. As it turns out, many more people say they either “think” or “know” there is a charter school in their local district than is in fact the case. Only 40% of those who say they “know” a charter school is in their district are right. Only 31% of those who “think” their district has a charter school are correct. Those who do not think their home district includes a charter are more often right, with only 12% responding incorrectly. Less than 10% of those who “know” their district has no charter school are wrong.

Despite the high frequency of guessing on that question, people are somewhat more likely to approve of charters if one or more is in fact present in their local district. Fifty-three percent of those residing in places with charter schools favor the idea and only 35% oppose it, as compared to a margin of 47% support to 40% opposition among those living elsewhere. Of course, it is not clear what the causal relationship is here—whether charter schools tend to locate in more-receptive communities or these schools radiate a positive influence on local public opinion.

Divisions among Democrats. School choice divides the Democratic Party coalition along racial and ethnic lines (see Figure 3). Democrats who identify as African American approve of targeted vouchers, universal vouchers, and charter schools at 70%, 64%, and 55%, respectively. Among Hispanic Democrats, support for the three policies registers at 67%, 60%, and 47%. Meanwhile, just 40% of non-Hispanic white Democrats support targeted vouchers, 46% approve of universal vouchers, and 33% endorse charter schools.

Teacher Pay and Personnel Policies

The year 2019 has been one of continued activism on the part of teachers seeking to make the case for better pay and working conditions—and against reforms such as charter schools and merit pay. After a rash of statewide strikes and walkouts shuttered schools in six states in spring 2018, this year has seen protracted strikes in Los Angeles, Oakland, and Denver, as well as the nation’s first-ever strike against a charter management organization. Teachers in each of these settings managed to secure healthy bumps in pay and other concessions, such as restrictions on class size and the hiring of additional non-teaching staff.

But how have these efforts played in the court of public opinion? Do Americans approve of teachers’ ongoing push for better pay? Have they become more sympathetic to those demands in the past year? How have their views of teachers unions changed over time? And do teachers and the public see eye to eye on matters such as tenure and merit pay? This year’s survey provided an opportunity to check the thermometer on each of these issues.

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, 56% say teacher salaries should increase—a 7-percentage-point jump over last year (see Figure 4). Forty percent of “informed” respondents say teacher salaries in their state should remain about the same, while just 5% say they should decrease.

This boost in support for a teacher pay increase comes on the heels of a 13-percentage-point jump that occurred between 2017 and 2018. As a result, support for increasing teacher compensation is now higher than at any point since 2008, when we first surveyed the public on the issue. That year, when we fielded our survey at the peak of the housing bubble and just prior to the financial crisis, marked the only other time in which a majority of poll respondents expressed support for increasing teacher pay when told actual teacher salaries.

More Democrats than Republicans favor increasing teacher salaries, but approval jumped in 2019 among members of both political parties. Support rose to 64% this year from 59% in 2018 among Democrats, and to 43% from 38% among Republicans. Meanwhile, teachers are even more convinced about the merits of increasing their own salaries, with 76% of them registering support.

Among those who are not first informed of what teachers currently earn, a larger proportion of the public favors increasing teacher salaries. Seventy-two percent of this segment say that salaries should increase, 25% say they should remain the same, and 3% say they should decrease. These numbers also reflect an uptick in support over 2018, in this case by 5 percentage points. 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 teacher salaries in their state, respondents’ average guess came in at $41,987—30% less than the actual average of $59,581 among our sample of educators.

Teachers unions and the right to strike. The public has also grown more sanguine about the influence teachers unions have on the nation’s public schools (see Figure 5). When asked whether they think the effects of unions are “generally positive” or “generally negative,” 43% of those polled offer a positive assessment and 34% give a negative one. The share opting for positive has risen 6 percentage points since 2018 and 13 percentage points since 2015. That year, just 30% of the public said positive while 40% said negative. The division of opinion over teachers unions falls sharply along partisan lines, with 57% of Democrats, but just 26% of Republicans, selecting positive. Teachers, meanwhile, think that unions have a positive impact by an overwhelming 60% to 26% margin.

Nor has the disruption caused by recent teacher strikes diminished the public’s support for the teachers’ right to take this action. While laws prohibiting teacher strikes are on the books in a majority of states, 54% of the public favors “public school teachers having the right to strike,” and just 32% opposes it; both figures are essentially unchanged over the past year. There is again a strong partisan divide on this issue, however, with 68% of Democrats and just 36% of Republicans in favor. A hefty share of teachers—68%—also support the right to strike; just 24% oppose it.

Merit pay. While Americans have grown more supportive of teacher pay raises, they continue to disagree with teachers over the criteria and methods that determine their compensation. This year, we used two different formats when asking whether part of teachers’ pay should be based on “how much their students learn.” A random half of respondents were asked the basic question, as in previous years of the poll. The other half answered a modified question that also listed a battery of other potential determinants of teachers’ pay. Both versions reveal more support than opposition from the public for paying teachers based in part on student learning. Approval is substantially higher, however, when respondents consider such merit pay alongside other forms of differentiated compensation.

When the question is posed in its traditional form, 47% of the public expresses support for merit pay and 40% is opposed. At 53%, approval for merit pay is higher among Republicans than among Democrats. Democrats are evenly split, with 43% in favor and 44% opposed. Among teachers, however, just 20% favor merit pay and as many as 74% are against it.

The second format of the question used the same language to ask whether part of teachers’ pay should be based on the following factors:

• whether they teach subjects with teacher shortages, like math and science

• whether they teach in schools with many disadvantaged students

• evaluations by their principals

• evaluations by their fellow teachers

• how many years they have been teaching

• whether they have a master’s degree
All of these options were shown when respondents were asked to register their opinion of each, with the items randomly ordered to defuse any tendency on the part of respondents to offer more (or less) support for those presented first.

When the question is asked this way, 72% of respondents express support for merit pay—24 percentage points higher than when the question is asked in isolation (see Figure 6). The public apparently finds the concept more attractive when it is considered in the context of other options for determining teachers’ salaries. Approval among teachers jumps as well, to 42%, though a 51% majority remain opposed.

A majority of respondents also favor five other options for determining pay: experience (74%), principal evaluations (66%), master’s degrees (66%), subject area shortages (65%), and student disadvantage (60%). Basing teacher pay in part on evaluations by their peers draws somewhat weaker support—49%—but that still exceeds the 35% who are opposed.

Teachers express more-selective views on the various options for determining their compensation. Only 33% of teachers endorse peer evaluations, with 57% opposed—the only option to generate more resistance than merit pay. A majority of teachers express support for basing pay in part on student disadvantage (73%), principal evaluations (57%), and subject-area shortages (55%). But far larger majorities express approval for the traditional determinants of teacher pay: experience (89%) and master’s degrees (80%). Teachers may be open to experimentation with alternatives, but they clearly remain most comfortable with the status quo.

Tenure. Teachers also disagree with the broader public on the merits of teacher tenure. A clear plurality of the public—49%—opposes the practice, with 37% in favor, while teachers, as might be expected, strongly approve of tenure—59% to 34%. It is possible that support for tenure among teachers is softening, however. Opposition to the practice rose by 10 percentage points over the past year, while support dipped by 3 percentage points.

Federalism and School Spending

The appropriate role of the federal government in K–12 education has long been a contentious issue. The Trump administration has called for only the most minimal boosts in federal funding. By contrast, candidates seeking the Democratic nomination for president are calling for massive increases. Joe Biden wants to triple the amount of money the federal government spends on the education of low-income children. Kamala Harris wants to spend $315 billion over 10 years to boost teacher salaries, and Bernie Sanders is willing to spend whatever it takes to boost minimum teacher salaries to $60,000 a year.

Although the price tag is larger than in the past, the debate between Republicans and Democrats is an old one. Democratic president John F. Kennedy was unable to persuade Congress to enact a general grant-in-aid to local school districts. It was his successor, Lyndon Johnson, also a Democrat, who crafted a compromise targeting federal dollars to schools with low-income students. Democrat Jimmy Carter kept his campaign commitment to create a federal department of education, but Congress prevented his Republican successor, Ronald Reagan, from keeping his promise to abolish it. Republican George W. Bush defied expectations by constructing a broad bipartisan coalition that passed No Child Left Behind, a law that boosted spending and demanded that states test students annually and sanction schools based on the results. But the partisan divide re-emerged as a Republican Congress won a partial retreat from a large federal role with the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 under Barack Obama, a Democrat.

Despite these twists and turns, the share of fiscal costs covered by federal grants has been surprisingly stable since the Carter administration. The level has wavered over the years, but it has never wandered far from 10% of total funding, with the rest coming from state and local school districts, which chip in roughly equal amounts. In 2016, the most recent year for which information is available, the federal share was 8% nationwide. State and local tiers of government each contributed 46% of the total cost.

Despite the consistency of these proportions over time, public perceptions of the federal share are wildly inaccurate (see Figure 7). When we asked respondents “what percent of funding for public schools in your local school district currently comes from each level of government,” people assign an average of 28% to the federal government, more than three times the actual amount. Meanwhile, the public underestimates the local contribution, positing 34%. The public also miscalculates the size of the state contribution by 9 percentage points, thinking it just 37%.

After respondents estimated the share of school spending contributed by each level of government, we asked them a series of questions on whether school spending in their local district should increase, and from which tier(s) of government. When asked whether “government funding for public schools in your districts should increase,” 62% of respondents said that it should. As in past years’ polls, information on what is currently being spent per child in the local district, which we provided to a random half of respondents, dampens enthusiasm for an increase, as only 50% of the informed respondents call for more spending. Even so, support for a boost in funding has jumped since 2017 by 8 percentage points and 11 percentage points, respectively, among uninformed and informed respondents.

In a second poll experiment, all respondents were told current spending levels in their local district. Half were also told the share of that spending coming from each tier of government, while the other half were not. We then asked both groups whether federal funding, state funding, and local funding for their district should increase.

Among those not given the true fiscal breakdown, 60% say the federal government should spend more on their local schools. Sixty percent also think the state should pony up more cash. Only when it comes to local taxes is the public stingy. Just 46% say the local district should spend more.

Spending preferences differ when the public is informed of the funding proportions, however (see Figure 8). Two thirds of those told how little the federal government contributes to K–12 education say it should foot more of the bill, a share that is 7 percentage points higher than among the uninformed. In other words, there appears to be a broad consensus that the federal fiscal role should expand.

Conversely, when the public learns that the local tier contributes 46% of the cost, only 36% of respondents feel an increase is warranted, representing a 9-percentage-point drop relative to the uninformed. Unless a local school district can make a strong case for more resources, it is likely to find stiff resistance from local taxpayers. Similarly, support for increasing state spending falls from 60% among the uninformed to 50% among those informed that the state was already contributing, on average, 46% of the cost.

Sharp disparities in spending preferences emerge along party lines, perhaps a reflection of long-standing differences in views on the appropriate federal role in education. Among the uninformed, 73% of Democrats, but only 43% of Republicans, favor more federal spending on schools, a 30-percentage-point difference. These margins attenuate by 7 percentage points among those who learn how little the federal government contributes to the cost of K–12 education in their district.

Yet partisan differences may be driven as much by spending preferences as by differing views concerning the role of each tier of government. Among those not told about the share contributed by each level, 55% of Democrats, but only 33% of Republicans, think local districts should spend more. Among those told how much local districts already contribute, partisan differences drop by 4 percentage points, but 43% of Democrats still favor more funding, compared to 25% of Republicans.

The story is much the same for state expenditures. Sixty-nine percent of uninformed Democrats, but only 50% of uninformed Republicans, think the state should spend more. When respondents are told the current state share, support for more funding declines among both groups by about the same percentage. Fifty-eight percent of informed Democrats want the state to spend more, but only 40% of Republicans do.

In sum, the public is not aware of how little the federal government contributes to the costs of K–12 public education. In general, people are in favor of spending more on the schools, but Democrats, as compared to Republicans, prefer a funding hike from all tiers of government. Candidates for the Democratic nomination know their audience when pitching for steep increases in federal support. But when informed about the large fiscal role already played by state and local governments, both Republicans and Democrats are less likely to favor digging deeper into the till. Apparently, the public is more cautious about local dollars coming from local taxes than about money arriving from Washington.

Common Core and Testing

Common Core. After several years of vigorous debate, support for the Common Core State Standards is rebounding (see Figure 9). Overall, 50% of Americans endorse use of the standards in their state, continuing a climb in approval from its low point of 41% in 2017. The resurgence in support is strongest among Republicans, rising to 46% from 32% over the past two years. Even so, Republicans remain divided over the standards, with 47% opposing their adoption. Democrats, who since at least 2014 have consistently expressed higher levels of approval for the standards than Republicans have, hold steady at 52% in favor and 36% opposed. Today, the party gap is the smallest it has been since 2013, when there was almost no difference between Republicans and Democrats over the Common Core. After opening to a 20-percentage-point chasm by 2015, the difference between Democrats and Republicans stands at just 6 percentage points today.

Teacher opinion on the standards has remained steady over the past five years, lingering in the low 40s and sitting at 44% today. This is the first year of the survey in which Republican support exceeds teacher support, though the difference is not statistically significant.

Even as public approval rises and polarization decreases, the politics of the Common Core remain fraught. This is clear when we find that simply referring to the standards as “Common Core” depresses support. When a randomly selected subset of our participants answers a similar question that does not invoke the standards by name, support for the use of “standards for reading and math that are the same across the states” is 66% and there is virtually no difference between Democrats (66%) and Republicans (67%). Perhaps the supporters of common standards could harness this strong majority support by launching public-awareness campaigns and re-branding efforts.

Testing. Americans’ backing of federal testing mandates remains strong. Seventy-four percent support the federal government’s requirement that all students be tested in math and reading in 3rd through 8th grade and at least once in high school. Support is widespread, with similar majorities among most demographic or political groups, including parents, racial and ethnic minorities, Republicans and Democrats. Teachers are the exception. Only 46% of teachers agree the testing requirement should remain in place, with 49% opposed.

One of the critiques of testing is the amount of time it requires. To explore whether time commitments affect opinions of testing, we conducted an experiment in which a random subset of participants were told: “According to the most recent information available, students in grades 3–8 in large cities spend an average of about 8 hours of school time each year taking tests required by the federal government.” We draw these estimates of the time commitment from a 2014 report from the Council of the Great City Schools. Admittedly, the estimate refers specifically to “large cities” and captures only the time spent taking the exams, rather than also factoring in the time spent on test preparation; thus, this experiment provides only a limited test of how information about the time commitment affects support for testing. Nevertheless, the experiment reveals that exposure to even partial information about the time costs of testing can move opinion. Approval drops 10 percentage points among those told about the hours devoted to testing. For teachers, this information decreases backing by just 4 percentage points.

Free College

Calls to make public colleges tuition-free are on the rise. Bernie Sanders zeroed in on the issue in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, and now several contenders for the 2020 nomination are offering proposals of their own. At the same time, a number of states, such as Tennessee, have launched programs to make tuition free at public two-year community colleges, and others, such as New York, have waived in-state tuition at public four-year colleges and universities.

We asked survey respondents whether they favor or oppose making public colleges in the United States free to attend. Some participants were asked about two-year colleges while others were asked about four-year colleges. For both types of college, free tuition is a popular concept (see Figure 10). Sixty percent of Americans endorse the idea of making public four-year colleges free, and even more (69%) want free public two-year colleges. Democrats are especially supportive of the concept (79% approval for four-year and 85% for two-year). Republicans tend to oppose free tuition for four-year colleges (35% in support and 55% opposed) and are divided over free tuition for two-year colleges (47% in support and 47% opposed).

In today’s economy, it pays to get a college education. Workers with a postsecondary degree consistently earn more than high-school graduates do. Does being informed—or perhaps reminded—of the economic returns of college influence attitudes toward making college free? To answer this, we conducted an experiment in which some respondents were randomly chosen to receive information about the average annual earnings of two- or four-year degree holders. Respondents answering the two-year-college question were told that graduates of these schools earn $46,000 each year, on average, over the course of their working lives. Respondents who got the four-year-college question learned that graduates of these schools earn $61,400 annually, on average, over the course of their working lives. It was not obvious whether—or how—this information might shift opinions. On the one hand, learning the economic returns to a college education could prompt people to think that more Americans should have access to college so they can share in greater economic opportunities. On the other, learning what college-degree holders earn could prompt people to think those who benefit from a degree should bear the cost.

As it turns out, information about earnings has little effect on opinions about free college. Support for a free education at public two-year colleges falls slightly, from 69% to 65%, when people are told the average earnings of graduates of these schools. Approval of a free ride at public four-year colleges among informed respondents (62%) is statistically indistinguishable from the attitudes of those not given the earnings information (60%).

Immigration

The increasingly polarized national debate over immigration shows up in how Americans think about higher education. Poll respondents are evenly split over the question of whether undocumented immigrants who graduate from a U.S. high school should be eligible for in-state tuition at colleges here—44% support the idea, and 44% oppose it. The politicized nature of the issue is evident in the stark differences between Democrats and Republicans. Among Democrats, 63% favor in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants and 25% oppose it. Among Republicans, just 20% support the concept and 71% oppose it.

The partisan debate over immigration has less effect on attitudes about the language in which non-English-speaking students should be taught. Most people (62%) say children who are not proficient in English should be placed in English-only classrooms. Interestingly, the balance of opinion on this issue has shifted against English-based instruction since two years ago, when 68% supported English-only classrooms and 32% favored teaching in students’ native languages.

Only 38% say English learners should be placed in classrooms where instruction is in their native language. While there is a partisan gap on this question, too, the majorities of both Republicans (74%) and Democrats (54%) do favor English-only classrooms.

Grading Public Schools, Colleges, and Universities

More Americans have a positive view of their local public schools than at any point since the EdNext survey began asking about these perspectives in 2007. Today, 60% of respondents give their local public schools a grade of A or B. The 9-percentage-point rise in these grades compared to last year extends a climb that proceeded more slowly over the previous decade. Yet, respondents’ more-positive opinions do not extend to the public schools beyond their local communities. The 24% share of survey takers giving an A or B to the public schools in the nation as a whole remains much the same as it was a year ago. As a result, the gap between respondents’ evaluations of their local public schools and their assessments of public schools in general has widened to 36 points today from 20 percentage points about a decade ago.

This year, for the first time, we also asked respondents to grade institutions of higher education. A random half of respondents were asked about these institutions in the nation as a whole, while the other half were asked about those in their home state.

Despite growing concern about issues such as college affordability and a lack of ideological diversity on campus, Americans think more highly of U.S. public four-year colleges and universities than of the nation’s public elementary and secondary schools. More than twice as many survey respondents (58%) assign these postsecondary institutions an A or B. The nation’s private four-year colleges and universities draw even higher esteem, with 66% giving them A or B grades. Clearly, people think more highly of private institutions of higher education than of public institutions. However, they draw an even greater distinction between institutions in their own state and those “in the nation as a whole.” Overall, 76% of participants grade public four-year colleges in their state with an A or B, 18 percentage points higher than for public four-year colleges in the nation as a whole. Similarly, 79 percent give the top marks to private four-year colleges in their state, 13 percentage points higher than for such colleges elsewhere. In short, respondents rate public and private four-year colleges within their state equally well, and they view in-state public colleges more positively than private colleges nationally.

Republicans consistently judge colleges more stringently than Democrats do, but the size of this opinion gap depends on whether respondents are evaluating public or private institutions and whether they are assessing institutions within their own state or across the country. The share of Republicans who grade public four-year colleges across the country with an A or B is 17 percentage points lower than the proportion of Democrats. For in-state four-year public colleges, the share of Republicans giving out top marks is 8 percentage points lower than among Democrats. For private four-year colleges across the nation, the share is also 8 percentage points lower for Republicans. The political party adherents are closest when it comes to evaluating in-state private four-year colleges, with a differential of only 4 percentage points in granting A or B grades. Democrats and Republicans come closest to agreement when evaluating the quality of private colleges within their states and disagree most when evaluating public colleges nationwide.

Compared to Democrats, Republicans see bigger differences between public and private institutions both in their state and across the country. The share of Republicans handing out A or B grades to private colleges in their state is 5 percentage points higher than for public colleges in their state. When considering schools across the nation, the share of Republicans giving the top grades to private college is 13 percentage points higher than for public colleges. In contrast, Democrats see no difference between private and public colleges in their state, and the share giving A or B grades to private colleges across the country is only 4 percentage points higher than for public colleges across the country.

The survey also asked participants to grade three specific higher-education institutions in their state (referring to each institution by name):

• the flagship public four-year college

• the nearest non-flagship public four-year college

• the nearest two-year public community college

There is remarkable consistency among these evaluations. The shares of Americans giving these schools an A or B grade are 75% for flagship public four-year colleges, 70% for the nearest non-flagship public four-year college, and 69% for the nearest public two-year community college. The partisan gaps found in overall evaluations of in-state public four-year colleges manifest again with respect to specific schools—as the share of Democrats giving the top grades is 11 and 10 percentage points higher than the share of Republicans for flagships and non-flagships, respectively. However, there is no substantive difference between parties in their evaluations of community colleges.

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 a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG). Paul E. Peterson, professor of government at Harvard University, directs PEPG and is senior editor of Education Next. Martin R. West, professor of education at Harvard University, is deputy director of PEPG and editor-in-chief of Education Next.

What Do Students Think about Education Policy? The 2019 survey offers first-ever comparison of high-school students and their parents Older Americans have long been an organized political force, exerting their influence to defend Social Security, Medicare, and other benefits targeted to their age group. Many politicians and political actors have sought to mobilize the youngest age cohort in a similar fashion. Young voters became valuable allies to Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders in the 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential campaigns. Many more candidates for the Democratic nomination are bidding for the youth vote in 2020. Progressive causes garner strong support from many of the most politically active members of the rising generation. On more than one college campus, student groups have successfully demanded that the names of slaveholders be scrubbed from buildings and statues of Confederate leaders be put into storage. Elsewhere, young activists have persuaded administrators to withdraw invitations to conservative speakers or drowned out their addresses with protests. Young women and men have demanded severe penalties for acts of sexual predation that college leaders once quietly ignored. Some contemporary commentators suggest that the youngest American cohort has taken a sharp turn to the left. However, the conventional wisdom among political scientists holds that children tend to take their political cues from their parents, resulting in more modest ideological differences from one generation to the next. In short, if you know the opinions of the parents, you often know what their children think as well. Do kids and parents see eye to eye on schools? To answer this question, we drew an additional sample of 415 high-school parents and asked them and their oldest child in high school the same battery of questions. In general, our findings are consistent with political scientists’ expectations. On over half of the survey items administered to parents and their children, no statistically significant differences in opinions are detected. For example, the two groups hold similar opinions on issues related to the compensation, evaluation, and rights of teachers. About 69% of both students and their parents support increased salaries for public-school teachers. Likewise, about 71% of both groups favor basing part of teachers’ salaries on how much their students learn. They are similarly supportive of basing teacher pay on evaluations by their fellow teachers (about 50% of both groups on average), whether they teach hard-to-staff subjects like math and science (60%), whether they teach in schools with many disadvantaged students (58%), and whether they have a master’s degree (72%). However, with respect to compensating teachers based on experience, parents (74%) are more supportive than their children (68%). A similar difference emerges over principal evaluations as a criterion, with 72% of parents and 60% of students in favor. Roughly half of both groups say that public-school teachers should have the right to strike; however, parents (35%) are more likely than students (25%) to say that they should not have that right. Neither group is particularly supportive of giving tenure to teachers (32%), though again, parents (49%) are more likely to express opposition than students (36%). The similarities between parents and students extend to other controversial issues. About 60% of both groups support universal vouchers. On immigration-related issues, students tend to share their parents’ views on whether speakers of other languages should initially be placed in English-only classrooms (63%) and on their support of in-state college tuition rates for undocumented immigrants (46%). There is also strong consistency regarding the student’s own academic coursework and postsecondary plans. Both groups think schools should focus more on students’ academic performance (recommending an average of 63% of schools’ total efforts) than on students’ social and emotional well-being (recommending 37%). Parents and students are both equally split on whether all students should be encouraged to take classes that prepare them for college or whether some students should be encouraged to take classes that prepare them to enter the workforce directly. Likewise, the groups are aligned on whether the student him/herself will in fact be prepared for college (84%) and the workforce (77%) upon high-school graduation. Moreover, about 68% of both groups want the student to attend a four-year university rather than choosing a two-year community college or another postsecondary option. Parents and students also give comparable evaluations of public and private postsecondary institutions in their state and in the nation as a whole. Given this broad consensus within families, it is interesting to drill down on those topics where parents and students do differ significantly. School safety is one such issue. Only about 40% of both parents and students are very or extremely confident that the student’s school provides sufficient security against a shooting attack—a troublingly low proportion but much higher than the 16% of the general population that expresses the same level of confidence about their local public schools. However, parents are more likely than students to think that schools should take additional protective measures. Seventy-seven percent of parents, but only 63% of their children, would install metal detectors at every school. Similarly, 81% of parents, but only 73% of the high-school students, would screen all students for severe emotional distress. Although both parents and students lack confidence in their school’s level of security, it seems students are less likely to think that interventions such as these would address their concerns. Parents and children also part ways when it comes to the quality of their local schools. Seventy percent of parents give their local public schools an A or B grade, and 82% assign their child’s high school those marks. Among students, these proportions drop by 15 percentage points for the local public schools and 13 percentage points for their own high school. These differences could reflect students’ more intimate knowledge of these schools, or they may simply reflect teenagers’ less than sanguine feelings toward schooling in general. On the other hand, while only 38% of parents give the nation’s public schools an A or B, this proportion rises by 8 percentage points among students. This suggests that students’ heightened scrutiny is reserved for the institutions they know best. When it comes to some hot-button political issues, students are, indeed, more likely to embrace a progressive view. They are less likely than their parents to approve of annual federal testing requirements (52% of students, 75% of parents), they are more supportive of increased government funding for local public schools (72% to 63%), and they are more likely to want four-year public colleges to be tuition-free (77% to 68%). However, students’ positions on these issues—less testing, more spending on their schools, and free tuition when they go to college—are plausibly attributable to self-interest rather than ideology. Self-interest may also explain why they are less supportive than their parents of the Common Core State Standards (35% versus 50%), an initiative aimed at boosting expectations for the rigor of student work. Overall, the differences between parents and their children lack a clear ideological pattern. In some cases, a higher share of students support the more-liberal policy option: students are less likely to favor charter schools (46% versus 56%), and they are more likely to support “federal policies that prevent schools from expelling or suspending black and Hispanic students at higher rates than other students” (37% versus 26%). By contrast, students are more likely than their parents to take the conventionally conservative position when asked whether high-school students should be taught in classes with those of similar abilities (63% versus 54%). In sum, students frequently share the views of their parents. The proverbial apple still falls pretty close to the tree. When their views diverge, students are less enthusiastic about their local schools, more likely to favor policies of special interest to the young (such as less testing, more school spending, and free college), and more liberal on charter schools and discriminatory disciplinary treatment of students of color. However, with the exception of charter schools, a majority of both parents and students hold the same position on all of these issues. The generation gap has not become a chasm. In adolescence, at least, the youngest Americans do not appear to differ much from those who preceded them.

Education’s political landscape has shifted dramatically over the past year. To the consternation of most school-district officials, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos used the bully pulpit to promote charter schools, vouchers, and tax credits for private-school scholarships. To the distress of teachers unions, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an Illinois law requiring government workers who elect not to become union members to pay representation fees. To the chagrin of civil-rights groups, the U.S. Department of Education said that it was reviewing a letter sent to school districts by the Obama administration informing them that they were at risk of incurring a civil-rights violation if students of color were suspended or expelled more often than their peers. To the relief of Common Core enthusiasts, the politically charged debate over the standards moved to the back burner. And to the dismay of parents, teachers, and policymakers across the political spectrum, students demonstrated almost no gains in reading and math on the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) over the 2015 test.

All these events were consequential, but none penetrated into the thinking of the American public as sharply as did teacher strikes in six southern and western states. Those walkouts seem to have lent new urgency to teacher demands for salary raises and increased financial support for schools.

The status of public opinion on these and other topics comprises the 12th annual Education Next (EdNext) survey of public opinion, administered in May 2018. The poll’s nationally representative sample of 4,601 adults includes an oversampling of parents, teachers, African Americans, and those who identify themselves as Hispanic. (All estimates of results are adjusted for non-response and oversampling of specific populations. See methods sidebar for further details.)

On several issues, our analysis teases out nuances in public opinion by asking variations of questions to randomly selected segments of survey participants. Respondents were divided at random into two or more segments, with each group asked a different version of the same general question. For example, we told half of the respondents—but not the other half—how much the average teacher in their state was paid before asking them whether they thought salaries should be increased, be decreased, or remain about the same. By comparing the differences in the opinions of the two groups, we are able to estimate the extent to which relevant information influences public thinking as to the desirability of a pay increase.

Some of the key findings from the poll are:

1. Teacher salaries. Among those provided with information on average teacher salaries prevailing in their state, 49% of the public say the pay should increase—a 13-percentage-point jump over the share who said so last year. Sixty-three percent of respondents in the six states that experienced teacher strikes in early 2018 favor boosting teacher pay, as compared to 47% elsewhere.

2. School spending. Among those provided information about current spending levels in their local school districts, 47% say that spending should increase, an increase of 7 percentage points over the prior year.

3. Agency fees. In June 2018, the Supreme Court reached a decision favored by majorities of the public and of teachers when it ruled that states could not allow public-employee unions to impose agency fees to cover collective-bargaining costs on workers who do not join unions. No less than 56% of the general public and 56% of public-school teachers oppose laws that require “all teachers” to “pay fees for union representation even if they choose not to join the union.” Only 25% of the public and 34% of teachers favor agency fees.

4. Union and nonunion teachers. Opinions on various issues differ widely between public-school teachers who join unions and those who do not. Nonunion members are 20 percentage points more likely to support annual testing in reading and math, charter schools, and universal school vouchers. Union members are at least 20 percentage points more likely to support increasing school spending (when informed of current spending levels), increasing teacher salaries, and giving teachers tenure; they are also more satisfied with union political activities and view collective-bargaining contracts more favorably. However, on some topics—merit pay, Common Core, school-discipline practices, and affirmative action in school assignment policies—the views of union and nonunion members do not differ significantly.

5. School vouchers. A 54% majority of the public supports “wider choice” for public-school parents by “allowing them to enroll their children in private schools instead, with government helping to pay the tuition,” a 9-percentage-point increase over a year ago. Opposition to vouchers has fallen from 37% to 31%. Approval for vouchers targeted to low-income families has not changed. Just 43% express a favorable view, the same level as in 2017. African American (56%) and Hispanic (62%) respondents are more favorably disposed toward vouchers for low-income families than are whites (35%).

6. Charter schools. After a substantial decline in support in 2017, public backing for charter schools climbed by 5 percentage points this past year, to 44%, with only 35% opposed. The uptick is concentrated almost entirely among Republicans, widening the divide between Republicans and Democrats on this issue.

7. Common Core. After falling in previous years, opinion on the Common Core State Standards has now stabilized at 45% in support and 38% opposed. The Common Core brand remains weak, however. When half of the respondents are asked instead about using standards that are “the same across the states,” the favorable response is 16 percentage points higher than when the name Common Core is used.

8. Assessment of local schools, police, and post offices. Despite the lack of progress on NAEP math and reading tests, approximately half the public (51%) awards the public schools in their local community a grade of A or B. This percentage has remained in the low to mid-50s for the past three years, slightly higher than in earlier iterations of the EdNext survey, when the percentage was stuck in the 40s. Still, the public holds schools in lower esteem than it does the local police force or local post office, which receive a grade of A or B from 69% and 68% of the public, respectively. African Americans view both the public schools and the police force in their local communities more negatively than do other racial and ethnic groups: 39% of African Americans think the public schools in their local communities merit an A or a B, and 43% give these grades to their local police forces.

9. Racial disparities in disciplinary practices. A majority of the public seems to share the position taken by the Trump administration when it announced its intention to review—and potentially rescind—a federal-government letter to local school officials warning them that they risk incurring a civil-rights infraction if they suspend, expel, or otherwise discipline students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds at different rates. Only 27% of the public favor, while 49% oppose “federal policies that prevent schools from expelling or suspending black and Hispanic students at higher rates than other students.”

10. Affirmative action in K–12 school assignments. With the departure of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy from the Supreme Court, affirmative action in school assignment policies could re-emerge as an issue before the court in the coming years. Majorities of the public and of teachers oppose both race-based and income-based affirmative action in K–12 school assignment decisions.

11. Immigration. Only 30% of respondents favor “the federal government providing additional money to school districts based on the number of immigrant children they serve.” In locales where the proportion of foreign-born residents is above the national median, 37% of respondents endorse the proposal, but that backing drops to 22% among those living in areas with fewer immigrants.

Teacher Salaries and School Spending

In late February of this year, teachers in West Virginia walked out of their classrooms and took to the streets to protest stagnant salaries and rising health-care costs. The illegal strike, which shuttered schools across the state, lasted nine days, ending only after the legislature agreed to give the state’s teachers—among the lowest-paid in the nation—a 5% pay hike. The action was widely perceived as a successful demonstration of strength, and by May, teachers in five other states—Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Oklahoma—had conducted similar strikes or walkouts to demand better pay and, in some cases, general increases in school funding.

The timing of the 2018 EdNext Survey in the first three weeks of May affords a window on public opinion in the immediate aftermath of most of these actions. Do Americans support teachers’ appeals for better pay and increased school spending? Have they become more sympathetic to those demands in the past year? Do they believe that teachers should be permitted to go on strike in the first place? And how does opinion among residents of the six states where the walkouts occurred compare to that of other Americans?

Teacher salaries. We asked all respondents to our survey 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, 49% say that teacher salaries should increase—a 13-percentage-point jump over the share who said so last year (see Figure 1a). This hefty spike in support for boosting teacher salaries is the largest change in public opinion we observed between our 2017 and 2018 surveys.

Forty-four percent of informed respondents say teacher salaries in their state should remain about the same, while just 7% say they should decrease.

More Democrats than Republicans favor increasing teacher salaries, but support jumped in 2018 among members of both political parties. Support rose from 45% in 2017 to 59% this year among Democrats, and from 27% to 38% among Republicans. Meanwhile, teachers are even more convinced about the merits of increasing their salaries, with 76% of them registering support, up slightly from 71% in 2017.

Is this upsurge of support for better teacher pay a consequence of this spring’s labor unrest? Residents of states that experienced strikes or walkouts are more enthusiastic about raising teacher salaries than those living elsewhere. Sixty-three percent of respondents in the six states listed above favor increasing teacher pay, as compared to 47% elsewhere. This difference was also present, but was less pronounced, in 2017: 47% of respondents in states that would later experience strikes or walkouts favored boosting teacher salaries, as compared to 38% elsewhere. In other words, support for a pay hike jumped by 16 percentage points in states that experienced labor unrest, but it also rose by 9 percentage points elsewhere.

If the strikes and walkouts did in fact contribute to the changes in opinion, their impact was not confined to the states in which the actions occurred. Moreover, those six states appear to have been fertile ground for an effort to raise teacher pay, with residents more likely to support such an effort, even in 2017. These higher levels of approval could reflect the fact that each of the states ranks in the bottom 10 nationally in terms of teacher compensation.

It is also possible that the jump in support for raising teacher salaries and this spring’s labor unrest both reflect the strength of the national economy. The only year in the 12-year history of the survey in which a higher share of Americans said that teacher salaries should increase was 2008, at the peak of the housing bubble and just prior to the financial crisis that followed (see Figure 2). The fact that economic growth is finally pushing Americans’ wages upward may have emboldened teachers to demand higher pay—and made the public more receptive to that appeal.

A larger proportion of the public favors increasing teacher salaries if respondents are not first informed of what teachers currently earn. Among this segment of those surveyed, 67% say that salaries should increase, 29% say they should remain the same, and 4% say they should decrease. These numbers also reflect an upswing in support over 2017, though by a smaller amount (6 percentage points) than the surge among those informed about teacher salaries (see Figure 1b). The higher level of support for boosting teacher salaries among the “uninformed” respondents reflects the fact that most Americans believe that teachers earn far less than they actually do. When asked to estimate average teacher salaries in their state, respondents’ average guess came in at $40,181—31% less than the actual figure of $58,297.

School spending. Support for higher school spending has also strengthened in 2018, though the changes are less dramatic than those related to teacher salaries. Among those provided information about current spending levels in their local school districts, 47% say that spending should increase, a rise of 7 percentage points over the prior year. A bare majority of 53% of informed respondents would prefer that spending levels remain the same (43%) or decrease (10%). Support for spending more is also higher this year among respondents who are not first informed of current spending levels. Fifty-nine percent of these respondents support a spending hike, up from 54% in 2017. As in the case of teacher salaries, residents of states that experienced a strike or walkout are more likely to be in favor of higher spending than those elsewhere (53% vs. 46%).

Merit pay. While Americans have grown more supportive of teacher pay raises, they continue to disagree sharply with teachers over the manner in which these educators should be compensated. When asked whether part of teachers’ pay should be “based on how much their students learn,” 48% of the public express support and 36% are opposed. At 55%, approval for merit pay is higher among Republicans than among Democrats. But even Democrats are more likely to support the concept (44%) than to oppose it (41%). Among teachers, however, just 22% favor merit pay and as many as 73% are against it.

Teachers’ right to strike. As noted above, West Virginia’s teachers carried out their strike in defiance of a state law banning such actions by teachers and other public employees. Though rarely enforced, laws prohibiting teacher strikes are on the books in a majority of states, including all of those that saw walkouts this spring, except for Colorado. While state legislators may not view teacher strikes favorably, the public appears more sympathetic. A majority of 53% of respondents—whether or not they live in a state that experienced a statewide strike or walkout this year—support “public school teachers having the right to strike,” and just 32% oppose it. There is a strong partisan divide on this issue, with 67% of Democrats and just 38% of Republicans in favor. Not surprisingly, more than 7 of every 10 teachers support the right to strike; just 2 of 10 oppose it.

Teachers and Teachers Unions While teacher strikes and controversies over school spending captured the headlines this past school year, no less important for teachers, and particularly for teachers union leaders, was the June decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that found agency fees unconstitutional. What do the general public and teachers themselves think about agency fees, the collective-bargaining process, and the influence of teachers unions? And how do the views of public-school teachers who are members of unions on these and other education policy topics compare to those who have chosen not to join their union?

Agency fees. A month after we fielded our survey, the Supreme Court ruled in Janus v. AFSCME that government employees couldn’t be required to pay an agency fee in lieu of dues if they do not join the union representing them in collective bargaining. The court decided, by a 5–4 vote, that these fees unconstitutionally compel employees to pay for the costs of speech with which they disagree. Teachers union leaders say agency fees are needed to cover the cost of collective bargaining and without them employees are tempted to “free ride” on the contributions of others. Eric Heins, president of the California Teachers Association, insists that “corporate CEOs, the wealthiest one percent, and politicians who do their bidding” launched the lawsuit. “They want to use the Supreme Court to take away the freedom of working people to join together in strong unions,” he says.

As it turns out, the Supreme Court decision has the approval of a larger share of both teachers and the general public than just the “wealthiest one percent.” No less than 56% of the public and 56% of public-school teachers express opposition to laws that require “all teachers” to “pay fees for union representation even if they choose not to join the union” (see Figure 3). Only 25% of the public and 34% of teachers favor agency fees. The remaining respondents say they neither support nor oppose them.

Public disapproval is greatest among those living in right-to-work states (61% against, 20% in favor), which already have laws that ban agency fees. But even in states that currently permit agency fees, a majority disapproves of the practice (51% to 31%).

Support for fees is higher among those given arguments in favor and against them. Before we asked a random half of our respondents for their opinion, we told them the following: “Some say that all teachers should have to contribute to the union because they all get the pay and benefits the union negotiates with the school board. Others say teachers should have the freedom to choose whether or not to pay the union.”

When given both sides of the argument, 52% of public-school teachers remain opposed, while 39% favor agency fees. Among the general public, support for agency fees shifts upward to 37%, but the negative view, at 44%, still commands a plurality. Partisan differences are large: 56% of Republicans, but only 35% of Democrats, oppose agency fees after hearing the arguments for and against the practice.

Although a plurality of the public is not any more inclined than a majority of the Supreme Court to allow agency fees, that opposition does not necessarily translate into a negative view of teachers unions. When those surveyed are asked whether they think the effects of unions are “generally positive” or “generally negative,” responses divide almost evenly (35% pro, 36% con), with 29% saying they had neither a positive nor a negative impact. Again, the division of opinion falls sharply along partisan lines, with 55% of Republicans, but just 22% of Democrats, saying unions have a negative effect. Public-school teachers, meanwhile, think that unions have a positive impact by an overwhelming 57% to 25% margin.

Respondents split almost down the middle when asked to weigh in on collective-bargaining contracts. When directed to choose between two statements, 54% say their view comes closer to the assertion that such contracts “produce so many rules and restrictions that they make it difficult for schools to perform well,” while 46% think a contract “produces reasonable rules and regulations that help schools perform well.” Sixty-five percent of Republicans pick the first statement, while 58% of Democrats select the second. The division among teachers is 60% to 40% in favor of the more-positive characterization.

But if the public divides over collective bargaining, a more unified view emerges on the topic of teacher tenure. Respondents oppose the practice by a clear plurality (33% in support to 48% against), while teachers, as might be expected, are overwhelmingly in favor of tenure—62% to 24%.

Union and nonunion public-school teachers. The Janus decision says agency fees deny nonunion members their freedom of speech by compelling them to support views different from their own. But do union and nonunion employees truly differ in their opinions? Or are the non-members simply free riders who enjoy the benefits of collective bargaining while not paying the costs?

To find out, we asked our oversample of teachers whether they were union members and whether they taught in public, private, or charter schools. That question gave us a sample of 228 public- and charter-school teachers who self-identify as union members, 195 public- and charter-school teachers who say they are not union members, and 86 private-school teachers, whom we omit from this analysis.

The degree to which union and nonunion public-school teachers differ in their opinions depends on the issue in question (see Figure 4). We detect little or no difference in opinion when it comes to merit pay, Common Core, discipline practices, and affirmative action in school assignments. But on other issues more directly related to union concerns, differences are large. For example, when asked about agency fees and given the arguments on both sides, only 16% of the nonunion teachers say they are in favor of the fees, compared to 65% of union teachers. When given the arguments on both sides before being asked whether unions have a positive or negative impact on schools, differences loom almost as large: 77% of union teachers and 56% of nonunion teachers say they have a positive impact. Other issues that generate at least a 20-percentage-point difference of opinion include: 1) the reasonableness or restrictiveness of collective-bargaining contracts; 2) universal vouchers; 3) federal requirements for annual testing in reading and math; 4) charter schools; 5) union influence on school quality; 6) teacher tenure; 7) school-spending levels; 8) teacher salary levels; 9) teacher tenure; and 10) satisfaction with union political activities. Clearly, the free-speech issues surrounding the agency-fee decision go well beyond plaintiff Mark Janus. Union leaders may find themselves seriously challenged as they seek to sustain union membership in the post-Janus political environment.

School Choice

School choice has received unprecedented media attention since the inauguration of Donald J. Trump in January 2017. His appointment of an avowed choice advocate, Betsy DeVos, as secretary of education, has mobilized both enthusiasts and detractors. At her 2017 confirmation hearing, she expressed unqualified backing for multiple forms of parental choice:

It’s time to shift the debate from what the system thinks is best for kids to what moms and dads want, expect and deserve. Parents no longer believe that a one-size-fits-all model of learning meets the needs of every child, and they know other options exist, whether magnet, virtual, charter, home, religious, or any combination thereof. Yet, too many parents are denied access to the full range of options . . . choices that many of us—here in this room—have exercised for our own children.

If DeVos has warmed the hearts of many in the choice community, she has provoked unreserved opposition from teachers unions, allied advocacy groups, and Democratic senators, who voted unanimously against her confirmation. When two Republican senators decided to join them, it fell to the vice president to cast the deciding vote in DeVos’s favor.

For DeVos, school choice should be, for the most part, the product of state and local decisions, not “a new federal mandate from Washington,” as she put it in a fall 2017 speech at the Harvard Kennedy School. Still, the U.S. Department of Education under DeVos has proposed expanded federal funding for charter school start-ups, a redesign of the compensatory education program that would foster parental choice, and a new choice program for military personnel.

To find out if public thinking on school choice has shifted in the midst of this federal advocacy, we asked, in addition to new queries, the same questions about vouchers, charters, and tax-credit scholarships we posed in prior years.

Vouchers. According to EdChoice, a pro-voucher interest group, 15 states have enacted 26 different voucher programs. Still, the organization’s own numbers concede that fewer than 200,000 students make use of vouchers, a minuscule share of the nearly 50 million students attending public schools in 2018. But do these voucher programs have a greater potential to grow in the Trump-DeVos era than in the past? Four poll questions—two old and two new—inquired about support or opposition to school vouchers. Each question was administered to a separate, randomly selected segment of our overall sample of respondents, enabling us to detect the responsiveness of opinion to specific wordings of the question. The two old questions ask respondents whether they favor “greater choice” for families by having the government help pay the tuition to attend a private school. To see how the public responds, specifically, to the word “voucher,” the two new questions substitute that term for the phrase “greater choice.” The following contains the wording for all four versions of the voucher question, with the differences among the versions indicated by deletions (in italics) and substitutions (in brackets):

A proposal has been made that would give all [low-income] families with children in public schools a wider choice, by [vouchers] allowing them to enroll their children in private schools instead, with government helping to pay the tuition. Would you support or oppose this proposal?

As mentioned, the two versions that do not include the word “vouchers” are identical to the question we asked in 2017, allowing us to estimate any changes in opinion over the past year. When respondents were asked about “all” families (universal choice), approval rose by 9 percentage points between 2017 and 2018 (see Figure 5). A year ago, only 45% of respondents said they favored universal choice, but that percentage jumped to an overall majority of 54% in 2018. Disapproval fell from 37% to 31%. The remaining respondents said they neither supported nor opposed the policy. The increase in support occurred among both Republicans and Democrats. Backing among Republicans for universal vouchers has bumped upward by 10 percentage points, to 64%, while among Democrats the rise has been 7 percentage points, to 47%. No significant differences among whites, blacks, or Hispanics are observed.

Opinion holds steady, however, when respondents are asked about “wider choice” for “low-income” families. Just 43% express a favorable view, the same as in 2017. African Americans (56%) and Hispanic (62%) respondents are considerably more supportive of vouchers for low-income families than are whites (35%).

Sponsors of choice programs enacted by both Congress and state legislatures typically use the word “scholarship” rather than “voucher,” believing that the term “voucher” has become toxic from criticism of the concept over many years. To assess this belief, we substituted “vouchers” for the phrase “wider choice” in the question above. As it turns out, the toxicity of the v-word, as vouchers are sometimes termed, depends on context. No significant change in opinion is detected when it is inserted into the question that refers to “low-income” families. But approval of the universal vouchers falls by 10 percentage points when “voucher” is substituted for the “wider choice” phrase.

Charters. Although charter schools are authorized by state entities and receive most of their funding from the government, they differ from other public schools in that they are privately managed under the direction of a nonprofit board. According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, over 3.2 million students, roughly 7 percent of the U.S. public-school population, attend one of the 7,000 charter schools in the 44 states that have authorized them. Parents must choose to send their child to a charter school, and, generally speaking, the school must accept all qualified applicants unless it is oversubscribed, in which case an admissions lottery is held. As charter enrollment has grown, school-district and teachers-union opposition to the formation of new charter schools has intensified.

This opposition has apparently had an effect on public opinion: in 2017 we reported a hefty 13-percentage-point drop in support for the formation of charter schools. However, a partial recovery of 5 percentage points has occurred over the course of the past year, allowing charters to regain a plurality approval rate of 44% in the halls of public opinion, with just 35% of the general public opposed. (Remaining respondents say they neither support nor oppose charters.) Among teachers, however, support for charter schools has fallen from 40% to 33%. White respondents (42%) are nearly as supportive as black (46%) and Hispanic (49%) ones, but the charter recovery is concentrated among Republicans; approval for charters among GOP voters has climbed from 47% to 57%. As a result, the charter debate has become increasingly polarized across party lines, with only 36% of Democrats now supporting their formation.

“Charter” is nonetheless a benign word. When we drop the term from the description of these schools, approval for charters falls by 6 percentage points, with most of the decrease concentrated among Republicans, for whom it is 10 percentage points. But inserting the word “public” to produce the awkward phrase “public charter schools” does nothing to help the cause of public-charter-school advocates.

Tax-credit scholarships. Eighteen states have enacted tax-credit scholarship programs. Depending on the state’s authorizing language, these programs allow either individuals, corporations, or both to donate money to a foundation that provides scholarships to children from low-income families and receive a tax credit for most, if not all, of their contribution. Private schools tend to favor these programs, because they generally entail only limited state regulation of the schools. The programs also appeal to taxpayers, because the amount of money the state gives up in tax receipts is often less than the cost of educating a child in a public school. This form of school choice is so popular that proponents succeeded in persuading the legislature of deep-blue Illinois to enact a tax-credit program.

The public at large also endorses the concept. In 2018, we again find a clear majority—57%—in favor of “a tax credit for individual and corporate donations that pay for scholarships to help low-income parents send their children to private schools.”

In sum, school choice did not lose ground and may well have gained political favor over the past year. Despite heavy criticism of choice-advocate DeVos by union officials and Democratic politicians, support for universal school vouchers and charter schools is higher than it was in 2017, and targeted vouchers and tax credits have held their own in the court of public opinion. The gains have been concentrated among Republicans, to be sure, but they have occurred without offsetting losses among Democrats. Of course, we cannot say whether these gains are attributable to DeVos’s unqualified endorsement of choice or to some other factor, but choice in 2018 has certainly enjoyed a boost in public favor.

Common Core, Testing, and Accountability

The Common Core State Standards initiative began in 2009 as an effort by states to develop more uniform content standards and testing policies aimed at preparing students for college and career experiences. Most states adopted the standards with little fanfare by 2011, after the Obama administration provided incentives through its Race to the Top initiative. Common Core soon became a national political flash point, however, when Tea Party organizations and other conservative groups mobilized intense opposition to the standards. At the same time, the teachers unions, which had initially favored the standards, came to worry that student performance on tests keyed to the standards would be used to evaluate teacher performance, and they too began to criticize the implementation of Common Core. When the standards became a matter of national contention in 2014, public support eroded further.

While debate over Common Core has largely faded, the standards themselves have not. Most states have quietly raised their standards to levels roughly equivalent to those originally envisioned in the Common Core initiative, though in most cases the standards no longer wear the “Common Core” label. As political and media attention has drifted to other issues, erosion in public approval for national standards has come to a halt, and opinion may be turning around. Support for Common Core now stands at 45%, compared to 41% a year ago, and the level of disapproval remains unchanged, at 38% (see Figure 6). Among teachers, however, support for Common Core slipped by 2 percentage points over the past year to 43%, an insignificant change, and opposition rose seven points to 51%.

GOP opposition remains stauncher than that of Democrats. In 2012, the parties showed no discernible difference in this regard, but favor among Republicans dropped more precipitously (and earlier) than among Democrats, opening a double-digit partisan gap just two years later. Opinion within each party largely crystallized by 2016, leaving Republicans and Democrats divided on the issue. Roughly half of Democrats (52%) favor the Common Core standards, with 30% opposed, while only 38% of Republicans support the standards and 50% oppose them.

The name Common Core remains toxic. When we ask a randomly selected subset of respondents about common standards across states without invoking the name Common Core, 61% of Americans support the policy—a 16-point jump over positive responses to the same question using the brand name. The effect of the name is only modestly larger among Republicans (-20 points) than among Democrats (-12 points). Among Republicans, this change has the effect of shifting the balance of opinion from opposition to support. Whereas half of Republicans oppose Common Core, 58% endorse the idea of common standards shared across states when the name is dropped.

In another sign that the accountability debate has been winding down, a large majority of Americans continue to support the federal requirement that all students be tested in math and reading each year in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school. Approximately two-thirds (68%) of Americans support this mandate, and this level of approval has held steady over the past several years. Favor is similarly high across most demographic and political characteristics examined in the survey, with the exception of teachers. Teachers split almost evenly over the federal testing requirement, with 48% in favor and 51% against. Like opinion among the overall population, teacher views on the mandate have been stable over the past four years.

School Quality

When asked to rate the schools in their local community, approximately half of Americans (51%) assign them a grade of A or B. This percentage has remained in the same range for the past three years, slightly higher than in earlier EdNext polls, when it was mired in the 40s. Evaluations of local public schools are somewhat higher among parents of school-age children, 57% of whom give them an A or a B, and significantly higher among teachers, 67% of whom do so.

As in previous years, Americans are much less sanguine about the public schools in the nation as a whole. Just 24% of Americans give the country’s public schools a grade of A or B. Similarly, most believe elementary and secondary schools in the United States are not as good as those in similarly developed countries. Overall, 53% say schools here are worse, and only 24% hold that they are better. Even among teachers, who generally think more highly of schools than the general public does, 49% say American schools are worse than those in similarly developed countries and mirroring the general population, just 24% say they are better.

Local schools compared to other community services. That Americans give higher grades to their local public schools than to those nationwide is often taken as a sign that people are satisfied with the schools they know best. But that is a strong conclusion to reach when only a little more than half of Americans assign their local schools an A or a B, despite the strong psychological pressure to view one’s own circumstances favorably. To get an alternative comparison for opinion on local schools, we asked respondents to grade the performance of other public-sector services in their communities, specifically the postal service and law enforcement. Both receive higher ratings than local public schools: 68% of Americans grade their local post offices with an A or a B, and 69% give those top marks to their local police forces (see Figure 7). In other words, even though Americans think their local public schools outperform public schools in the nation as a whole, they also think they underperform other important local services. Even teachers, who have the most positive views of public schools, rate the other two government services more highly: 76% give their local post offices an A or a B, and 80% do so for their local police forces.

Republicans and Democrats hold their local post offices in equally high regard, much as they agree about their local public schools. There are differences, however, when it comes to views of local police. For example, more Republicans (77%) than Democrats (64%) give local law enforcement an A or B grade, although members of both parties view police more positively than they do public schools.

A larger rift in opinion emerges along racial lines. African Americans view both the public schools and the police forces (but not the post offices) in their local communities more negatively than do other racial and ethnic groups. Only 39% of African Americans think the public schools in their local communities merit an A or a B, while 56% of Hispanics and 52% of non-Hispanic whites do so. A similar share of African Americans (43%) gives these grades to local police forces, but 60% of Hispanics and 76% of whites give the police an A or a B.

Even though African Americans, on average, hold the quality of police and school services in similarly low regard, the trajectories in these views over time differ. The share of African Americans giving their local police forces an A or a B fell 12 percentage points, from 55% in 2008, when Education Next last asked this question, even as the share of whites giving these grades to their local police rose by 9 percentage points. Meanwhile, over the past decade, the share of African Americans saying their local public schools deserve an A or a B has climbed by 15 points—outpacing the 8-point improvement in opinion among whites. As a result, African Americans and whites have moved closer together in their estimations of their local schools, with the gap between the two groups shrinking from 20 to 13 percentage points. At the same time, the difference in their views of local police forces has grown from 12 to 33 percentage points.

The racial difference also extends to how people evaluate the effect of police unions on the quality of policing. Among African Americans, 24% say these unions have a positive effect and 41% say they have a negative effect. Among whites, 35% say positive and 31% say negative. But this pattern reverses when it comes to teachers unions: African Americans tend to hold a more favorable view and whites lean toward a more critical one. Nearly half of African American respondents (48%) say teachers unions have a positive effect on schools and 19% say they have a negative effect. Among whites, 32% say positive and 41% say negative.

As mentioned above, the public as a whole is equally split in its views of teachers unions’ influence: 35% say they have a positive effect on schools, 36% say a negative effect, and 29% say they have neither a positive nor a negative effect. Opinion is similarly divided about the effect of police unions on the quality of policing (34% positive and 32% negative) and slightly more favorable on the effect of postal workers’ unions on the quality of the postal service (38% positive and 28% negative). Democrats are more likely to believe that unions have a positive effect on the quality of services, but the partisan gap is smaller for police unions (38% of Democrats and 31% of Republicans) than for postal workers’ unions (48% of Democrats and 26% of Republicans) and teachers unions (48% of Democrats and 20% of Republicans). In other words, Democrats hold lower opinions of police unions than of other public-sector unions, while Republicans think more highly of police unions than of other public-sector unions.

Teacher quality. Despite Americans’ divided views on teachers unions, they hold teachers themselves in high regard. On average, the general public says 25% of teachers in their local schools are excellent, 31% are good, 28% are satisfactory, and only 16% are unsatisfactory. Parents and teachers are slightly more positive in their evaluations. Parents of school-age children say that 61% of teachers in their local schools are excellent or good, while 67% of teachers give their colleagues those rankings. Parents hand out the unsatisfactory rating to just 15% of teachers, not much higher than the 12% of colleagues that teachers deem below what is acceptable.

Home vs. school. Finally, we asked respondents which is more important for a child’s academic learning—the home or the school. Americans are split, but lean moderately toward believing the home matters more: 39% point to the home while 31% give the nod to the school (another 31% say they are of equal importance). The views of parents of school-age children are similar: 37% say the home and 29% say the school. Teachers, meanwhile, are much more likely to say the home is more important for academic learning than the school. Nearly half of teachers (47%) choose the home and just 18% opt for the school.

This divergence between parents and teachers is striking. Perhaps teachers observe stark contrasts among the home backgrounds of their students and conclude that the home has the greater impact, while parents see dramatic differences in the quality and effectiveness of their children’s teachers and conclude that school quality is what counts.

Racial and Ethnic Disparities: School Discipline and Affirmative Action

Racial and ethnic issues continue to figure prominently on the national education agenda. At the University of Virginia, civil-rights and “white supremacist” groups have clashed over the presence of Confederate statues on campus, and the Trump administration has announced its intention to review guidance concerning racial disparities in school discipline promulgated by the Obama administration. The retirement of Supreme Court justice Kennedy, who cast deciding votes on numerous cases addressing affirmative action in college admissions and K–12 school assignment policies, may open the door to further litigation on this issue before the high court.

Racial disparities in school-discipline practices. In 2014, the Obama administration’s departments of Education and Justice, acting jointly, sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to school superintendents nationwide warning that their district would risk incurring a civil-rights violation if its schools suspended, expelled, or otherwise disciplined students of color at higher rates than they punished others. Though they account for only 15 percent of public-school students, the letter notes, black students comprise 36 percent of all reported expulsions. Conservatives allege that the letter intrudes on prerogatives that properly belong to state and local governments, and the U.S. Department of Education has announced its intention to review the policy, a step that has drawn heavy criticism from civil-rights groups.

In 2015, a year after the “Dear Colleague” letter was sent, we asked respondents whether they supported or opposed “federal policies that prevent schools from expelling or suspending black and Hispanic students at higher rates than other students.” Only 21% of the public favored the policy, while 51% disapproved of it, and the remainder took neither position. Teachers were also overwhelmingly opposed (59% to 23%).

Now, shortly after the Trump administration’s announced review of the letter, we have asked this question again. Support for federal limits on racial disparities in student-discipline practices remains at a low 27%, though this constitutes an uptick of 6 percentage points, all of which is concentrated among Democratic respondents, whose level of approval has shifted upward from 29% to 40% (see Figure 8). We find no significant change in the views expressed by Hispanics. Although endorsement of these federal policies also remains unchanged among African Americans, disapproval has increased 12 percentage points, from 23% to 35%.

Conservatives allege that the “Dear Colleague” letter is misguided because it imposes an unwarranted federal mandate on state and local education authorities. Do the principles of American federalism also affect public thinking on this issue? To find out, we divided our sample into two segments, asking one the policy question just quoted above while asking the other group the same question but substituting the phrase “school district” for “federal.” Responses to the two variants of this question do not differ significantly from one another, except that Democrats, curiously enough, are 5 percentage points less likely to favor rules against racial disparities set at the district level than at the federal level, a marginally significant difference. Support for these policies at the district level also climbed 11 percentage points among Hispanic adults, from 25% in 2015 to 36% this year. Meanwhile, opposition to such district policies increased to 67% among Republicans—an 8-percentage-point rise since 2015.

In sum, the public takes essentially the same position with respect to school-discipline disparities regardless of the level of government that designs the policy, and the only significant change in public opinion since 2015 has been a further polarization along partisan lines. Opinions vary by ethnic background, with African Americans increasingly opposed to these policies set at the federal level and Hispanics increasingly in favor of these policies set at the district level.

Race- and income-based school assignments. In 2007, the admissions policies of the Board of Directors for Seattle Public Schools gave priority to students who enhanced the racial diversity of a school when the institution had more applicants than it could admit. That summer, the Supreme Court found the practice unconstitutional by a 5–4 vote, averring that it classified “every student on the basis of race” in violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. To gauge public opinion on the court’s decision, in 2008 we asked whether the respondent thought “public school districts,” in order to “promote school diversity,” should “be allowed to take the racial background of students into account when assigning students to schools.” At that time, 63% said definitely or probably not, while only 16% said definitely or probably yes. Another 21% said they were “not sure.” Among public-school teachers, these percentages were 61%, 19%, and 20%, respectively.

The federal government’s guidance to school districts on the implications of the court’s 2007 decision has shifted across presidential administrations. Under George W. Bush, the Department of Education wrote that the decision effectively barred the use of race in school assignments and encouraged districts to employ race-neutral strategies when seeking to promote school diversity. The Obama administration, in 2011, adopted a more liberal interpretation suggesting that the use of race is still permissible in some situations, such as when race-neutral approaches prove ineffective in achieving school diversity. This June, Secretary DeVos rescinded that document and restored the more cautious guidance promulgated under president Bush.

To discern whether public opinion on this topic has shifted over the past decade, we asked the same question this year that we posed in 2008. We find that the public remains overwhelmingly opposed to considering race when assigning students to schools, though the margin of difference has narrowed a bit (see Figure 9). Among the general public, support has edged up by an insignificant 2 percentage points, to 18%, but opposition has fallen by 6 percentage points, to 57%. Among public-school teachers, the share responding in favor is now 27%, representing an 8-percentage-point increment. Among African American adults, the tick upward is a negligible 1%, but opposition has declined to 46%, a 12-percentage-point drop. Among Hispanic adults, the share taking a favorable position has increased by 10 percentage points, though a majority of this group remains opposed (51% to 24%). Only 11% of Republicans and 25% of Democrats favor race-based school assignment. In other words, a solid majority of the public remains opposed to race-based school assignment policies even when aimed at increasing school diversity.

In light of that opposition as well as uncertainty about the direction of future court decisions, liberal policy analysts have suggested income-based affirmative action as an alternative. “Class-based admissions and recruitment strategies can be effective tools for guaranteeing both racial and socioeconomic diversity on campus,” argues Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, has urged wider access to the city’s selective high schools for students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and the Supreme Court seems to have found no constitutional objection to income-based admissions policies.

To assess the public’s view of this approach, we divided our sample into two segments, asking one the 2008 question about race-based school assignments, while asking the other the same question but substituting for “racial background” the words “family income.” The responses reveal little difference in levels of support for income-based and race-based affirmation action. If anything, approval of income-based affirmative action is even lower. The biggest difference is for African Americans, who are 13 percentage points less supportive of the income-based alternative.

Immigration

With the 2016 presidential election campaign, immigration policy came to the fore of our national consciousness. Trump’s promises to build a wall and tighten the availability of foreign visas have sparked impassioned debate. A few weeks after the administration of the 2018 EdNext survey, fury over immigration policy boiled over with the administration’s decision to prosecute all adults entering the United States illegally, resulting in the separation of children from their families.

Federal aid for immigrant schoolchildren. With U.S. primary and secondary schools daily facing the task of serving 2.3 million foreign-born children—about 4 percent of total enrollment—the immigration issue naturally spills into common discourse about our educational institutions. States and localities with large numbers of immigrant schoolchildren have repeatedly sought federal aid to cover the cost of what is a national challenge, not just the concern of the specific state in which migrants settle. As it turns out, the public is not particularly friendly toward helping out those most affected by migration (see Figure 10). Only 30% of respondents favor “the federal government providing additional money to school districts based on the number of immigrant children they serve.” Almost half of respondents are opposed, with the remainder undecided.

As one might expect, support for the proposal was higher in geographic areas with greater concentrations of immigrants. In locales where the proportion of foreign-born residents is above the 9.3% national median, 37% of respondents endorse the proposal. Backing for the policy drops to 22% among those living in areas with fewer immigrants.

Nationwide, some segments of the public are more likely to approve additional federal aid for immigrants. Forty-three percent of Democrats favor the idea, and opinions among teachers are similar. Approval is highest among Hispanics, at nearly 50%, and lowest among Republicans, with only 14% in favor and 71% against.

Does the public become more willing to support federal aid for immigrant students if they are told the percentage of residents in their district who are foreign-born? We conducted an experiment to answer this question. Before soliciting their opinion about additional federal aid, we told a random half of our respondents the proportion of foreign-born individuals living in their local area. Among those so informed, 36% support the proposal—a 6-percentage-point increase from 30% in favor among respondents not given the information. The positive shift in backing for federal aid for immigrants is fairly uniform across all segments of the population.

Visas for specialized workers. To further assess the public’s attitudes toward immigrants and immigration, we asked respondents to say whether the U.S. government should increase or decrease the number of visas for highly educated foreign workers. As we did in the 2017 EdNext poll, we informed respondents that 85,000 visas were currently provided and offered them arguments on both sides of the issue: some people say these visas are necessary for filling vital jobs, while others say they take jobs away from American college graduates.

Only 17 percent of the public supports increasing the number of visas, representing just an insignificant change from the 15 percent who held that view last year. Forty-six percent of respondents prefer to keep the number of visas at its current level. The remaining 37% favor decreasing the number. The political ramifications of the Trump administration’s new regulations of the H1-B visa program will likely become clearer after their actual effect on the number of foreign workers in the United States unfolds.

Albert Cheng is assistant professor in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas College of Education and Health Professions. Michael B. Henderson is assistant professor at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication and director of its Public Policy Research Lab. Paul E. Peterson, professor of government at Harvard University, directs its Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) and is senior editor of Education Next. Martin R. West, professor of education at Harvard University, is deputy director of PEPG and editor-in-chief of Education Next.

Download the full results of the 2018 Education Next survey here.

Executive Summary

In its 10th annual survey of American public opinion, conducted in May and June of 2016, Education Next finds that the demise of school reform has been greatly exaggerated. Public support remains as high as ever for federally mandated testing, charter schools, tax credits to support private school choice, merit pay for teachers, and teacher tenure reform. However, backing for the Common Core State Standards and school vouchers fell to new lows in 2016. As in previous polls, Democrats are more supportive of Common Core than Republicans are, and we find polarization along party lines on several other issues. Surprisingly, more Democrats than Republicans support vouchers targeted to low-income students, tax credits, and vouchers for all families (universal vouchers).

Note: Throughout our analysis, we disregard all neutral responses to poll questions and base our percentages only on responses indicating a position either in favor of or opposed to the proposal in question. 

Standards, Testing, and Accountability

Common Core State Standards. In 2016, 50% of all those taking a side say they support the use of the Common Core standards in their state, down from 58% in 2015 and from 83% in 2013. Republican backing has plummeted from 82% in 2013 to 39% in 2016. The slip among Democrats is from 86% to 60% over this time period. Eighty-seven percent of teachers supported the initiative in 2013, but that fell to 54% in 2014 and to 44% in 2015, stabilizing at that level in 2016.

Same standards in general. When “Common Core” is not mentioned, two-thirds back the use of the same standards across states as compared to an even split when the name Common Core is included in the question. The Common Core “brand” is particularly toxic to Republicans, who are 22 percentage points less likely to respond favorably when the name is mentioned, as compared to a differential of 10 percentage points among Democrats.

Testing. Nearly four out of five respondents, about the same as in 2015, favor the federal requirement that all students be tested in math and reading in each grade from 3rd through 8th and at least once in high school. Support among Republicans, at 74%, is only modestly lower than among Democrats, at 80%. However, teacher support for testing, at 52%, is much lower.

Parental opt-out. Seventy percent of the public oppose letting parents opt their children out of state tests, the same percentage as in 2015. Among teachers, opposition to opt-out has declined from 64% in 2015 to 57% in 2016.

School Choice Initiatives

Charter schools. Overall public support for charters has remained quite stable since 2013. In 2016 the share favoring charters is 65%, roughly the same as in the past four years. Seventy-four percent of Republicans back charters, but only 58% of Democrats do, a gap of 16 percentage points between the parties.

School vouchers. Suprisingly, backing for both targeted and universal vouchers is greater among Democrats than Republicans, though public support for both types has declined. Whereas 55% of the general public favored targeted vouchers in 2012, only 43% do in 2016. The decline was particularly severe among Republicans, falling from 51% to 37%. Among Democrats, support slipped from 58% to 49%.

The popularity of vouchers for all families (universal vouchers) has also reached a new low. In 2014, they were favored by 56% of the public, but only 50% back them in 2016. When it comes to universal vouchers, 51% of Republicans liked the idea in 2014, while just 45% do in 2016. Democratic support for such vouchers has increased from 49% in 2013 to 56% in 2016.

Tuition tax credits. In 2016, 65% of the public say they favor tax credits for donations to foundations that help low-income students attend private schools, reflecting a modest decline from 70% support in 2013. The policy finds greater support among Democrats, at 69%, than among Republicans, at 60%. Just 47% of teachers favor tax credits.

Teachers

Teacher effectiveness. In 2016, Matt Kraft of Brown University and Allison Gilmour of Vanderbilt studied the ratings teachers received in 19 states that had reformed their teacher evaluation systems. In no state did the fraction receiving an unsatisfactory rating exceed 4%. To see whether the public—and teachers themselves—hold similarly sanguine views of teacher performance, we asked respondents to indicate the percentage of teachers in their local schools they would assign to each of four categories: unsatisfactory, satisfactory, good, and excellent. On average, respondents rate 15% of teachers as unsatisfactory. Teachers give the unsatisfactory rating to 10% of their colleagues.

Merit pay. Asked their opinion on “basing part of the salaries of teachers on how much their students learn,” 60% of the public express support for the idea in 2016. That percentage has remained relatively constant since 2008. Sixty-three percent of Republicans favor merit pay, as compared to 57% of Democrats. Teachers remain largely united in opposition to merit pay, with just 20% expressing support.

Tenure. Asked about support for “giving tenure to teachers,” just 31% of the public express a favorable view in 2016, a figure that has declined by 10 percentage points since 2013. Forty-one percent of Democrats and just 29% of Republicans favor teacher tenure. The public’s opposition to tenure contrasts with 67% support for the practice among teachers.

Teachers unions. Just short of half (49%) of respondents say unions have a generally positive effect on schools. Democratic and Republican views diverge, with 65% of the former and just 31% of the latter taking that position. In 2016, 76% of teachers say unions have a generally positive effect, an increase from 64% in 2013.

Blended Learning

The percentage of the public who said at least 30% of instructional time in high school should be spent on a computer declined from 60% to 2015 to 55% in 2016. Among parents, the change was from 57% to 51%.

Grading Schools

In 2016, 55% of people give their local schools either an A or a B, a higher share than at any point in the past 10 years. Over the course of the decade, the shift upward has been from 43% to 55%. However, only 25% give the nation’s schools as a whole one of these top grades.

Racial Disparities in School Discipline

Only 28% of teachers and of the general public favor a federal policy that prevents schools from expelling or suspending black and Hispanic students at higher rates than other students, a percentage that has not changed over the past year. In 2016, 48% of black respondents express support for the idea, down from 65% in 2015. Among Hispanic respondents, 39% express support, about the same as one year ago.

Financing K–12 Education

Per pupil expenditures. In 2016, 61% of the public favor an increase in per pupil expenditures, but when told their district’s current spending level before the question is posed, only 45% favor an increment. When people are asked to estimate per pupil spending in their local school districts, the average response in 2016 is $7,020, a little more than 50 percent of the actual per pupil expenditure of $12,440.

Teacher salaries. When respondents are asked in 2016 to estimate the average teacher salary in their state, their guesses are, on average, 30% lower than the amount reported by the National Education Association. When given this information before the question is posed, only 41% say salaries should be boosted; if not given this information, 65% favor a pay hike.

Methodology

These results are based upon a nationally representative sample of adults (ages 18 and older) and representative oversamples of the following subgroups: parents with school-age children living in their home (1,571) and teachers (609). Total sample size is 4,181. Respondents could elect to complete the survey in English or Spanish. The survey was conducted from May 6 to June 13, 2016, by the polling firm Knowledge Networks (KN), a GfK company. Respondents are asked whether they “strongly” or “somewhat” support or oppose proposals about which their opinion is being solicited. They are also offered a fifth choice: “neither support nor oppose.” We ignore those who take this neutral position and calculate the percentages favoring and opposed as a proportion of only those taking a position on one side or another.

The year 2016 marks the 10th anniversary of the Education Next poll on K–12 education policy, offering us the opportunity to take a retrospective look at public opinion on this vital topic. In 8 of the past 10 years, we have also surveyed teachers on the subject and have seen some interesting differences between the thinking of these educators and the public at large. And this year, given that public opinion on many national issues is riven by partisan disparities, we compare and contrast the views of Republicans and Democrats.

On many topics, we find that opinion has remained consistent over the past 10 years. We see only slight changes in people’s views on the quality of the nation’s schools, for instance, or on federally mandated testing, charter schools, tax credits to support private school choice, merit pay for teachers, or the effects of teachers unions. But on other issues, opinions have changed significantly. Support for the Common Core State Standards has fallen to a new low in 2016. So has public backing for school vouchers—both those limited to low-income families and those made available to all families. Support for tenure has fallen, but approval for teacher salary hikes has climbed to levels not seen since the U.S. recession of 2008 among respondents not told about current salary levels. But fewer members of the public and fewer parents think at least 30% of the high school day should be devoted to students receiving instruction on a computer. Also, people think better of their local public schools in 2016 than they did in 2007.

On numerous issues, a partisan divide persists. From Common Core and charter schools to merit pay and teacher tenure, from school spending and teacher salaries to union impact on schools, the opinions of Democrats differ in predictable ways from those held by Republicans.  But the partisan split does not always fall out exactly as opinion leaders expect. Surprisingly, school vouchers targeted toward low-income families command greater backing among Democrats than Republicans. The same is true for tax credits for donations to fund scholarships for students from low-income families who attend private school.  Even universal vouchers for all students garner greater support among the partisans who predominate in Blue States rather than Red States.

Other results from the 2016 survey are no less intriguing. We shall see, for example, that members of the public, on average, think that 15% of all teachers at their local schools are performing at an unsatisfactory level. What’s more, teachers themselves, on average, think that 10% of their colleagues are unsatisfactory. People also remain adamantly opposed to policies that mandate equal suspension and expulsion rates across racial lines, despite ongoing efforts in this direction by the Obama administration. All this, and more, is spelled out in the following discussion and in the two interactive graphics available here and here.

Common Core, Accountability, and Testing

Public thinking on these issues is complex. On one hand, Americans continue to support state and federal policies that require schools to assess student progress toward meeting state-designated performance standards. On the other, they are steadily turning against the most prominent initiative to do just that—the Common Core State Standards.

Common Core. Should standards setting out expectations for students at each grade level be uniform throughout the United States? Such standards are commonly used in other countries but have generated great controversy here. The Common Core State Standards Initiative, an effort launched by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers in 2009 to establish uniform standards, initially proved so popular among policymakers that 45 states had, by 2011, agreed to participate. That undertaking became steadily more controversial, however, as the standards were implemented and tests were devised to measure student performance against them (see “The Politics of the Common Core Assessments,” features, Fall 2016). While the standards remain in place in most states, they are opposed by conservative groups that fear expanded federal control and by teachers unions wary of their use in teacher evaluations.

For several years EdNext has gauged public support for Common Core by asking the following question:

As you may know, in the last few years states have been deciding whether or not to use the Common Core, which are standards for reading and math that are the same across the states. In the states that have these standards they will be used to hold public schools accountable for their performance. Do you support or oppose the use of the Common Core standards in your state?

In 2012, the first year EdNext inquired about Common Core, 90% of those who took one side or the other said they favored the standards. But as the Common Core debate intensified, support steadily eroded (see Figure 1a). In 2013, favorable opinion slipped to 83%; it fell to 58% in 2015 and to just 50% in 2016. Republicans have made the largest shift away from Common Core over the past five years. Their backing plummeted from 82% in 2013 to 43% in 2015 and is down to 39% in 2016. The initial slip among Democrats was less dramatic—from 86% to 70% between 2013 and 2015. But in 2016 Democratic support has fallen further, to 60%. Still, Democrats, unlike Republicans, are more likely to back than to oppose Common Core. (As detailed in the methodological sidebar, all the percentages reported in this essay exclude respondents who are neutral on any given question—that is, those who select the “neither support nor oppose” response.)

Meanwhile, teacher opinion on the Common Core roughly parallels that of the public as a whole. Eighty-seven percent of teachers with an opinion supported the initiative in 2013. The biggest drop in teachers’ support for Common Core (33 percentage points) took place between 2013 and 2014. Teacher opinion slipped an additional 10 percentage points in 2015, but stabilized at 44% in 2016. If teacher opinion is stabilizing, it could give hope to Common Core supporters, provided that teachers, the specialists on education matters, are driving public opinion.

For several years EdNext has studied public response to the name “Common Core” as distinct from opinion about the general concept of uniform state standards. To do so, we have divided respondents into two equal and randomly selected groups, asking one group the above question and the other an otherwise identical question that refers to “standards that are the same” rather than to Common Core. Differences in the responses to the two questions reveal that the Common Core “brand” holds a negative connotation for many people: every year, support for using the same standards in general is higher than it is for Common Core in particular (see Figure 1b). In 2016, support for uniform standards climbs to two thirds when the Common Core label is not mentioned, as compared to an even split when the name is included. The brand name is particularly toxic to Republicans, who are 22 percentage points less likely to respond favorably when the name is mentioned (while Democrats are just 10 percentage points less likely to do so). Among those asked the question that does not mention Common Core, the 16-percentage-point drop between 2014 and 2015 has been followed by a recovery of 2 percentage points between 2015 and 2016, suggesting possible stabilization of opinion.

Teacher opinion is less influenced by the brand name. Even when the Common Core name is not mentioned, only 50% of teachers say they approve of uniform standards. That figure is only 6 percentage points higher than the 44% in favor when Common Core is mentioned. It seems that a substantial share of teachers either realize that similar standards and Common Core are much the same, or that they dislike standards in general.

Testing and parental opt-out. The public’s commitment to the use of standardized tests to assess students and schools has not declined. When people are asked whether the federal government should continue the requirement that all students be tested in math and reading in each grade from 3rd through 8th and at least once in high school, nearly four out of five respondents say they favor the policy (see Figure 2). The percentage of people who oppose letting parents opt their children out of state tests is almost as high: 70% come down against opt-out. Those percentages remain nearly as high as in 2015. Finally, support for using the same standardized tests across states is higher than support for the same standards. Seventy-three percent favor uniform tests, though support is slightly weaker among Republicans (68%) than Democrats (76%).

On these issues, teachers’ views again differ somewhat from the public’s. Only about half of teachers like the idea of continuing the federal requirement that all students in certain grades be tested. And, the percentage of teachers who think parents should be allowed to have their children opt out of tests increased from 36% to 43% between 2015 and 2016.

In short, one cannot summarily claim that people are turning against similar standards and tests throughout the United States. Even though they are not convinced that Common Core is the answer, they are still inclined to approve of the general idea of one framework for assessing students and schools across the states. This broader idea may well have a longer shelf life among the public—if perhaps not among teachers—than the Common Core brand.

School Choice

Opinion on school choice issues is full of surprises for those who think that members of the public blindly follow their political leaders—or, for that matter, that elected officials hew closely to the views of their party’s base. Republican support for vouchers and tuition tax credits is slipping, creating a partisan cleavage in the electorate that is the opposite of the divide observed among Democratic and Republican elected officials. Opinion with respect to charter schools has also become more polarized, but here the growing opposition among Democrats parallels the intensifying resistance to charters by many state legislatures dominated by that party.

School vouchers have been heatedly debated across party lines for many years. The nation’s very first voucher program, begun in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1990, was established at the behest of the Republican governor, Tommy Thompson. Democrats in the Wisconsin legislature frustrated the governor for several years, but Thompson enlisted the aid of Annette “Polly” Williams, a black state legislator who pulled together enough bipartisan support to get a very small program off the ground. The program has since expanded, but battles between Democrats and Republicans over its funding have never ceased. The conflicts in Wisconsin gave rise to a national organization, the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), which has cultivated a coalition of Republicans and black Democrats who support private school choice. Even so, votes cast by Democratic elected officials in support of voucher programs are rare. During the George W. Bush administration, Republicans initiated a small voucher program for low-income students in the District of Columbia. Upon his election, President Barack Obama made it clear that he opposed the program and attempted to starve it of funding, though Republicans in Congress have kept him from eliminating it altogether.

Among members of the public, the partisan divide runs in the opposite direction, with more Democrats than Republicans favoring school vouchers targeted toward low-income families, a fact that few analysts have recognized. However, a major shift against vouchers has taken place within the ranks of both political parties and among the public as a whole. Between 2012 and 2016, support for targeted vouchers, as indicated by responses to a question emphasizing the wider choice that vouchers offer to parents, fell from 55% to 43% among the public as a whole, from 58% to 49% among Democrats, and from 51% to 37% among Republicans (see Figure 3a). EdNext also traced opinions over a longer period of time, but with a question that emphasized “government funds” instead of “wider choice” (see sidebar on school vouchers). When this question was first posed in 2007, 56% favored vouchers for low-income families, but only 47% did so in 2013, and support slipped further, to 36%, in 2016. Taken together, these shifts are quite remarkable. Rarely does opinion on a policy question change so dramatically over the course of a single decade. When the “government funds” wording was used, Republican backing for targeted vouchers fell by 24 percentage points between 2007 and 2016: from 53% in 2007 to just 29% this year. Among Democrats, the decline was from 59% to 39%, a drop of 20 percentage points.

The popularity of vouchers for all families (universal vouchers) has also trended downward (see Figure 3b). In 2014, such vouchers were favored by 56% of the public; in 2016 it stands at just 50%. Fifty-one percent of Republicans favored them in 2014, but only 45% do in 2016. Meanwhile, Democratic support for universal vouchers has increased from 49% in 2013 to a level of 56% in 2016. Remarkably, Democrats in 2016 are 11 percentage points more supportive of universal vouchers than Republicans are.

The greater support for vouchers among Democrats is all the more surprising, given the deepening opposition to them among teachers, whose support for targeted vouchers fell from 39% in 2012 to 30% in 2016 (when “wider choice” is emphasized in the question). The percentage of teachers favoring universal vouchers also slipped, from 42% in 2014 to 37% in 2016.

Any explanation for these trends is necessarily speculative. But the lower level of support among Republicans may reflect the tension between the party’s ideals and the material interests of its constituents. As conservatives, Republicans generally espouse the extension of free markets. Milton Friedman, an economist whose ideas have long been championed in Republican circles, made the case for vouchers as follows:

[School choice] would bring a healthy increase in the variety of educational institutions available and in competition among them. Private initiative and enterprise would quicken the pace of progress in this area as it has in so many others.

But many Republicans already have choice. Those who can afford to reside in affluent suburban areas can choose where they live and thus which schools their children will attend. Those without school-age children benefit from the higher value of homes in neighborhoods with higher-quality schools. Universal vouchers provide access to schools without regard to where people live, undermining the value of these homes. In small-town America, a Republican stronghold, local public schools are often major institutions that undergird cultural, sporting, and other community activities.

The focus of the school voucher movement has aggravated the tension between these material interests and conservative ideals. By making equal opportunity a central theme of the movement, organizations such as the BAEO, the Friedman Foundation (established by Milton and Rose Friedman and now known as EdChoice), Democrats for Education Reform, and other groups in favor of school choice have put Republican support at risk by emphasizing the role that vouchers can play in opening school doors to the disadvantaged.

On the other hand, this emphasis on equal opportunity holds appeal for racial and ethnic groups that comprise a significant part of the Democratic constituency. In 2015, the black and Hispanic populations were oversampled in the EdNext poll. At that time, nearly two-thirds of both blacks and Hispanics said they favored targeted vouchers. Even larger percentages of these groups supported universal vouchers. The large numbers of blacks and Hispanics who identify themselves as Democrats help explain the greater support for vouchers among Democrats than among Republicans. Indeed, it may be said that on this issue the Democratic Party is divided between two of its key constituencies—teachers on one side, minority groups on the other.

Tuition tax credits. Half of the states now have either a school-voucher program or a similar initiative that uses the tax code to subsidize the opportunity to attend a private school, according to EdChoice. A common form of tax credit allows businesses or individuals to contribute to organizations that distribute private-school scholarships to low-income families. Tax-credit initiatives are spreading more quickly than voucher programs, and a close look at the public opinion data suggests that is likely to continue. In four of its annual polls (2009 and 2014–16), EdNext has inquired about tax credits for scholarships for low-income families. In 2010 and 2011, we asked instead about “a tax credit for individual and corporate donations that pay for scholarships to help parents send their children to private schools,” language that implies the scholarships could be used by any family, regardless of income. However, the public responded to both programs in much the same way, so we shall ignore the distinction in the discussion that follows.

In 2016, 65% of people offering an opinion on tax credits say they favor them, making this mechanism the most popular kind of school choice (see Figure 4). Although substantial majorities support tax credits, the policy finds greater favor among Democrats, at 69%, than among Republicans, at 60%. Meanwhile, just 47% of teachers favor tax credits.

Support for tax credits may have reached its high-water mark in 2012 when the in-favor percentage climbed to 77%, well above the 63% level attained in 2009 when the tax credit question was first posed. It is not clear whether slippage has occurred since 2012, because the placement of the neutral response in 2013 was altered. However, we do see a modest decline in the percentage in favor, from 70% in 2014 to 65% in 2016. Much of the shift has taken place among Republicans, where backing for tax credits has slipped 8 percentage points since 2014. Nonetheless, tax credits have held on to greater public support, while both universal and targeted vouchers have not.

Charter schools. In 1988, when Ray Budde, a former assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, suggested that teachers bypass bureaucrats by forming their own schools, he was wise to apply the word “charter” to his concept. The term evokes images of the charters that granted Virginia to Sir Walter Raleigh, and Massachusetts Bay to the Pilgrims. It draws upon recollections of the Magna Carta, that ancient agreement between barons and the King of England celebrated as a pivotal moment in the history of freedom. Even Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, embraced the concept.

Charter schools have come a long way in the decades since Budde first proposed the idea. The first charter school was formed in Minnesota in 1992, and by 2007 charters were educating about 2% of the public school population nationwide. Today it is estimated that nearly 6% of public school students attend charters. Despite this growth, overall public opinion on charter schools has not changed much since 2008, when EdNext first inquired about them with the question it still uses (see Figure 5). Before 2013, support for charters ranged between 70% and 73%. From 2013 on, charter support has hovered between 67% and 65%. Despite this modest dip, we do not conclude that there has been any real change in public opinion, because the downward shift between 2012 and 2013 could simply have been a function of our moving the neutral response option in 2013 (see methodology sidebar).

Although public opinion is stable, support for charters is substantially greater among Republicans than among Democrats. Republican support for charters has remained steady throughout the decade, and in 2016 it stands at 74%. Democratic support for charters slipped from 72% in 2008 to 63% in 2012, but it has remained steady since 2013 at 59%  that year and 58% in 2016.

Teacher Performance and Policies

Teacher evaluations. Over the past five years, most states have overhauled their approach to teacher evaluation. Spurred by the Obama administration’s Race to the Top grant competition and later by its No Child Left Behind waiver program, states have adopted policies requiring that teachers be rated on ordered scales, and on multiple performance categories. (Previously, many school districts relied on binary rating systems in which all but a handful of teachers were deemed satisfactory.) These policy changes, however, have not transformed the results of teacher evaluations. In 2016, Matt Kraft of Brown University and Allison Gilmour of Vanderbilt studied the ratings teachers received from new evaluation systems in 19 states. In only three states did the fraction of teachers receiving an unsatisfactory or ineffective rating exceed 1%, and in not one state was it greater than 4%.

Do members of the public hold a similarly sanguine view of teachers? And how do teachers themselves rate their peers? We asked respondents in the 2016 EdNext survey to indicate the percentage of teachers in their local schools they would assign to each of four categories: unsatisfactory, satisfactory, good, and excellent. On average, the shares of teachers rated as good or excellent are 33% and 26%, respectively, with another 26% identified as satisfactory. But as Figure 6 illustrates, respondents report that they think 15% of teachers are unsatisfactory—far more than the maximum of 4% that were so deemed by the new state evaluation systems. Not surprisingly, teachers express somewhat more positive views of their colleagues’ performance than members of the general public do, but even they report that 10% of their fellow teachers are performing at an unsatisfactory level and that an additional 21% are no better than satisfactory. On average, they rate about half of the remaining teachers as good and half as excellent.

Merit pay and tenure. In general, people broadly support merit pay and oppose teacher tenure. Asked their opinion on “basing part of the salaries of teachers on how much their students learn,” 60% express support (Figure 7a). The share of the public supporting merit pay has remained relatively constant since we first asked this question in 2008. Meanwhile, teachers remain largely united in opposition to the concept of merit pay, with just 20% expressing support. The gap of 40 percentage points in support between teachers and the broader public is the widest that we observe on any issue in our 2016 survey. Perhaps surprisingly, however, the views of Republicans and Democrats on merit pay are not that far apart, with 63% of Republicans in favor as compared to 57% of Democrats.

Asked about their support for “giving tenure to teachers,” just 31% of those offering an opinion express a favorable view (see Figure 7b). Support has declined by 10 percentage points since 2013, suggesting that opinion has shifted in response to the media attention the issue has received during the ongoing Vergara v. California litigation over the constitutionality of tenure (see “Reaping the Whirlwind,” legal beat, Fall 2016). The public’s opposition to tenure contrasts with 67% support among teachers themselves. There is also a noteworthy partisan gap in opinion on tenure, with 41% of Democrats and just 29% of Republicans expressing support.

The less satisfied respondents are with teacher quality, the more likely they are to support reforms to teacher-related policies. Those with generally favorable views of teachers—respondents who rate fewer than 25% of teachers as satisfactory or below—are evenly split on merit pay, with exactly 50% expressing support. In contrast, among those who think less highly of teacher performance—that is, respondents who rate at least three-quarters of teachers satisfactory or below—about 75% favor merit pay. A similar pattern emerges for teacher tenure, with 56% of the former group and 82% of the latter group expressing opposition.

Teachers unions. Members of the public appear to be evenly divided in their thinking about the influence of teachers unions, with 49% of those who take a position saying they have a generally positive effect on schools (see Figure 8). Meanwhile, teachers overwhelmingly have favorable views of the unions that represent them, with 76% reporting that unions have a generally positive effect. Moreover, teachers’ views of their unions have trended in a more favorable direction since 2013, when just 64% gave a positive response. Predictably, Democratic and Republican views diverge, with 65% of the former and just 31% of the latter saying that unions have a positive effect on schools.

Blended Learning

As the use of technology in schools grows rapidly—whether in blended-learning environments, for project-based learning, or just because it’s the fad du jour—the amount of time students should spend learning on computers is a point of contention. The chants of “teachers, not technology” and “laptops for layoffs” increasingly appear to be relics of the past, but more and more people seem to agree that digital learning in K–12 classrooms works best when it is used with the oversight of a teacher. They feel that students can learn effectively via computer if an educator is around to assist and supplement, and teachers are realizing that computers—when properly used—have the power to enhance their craft.

Yet blended learning has lost ground among parents over the last year. In 2015 and again in 2016 we asked: “About what share of instructional time in high school do you think students should spend receiving instruction independently through or on a computer?” Overall, the percentage of respondents who said that at least 30% of time should be spent in this way declined from 60% to 55% over the past year. Among parents, the change was from 57% in 2015 to 51% in 2016. Meanwhile, the percentage of teachers favoring a substantial amount of time devoted to computerized learning has remained constant: in 2015, 42%, and in 2016, 41% of teachers think at least 30% of students’ time should be spent receiving instruction on a computer.

Some blended-learning experts criticized our question wording in the 2015 EdNext survey that referred to “receiving instruction” rather than “learning independently.” To find out whether responses change when the wording is altered, we used the latter phrase in posing this question to a randomly selected subgroup of the respondents in 2016. For both parents and the public as a whole, the wording change made no significant difference. But for teachers, “learning independently” gathered more support than “receiving instruction”: 48% favor devoting 30% or more of the school day to learning independently, while, as mentioned, only 41% do when the question asked about “receiving instruction.”

Grading Schools

Each year since 2007, EdNext has asked people to evaluate public schools at both the national and the local levels on the A-to-F scale traditionally used to grade students. Respondents always give much higher grades to schools in their communities than to schools in the nation as a whole. When asked about local schools in 2016, for example, 55% of respondents give them either an A or a B and only 13% give them a D or an F, with the rest handing out the diplomatic C (see Figure 9a). But when grading the nation’s schools, only 25% of the respondents award them an A or a B, while 22% hand out either a D or an F (see Figure 9b). In short, local schools receive more than twice as many high grades as the nation’s schools do.

The much higher rating given to local schools creates a paradox. Simply by substituting the words “in your community” for the words “in the nation as a whole,” the survey generates a dramatically different set of evaluations. Since the nation’s schools are simply the sum of all the local schools in the country, and opinions in a nationally representative survey reflect attitudes toward local schools across the country, how can there be such a sharp difference?

In our view, people tend to rely on shortcuts when making assessments of public institutions, as they have neither the time nor the inclination to undertake full-scale, careful assessments of their own. For instance, people often prefer the familiar to the less well known and the proximate to the distant. In this case, citizens have some direct acquaintance with their local schools to which they or their friends and neighbors are sending their children, but the nation’s schools remain a distant abstraction about which they have little direct information.

What’s more, people tend to hear mostly good news about their community schools and almost all glum news about the nation’s schools in general. A Google search on “America’s schools” results in headlines such as “America’s Schools Are Falling Apart,” “Why America’s Schools Have a Money Problem,” and “The Real Reason America’s Schools Stink.” But a search for the term “local schools” turns up the websites of specific local school systems and a website rating “great schools.”

Accordingly, public evaluations of the nation’s schools have only slightly improved since 2007 among the public as a whole as well as among Republicans and Democrats. However, teacher thinking on this issue has slipped from a high of 38% giving schools one of the two top grades in 2011 to just 30% in 2016.

By contrast, people’s thinking about their own local schools has become noticeably more favorable since 2007. Not only are people inclined to like their local schools more than schools across the nation, but we see a clear upward trend in the percentage of the public awarding their schools either an A or a B. Over the course of the decade, the shift upward has been from 43% to 55%. Similar shifts over this same time period have taken place among both Republicans and Democrats. Teachers already offered a higher evaluation in 2008, but even from that high level there has been an upward shift of 8 percentage points to 69% of teachers giving local schools either an A or a B.

Grades assigned by the public to local schools have risen and fallen in the past. In the decade prior to the 1983 release of “A Nation at Risk,” the landmark report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, the percentage of the public giving local schools one of the two highest grades in the Phi Delta Kappan (PDK) poll had fallen from nearly 50% to just above 30%. After the report appeared, stimulating a variety of reform efforts, public evaluations of their local schools climbed steadily to an all-time high of 51% in 2000, just prior to the national debate over the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which held schools accountable for low performance. At that point, public evaluations edged downward, with only about 44% willing to give their local schools an A or a B in the PDK poll, comparable to the 43% assigning schools one of these two grades in the EdNext poll of 2007. That year marked a new turning point, with evaluations of local schools rising once again in both the PDK and EdNext polls.

We do not have a ready explanation for the recent shift in public thinking in a positive direction. Certainly, there is nothing in the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), commonly known as the nation’s report card, that justifies such optimism. Gains in 4th- and 8th-grade student performance registered during that period for whites, blacks, and Hispanics alike are far smaller than those notched over the prior decade, when public assessments of local schools were slipping. Also, performance of 15-year-old U.S. students on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) has shown no improvement since 2006. While student-achievement data run counter to rising public optimism, the change in public thinking corresponds with the new mood that emerged on Capitol Hill in 2015 when Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which stripped the federal government of much of its authority to direct school reforms at the local level. Perhaps members of Congress heard from their constituents that they felt their local schools were good enough.

Racial Disparities in Discipline

In January 2014, the Obama administration’s Department of Justice and Department of Education jointly sent each school district a “Dear Colleague” letter urging local officials to avoid racial bias when suspending or expelling students. The letter said that African American students receive about 35% of one-time suspensions and about 36% of expulsions, even though they comprise only about 15% of those attending public schools. The departments, citing the Civil Rights Act of 1965, gave school districts new “guidance,” telling them they risked legal action even if their school-discipline policies were neutral on their face if those policies had an unintended “disparate impact, i.e., a disproportionate and unjustified effect on students of a particular race.” The issue has gained more traction throughout 2016, as discussions of disproportionately high incarceration rates among minority men have captured widespread media attention.

Do members of the public support policies that prevent disparities in suspensions and expulsions? And has the level of support changed over the past year? To find out, we asked respondents in both 2015 and 2016 whether they supported or opposed “federal policies that prevent schools from expelling or suspending black and Hispanic students at higher rates than other students.”

In 2015, only 29% said they favored a policy that prevented racial disparities in disciplinary policy, while 71% were opposed. Despite the debate over the past year, those percentages remain essentially unchanged in 2016—72%  against, just 28% in favor.

Teachers are just as negative about federal attempts to eliminate racial disparities in disciplinary practices. In both 2015 and 2016, no fewer than 72% of teachers said they were opposed. Although opponents outnumber supporters in both political parties, one does see some polarization. Among Democrats, 61% say they do not favor the policy, as compared to 86% of Republicans.

There is some sign that the policy has lost ground even among African Americans. In 2015, 65% of black respondents expressed support for the idea, but that percentage fell to 48% in 2016. Among Hispanic respondents in 2016, 39% express support, about the same as one year ago.

Financing Education

It appears that the American people need a primer in school finance. A clear majority of respondents favor higher levels of per pupil expenditure and higher teacher salaries. But people tend to seriously underestimate both school expenditures and teacher pay. If respondents are told how much is actually being spent in their school district, they become less enthusiastic about increasing the amount; if they are told the average teacher salary in their state, they are less inclined to favor a pay raise. People also watch their pocketbooks more carefully in times of economic turndown, such as during the global recession of 2009. Once the economy begins to turn around, members of the public once again become more inclined to support spending increases for schools and salaries, but the pace at which this change occurs is sometimes slow and uneven. On all these financial questions, a wide partisan gap persists from year to year, and when it comes to teacher salaries, that gap seems to be widening.

Current expenditures per pupil. As noted, people tend to underestimate the amount of money spent on public schools. When we asked respondents to estimate per pupil spending in their local school district, the average response in 2016 was $7,020, little more than 50% of the actual per pupil expenditure of $12,440, on average, in the districts in which respondents lived. That underestimation may color people’s thinking as to whether or not expenditures should go up. In 2016, when a random selection of respondents were asked if spending in their school district should be increased (as opposed to either being cut or remaining at current levels), 61% supported the idea (see Figure 10a). But in another random group, in which people were first told their district’s current level of school expenditure, only 45% favored an increment (see Figure 10b). Among Democrats, 70% of those not informed, but only 57% of the informed, want to spend more. A larger difference of 20 percentage points separates the uninformed (51%) and the informed respondents (31%) among Republicans. Information also influences teacher opinion. The difference between the uninformed and informed groups of teachers is 15 percentage points in the 2016 survey.

These findings are not unique to 2016. In every poll since 2007, we have found that respondents prefer to spend less when they are informed of current expenditure levels.

Differences between the uninformed and the informed are especially large in districts where expenditures per pupil are already high. Among respondents living in districts that spend more than $15,440 ($3,000 above the average district in the sample), 57% of the uninformed think spending should increase, compared to only 36% of informed respondents in these districts—a gap of 21 percentage points. Among respondents living in districts that spend less than $9,440 ($3,000 below the average district), 61% of uninformed respondents support higher spending, just 12 percentage points above such views among the uninformed. In sum, clear majorities of uninformed respondents want their districts to spend more, but when respondents are told current expenditure levels, they take those amounts into account—an indication that public thinking on expenditures would change if residents were better informed about actual fiscal practices in their schools.

Whether or not respondents are informed of actual spending, they seem to prefer lower expenditures when the country enters a serious recession, as happened from late 2007 to mid-2009. In 2009, support for increased spending fell sharply from 2008 levels. In subsequent years, preferences for higher spending revived for both the uninformed and the informed groups, but at different rates.

Among uninformed respondents, preferences for higher spending recovered almost as soon as the economy showed signs of stabilizing. As early as 2010, the percentage of this group favoring an increase rebounded to 63%, even higher than in 2008. Among informed respondents, in contrast, support for increased spending picked up only modestly after 2009, and the level of support in this group is still only 45% in 2016, noticeably below the 51% attained in 2008.

Since then, support among respondents who were not given spending information has bounced around at that level, with support fluctuating somewhat, depending on the year. In even-numbered years, when state and national elections are held, the share of the uninformed members of the public who favor higher spending is roughly 5 percentage points higher than it is in odd-numbered years, when most states do not hold elections. Is it possible that people come to think more spending is needed when expenditure levels are under debate in forthcoming elections? It is hard to say, because our data are collected in May and June of each year, when campaigns are only beginning to attract public attention. Still, no other explanation comes to mind for the small but regular seesaw in support for more spending among the uninformed respondents. The seesaw pattern is somewhat more pronounced among uninformed Republicans than uninformed Democrats, perhaps because Democrats are generally more committed to higher funding for education, while Republican thinking is more responsive to political and economic circumstances. About that one can only speculate. (The opinions of the informed respondents do not show a clear seesaw pattern.)

One can state with greater certainty that the partisan divide on this issue seems quite secure, running at 20 percentage points or more nearly every year among both those not informed and those informed of current expenditure levels. The fact that partisan differences persist even when people are given this information suggests that this rift in opinion runs deep within the electorate.

Teacher salaries. Just as per pupil spending is much higher than people think, so is the average teacher paid much better than members of the public estimate. When respondents were asked in 2016 to estimate the average teacher salary in their state, their guesses were, on average, 30% lower than the $57,000 average teacher pay reported by the National Education Association, the organization that collects the best available information on this topic.

Inasmuch as people, on average, think teacher salaries are quite low, it should come as no surprise to learn that a strong majority of respondents think they should rise. In 2016, when we asked a randomly selected subgroup of our respondents whether teacher salaries should increase, 65% favored the idea (see Figure 11a). But when members of another random subgroup were first told the average teacher salary in their state, only 41% wanted to hand out pay raises (see Figure 11b). The same pattern obtains among Democratic and Republican partisans. Seventy-six percent of uninformed Democrats wanted a salary increase but only 49% of the informed ones did. For Republicans, these percentages were 52% and 33%, respectively. Information even had its effects on teacher opinion. Eighty-nine percent of the uninformed teachers, but just 79% of the informed, favored a pay raise for themselves and their colleagues. These “information effects” on opinions about teacher salaries have been observed every year from 2008 to 2016.

After the U.S. recession took hold in 2008, support for increases in teachers’ salaries among both uninformed and informed groups of respondents declined sharply. Among the uninformed, the share in favor of an increase fell by 14 percentage points in 2009 from a high of 69% attained in 2008. Among the group of people who were told current teacher salaries in their state, support fell from 54% to 40%.

Support for increases in teacher salaries has subsequently bounced back among both uninformed and informed respondents, but these rebounds have not followed the same course. Among uninformed respondents, the decline in support continued through 2011, but subsequently has recovered most of its lost ground, reaching the 65% level in 2016 mentioned above. In the intermittent years, we once again see a somewhat attenuated version of a seesaw pattern in the level of support depending on whether or not it is an election year. Once again, the seesaw pattern is greater among uninformed Republicans than uninformed Democrats. Also, the partisan gap among those uninformed of current salary levels persists, and in fact it seems to be growing. Democratic partisans are anywhere between 14 and 25 percentage points more supportive of higher teacher salaries than Republicans are, with the gap 10 percentage points wider in 2015 and 2016 than it had been in 2008 and 2009.

Among those who were told current teacher salaries in their state, support did not begin to increase again until 2014 and has never recovered to its 2008 levels, remaining just 41% in 2016. Meanwhile, the percentage of informed teachers favoring salary increases in 2016, at 79%, is nearly as high as it was in 2008 (81%). Note, however, that the teacher-public divide is widening. Between 2008 and 2016, support for increased funding has fallen by 13 percentage points among the informed public but by only 2 percentage points among informed teachers.

Conclusions

We draw seven main conclusions from our multiyear survey of public and teacher opinions on a broad range of educational issues:

1) Uniform national standards and tests of student performance against those standards gather broader public backing than do the specific sets of standards and tests known as the Common Core. In earlier polls, we found a similar diminution of support for federally mandated testing and accountability when that policy was translated into No Child Left Behind, a federal law that had numerous specific components. Even if members of the public buy into a broad principle, programs that operationalize that principle can suffer “death by a thousand cuts.”

2) A decade ago, school vouchers targeted toward low-income students commanded the backing of a substantial plurality of the public. That is no longer so, perhaps in part because targeted voucher programs remain small, fragile, and underfunded. Meanwhile, charter schools, appearing on the scene at roughly the same time, have expanded steadily, with 6% of the student population now attending one. Although public backing for charters is polarized along party lines, the level of support remains high overall, at nearly 2-to-1 margins. A more recent school-choice idea, tuition tax credits, could be at risk. While the concept remains popular with the public today, one wonders whether the current level of support will persist if tax credit programs don’t soon become more prevalent across the country.

3) People are less inclined to spend more when they find out how much is currently devoted to school spending. In nearly every year over the past decade (and in every year we have asked the relevant questions), we have found much less enthusiasm for boosting per pupil expenditures and teacher salaries among those who are first told how much these items are actually costing the district. We also find that people seriously underestimate how much is currently spent and how much teachers are paid.

4) People like their local schools more than ever before, but at the same time they judge a substantial share of the teaching force to be performing below a satisfactory level. Consistent with this view, as of today a substantial share of the public would end teacher tenure and pay more-effective teachers higher salaries than less-effective ones. However, one cannot be sure that public support for those tactics would be as great once a specific policy to enact them were put into place.

5) More than the public, teachers support higher salaries, embrace teacher tenure, oppose merit pay, and back the unions that represent many of them. They are also more likely to oppose most forms of school choice. Although teacher support for Common Core tumbled in 2014 and 2015, in the past year it has stabilized, with nearly half the teaching force continuing to support Common Core. Surprisingly, teachers believe that 1 out of every 10 of their colleagues is performing at an unsatisfactory level.

6) Members of the public do not favor the idea that expulsion and suspension rates in schools should necessarily be race neutral. Despite the wide disparities in expulsions and suspensions across racial groups, most people oppose policies that would require schools to suspend black and Hispanic students at the same rate as other students.

7) Both parents and the public as a whole remain
supportive of testing and opposed to policies that would allow parents to withhold their children from state test-taking, but support for parental opt-out has gained ground among teachers.

Paul E. Peterson is professor and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School. Michael B. Henderson is an assistant professor at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication and director of its Public Policy Research Lab. Martin R. West, editor-in chief of Education Next, is associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and deputy director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School, where Samuel Barrows is a postdoctoral fellow.

Methodology

The results presented here are based upon a nationally representative, stratified sample of adults (age 18 and older) and representative oversamples of the following subgroups: parents with school-age children living in their home (1,571) and teachers (609). Total sample size is 4,181. Respondents could elect to complete the survey in English or Spanish. Survey weights were employed to account for nonresponse and the oversampling of specific groups.

The survey was conducted from May 6 to June 13, 2016, by the polling firm Knowledge Networks (KN), a GfK company. KN maintains a nationally representative panel of adults (obtained via address-based sampling techniques) who agree to participate in a limited number of online surveys.

We report separately on the opinions of the public, teachers, parents, African Americans, and Hispanics, as well as on those of self-identified Democrats and Republicans. We define Democrats and Republicans to include respondents who say that they “lean” toward one party or the other. In the 2016 EdNext survey sample, 52% of respondents identify as Democrats and 44% as Republicans; the remaining 4% identify as independent, undecided, or affiliated with another party. These percentages are similar to those obtained in the first EdNext survey in 2007, when 53% identified as Democrats and 42% as Republicans. Nonetheless, any changes over time in the views of Democrats and Republicans may be driven by shifts in the composition of those who identify with each party.

In general, survey responses based on larger numbers of observations are more precise, that is, less prone to sampling variance than those made across groups with fewer numbers of observations. As a consequence, answers attributed to the national population are more precisely estimated than are those attributed to groups. The margin of error for binary responses given by the full sample in the EdNext survey is roughly 1.5 percentage points for questions on which opinion is evenly split. The specific number of respondents varies from question to question due to item nonresponse and to the fact that, in the cases of several items, we randomly divided the sample into multiple groups in order to examine the effect of variations in the way questions were posed. The exact wording of each question is displayed at www.educationnext.org/edfacts. Percentages reported in the figures and online tables do not always sum to 100 as a result of rounding to the nearest percentage point.

The EdNext survey often asks respondents to indicate whether they strongly support, somewhat support, somewhat oppose, or strongly oppose an idea or policy. They are also offered a fifth choice: “neither support nor oppose,” a category similar to (but not quite the same as) the “don’t know” category used by some other surveys.

In our previous reports on the poll, we have ordinarily provided information on 1) the combined percentages of those somewhat or strongly in favor, 2) the combined percentages of those strongly and somewhat opposed, and 3) the percentage taking the neutral position. That information is available in interactive graphics for 2015 and 2016 and in tabular form for all previous years at www.educationnext.org/edfacts/. In the figures and discussion presented in this essay, however, we disregard all the neutral-position responses and calculate the percentage favoring or opposing a policy as a proportion of only those taking a position on one side or another of the issue. Not much is lost by taking this step, and one definite benefit is obtained: one can capture the relative balance of support and opposition for any given year in a single number, allowing one to see how opinion is trending (or not) over time. But we caution the reader not to compare numbers from previous essays to those in our figures documenting trends, as the earlier numbers calculate support for a policy as a percentage of all respondents, including those taking the neutral position.

A further word of caution: In the 2007 through 2012 surveys, the neutral response was presented as the middle option among the five response categories. Beginning in 2013, the neutral response was made the fifth option, a change that reduces the number selecting that neutral alternative. In ignoring the neutral responses in our analysis, we assume that those selecting this category, if forced to choose, would distribute themselves in the same proportions as those actually taking a position. All trends that cross the 2012 boundary reflect this assumption, even when the proportion of neutral responses changes significantly. Therefore, these trends must be interpreted with care. In the figures, we drop a sharp vertical line through the graphs in order to remind the reader to use caution when interpreting trends that cross the time boundary. Our discussions in the text look at trends prior to 2013 separately from those after that date.

Click to download the full results of the 2015 Education Next-PEPG Poll

The American public is displaying its independent streak. Critics of testing will take no comfort from the findings of the 2015 Education Next poll—but neither will supporters of the Common Core State Standards, school choice, merit pay, or tenure reform. The unions will not like the public’s view on their demands that nonmembers contribute financially to their activities. Teachers will be unhappy to hear that public enthusiasm for increasing teacher pay falls through the floor when people are told current salary levels and asked if they are willing to pay additional taxes for that purpose. The Obama administration will be equally unhappy to hear what both teachers and the public think about its proposals to require similar student suspension and expulsion rates across racial and ethnic groups.

These are among the many findings to emerge from the ninth annual Education Next survey, administered in May and June 2015 to a nationally representative sample of some 4,000 respondents, including oversamples of roughly 700 teachers, 700 African Americans, and 700 Hispanics (see methodology sidebar). The large number of survey respondents enabled us to ask alternative questions on the same topic in order to determine the sensitivity of opinion to new information and particular wording. We also posed many new questions in 2015, allowing us to explore opinion on curricular and other issues that have never before been examined in a nationally representative survey of the American public. Results from the full survey are available here, and click here for a graphic display of most findings.

Testing and Accountability

In early 2015, as Congress began rewriting the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), no issue loomed larger than the use of student testing to measure the performance of schools and teachers. Media reports featured teachers decrying a scourge of overtesting. By spring, hundreds of thousands of parents had chosen to have their children “opt out” of state tests, garnering the rousing approval of the teachers unions. Out on the hustings, Republican presidential candidates escalated their critique of the Common Core. The movement to put “the standardized testing machine in reverse,” in the words of New York mayor Bill de Blasio, seemed to have legs.

It is perhaps surprising, then, that in July a bipartisan Senate supermajority of 81–17 passed a revision of NCLB that keeps the federal requirement that all students be tested in math and reading in grades 3 to 8 and again in high school. Has the upper chamber ignored the people’s will? Or, is the public’s appetite for the information provided by regular student testing broader and more robust than the media coverage would indicate?

Our polling suggests the latter (see Figure 1). A solid 67% of members of the public say they support continuing the federal requirement for annual testing, while just 21% oppose the idea, with the remainder taking a neutral position. Parental support for testing (66%) is about as high as that of the public as a whole. Teachers are divided down the middle, with 47% saying yes and 46% saying no to continuing the policy.

In 2012, the last time we asked this question, 63% of the public said they supported annual testing, and only 12% opposed. In other words, the shares of supporters and opponents are both slightly higher in 2015 than they were three years ago, with the share taking a neutral position declining from 25% to 13%. This shift could suggest that public opinion has crystallized in the intervening years (but it may also reflect the fact that our survey presented the neutral response option more prominently in 2012). Either way, the backlash against standardized testing appears less potent than opponents claim.

Opting out. The House of Representatives also passed a reauthorization bill requiring that states maintain annual testing regimes, but its version differs from the Senate’s in one key respect: it allows parents to “opt out” of state tests, despite the fact that the federal government does not require that the tests be used to evaluate the performance of individual students. The difference between the two bills looms large, because one cannot assess school performance accurately unless nearly all students participate in the testing process.

What do people think of the opt-out movement? To find out, we asked whether they thought parents should be able to decide whether or not their children take annual state tests. Our results reveal little public sympathy for giving parents this option (see Figure 1). Only 25% of members of the public like the idea of letting parents decide whether their children are tested, while 59% oppose it. Among parents themselves, just 32% favor the opt-out approach, while 52% oppose it. Fifty-seven percent of teachers also dislike the idea, with only 32% giving it their support. In short, as Senate and House negotiators turn to ironing out differences between their bills, the Senate team can argue that its approach to “opt out” (which does not require states to offer that option) is backed by strong majorities of the public and of teachers.

Accountability: who should hold the reins? Another fault line in the debate over the proposed federal education law lies between Congress and the executive branch. As of late July, both the Senate and the House bills defer to the states on the question of how to design their school accountability programs. The Obama administration, backed by civil rights and business groups, wants the feds to have more voice in defining what constitutes a “failing school” and in proposing remedies. But the Senate has nixed the so-called Murphy Amendment, which would require states to identify and intervene in their lowest-performing schools; high schools with fewer than 67% on-time graduates; and any school where disadvantaged or disabled students fall short of standardized test goals for two consecutive years.

Where do people come down on this debate? To find out, we asked our respondents which level of government (federal, state, or local) should play the largest role in three key aspects of the design of school accountability programs:

· Setting education standards for what students should know;

· Deciding whether or not a school is failing; and

· Deciding how to fix failing schools.

When it comes to standard setting, members of the public are evenly divided over whether the federal government or the states should be in the driver’s seat: 43% say the states, and 41% say the federal government, while just 15% suggest that the local government should play this role (see Figure 2). But people clearly want the feds in the back seat when it comes to identifying and improving failing schools. Only 18% of respondents say that the federal government should play the largest role in identifying failing schools, and 20% say it should do so when it comes to fixing them. The percentages of those who say the states should have the lead role in these areas are 50 and 51, respectively.

Given the backing of civil rights groups for a larger federal role in this area, it is worth noting that neither African Americans nor Hispanics differ notably in their thinking from that of the broader public with respect to the role of the federal government in school accountability. Among African Americans, the share favoring federal leadership across the three topics is 46% for setting standards, 23% for identifying failing schools, and 23% for fixing failing schools, respectively. Among Hispanics, the parallel numbers are 44%, 18%, and 29%.

In short, if those in our nation’s capital want to modify federal education policy along lines preferred by the public at large, they will enact a law that resembles the bipartisan bill passed by the Senate. Education secretary Arne Duncan has indicated that the administration will not support a bill that doesn’t strengthen federal oversight of school accountability measures. If it should come down to a presidential veto, defending that action to the public on these grounds would be an uphill battle.

The Common Core

While support for standardized testing remains strong, the debate over the Common Core State Standards continues to divide both teachers and the general public (see Figure 3). Support for using the Common Core, which fell from 65% in 2013 to 53% in 2014, has now slipped slightly further, to 49%. Still, only 35% of members of the public express opposition to using the standards, with the remaining 16% undecided. Democrats (57%) remain much more supportive of the Obama-backed policy than Republicans are (37%).

The latest decline in support for these standards does not arise simply from a politically tainted Common Core “brand.” Among a second group of respondents who answered the same question but without the phrase “Common Core,” support for the use of shared standards across the states slid from 68% in 2014 to 54% in 2015.

It is interesting to note that this year’s difference between those favoring the Common Core standards (49%) and those favoring generic standards (54%) is just 5 percentage points. In 2014, that differential was 15 points. Why? It may be that the debate over national standards has been so energetic over the past year that the public now is more aware of the issue, whether or not the phrase “Common Core” is mentioned.

A third group of respondents were not told the standards would be “used to hold public schools accountable for their performance.” Without the accountability phrase in the question, support for the Common Core falls to just 39%, with 37% opposed. The proportion of people with no opinion increases from 16% to 23%.

Teacher support is also sliding. In 2013, 76% of teachers supported the Common Core—giving it a far greater approval rating than did the general public. But teacher approval collapsed to 46% in 2014 and has now fallen to just 40%. Meanwhile, the share of teachers expressing opposition has risen to 50%, leaving just 10% undecided. Unlike the public at large, teachers are more likely to express support for the Common Core when the survey question does not include the accountability phrase. They divide evenly when the question omits that phrase, with 44% in support and 43% opposed.

The news for proponents of the Common Core is not all bad. Those who favor the Common Core continue to outnumber opponents, by 14 percentage points. Also, the rate of decline in support slowed markedly between 2014 and 2015, perhaps suggesting that opinion on the issue has begun to stabilize. Moreover, the broader public’s opposition to the Common Core appears to rest on a shallow factual foundation. Asked whether or not the Common Core is being used in their local school district, fully 58% of the members of the public admit that they do not know. Only 44% of residents in states that have adopted the Common Core realize that the standards are being used in their school districts; and perhaps more startling, 24% of residents in states that do not have the Common Core believe their districts are using the standards.

Yet among the 34% of the public who report that the standards are being used in their district, respondents who believe the standards have had a negative effect on schools (51%) exceed those who think they have had a positive effect (28%). Twenty-one percent give a neutral response. Teachers and parents, who claim greater knowledge of whether the standards are in use, are just as negative in their assessment of the impact. Seventy-three percent of teachers report that the standards are being used in their district, with 49% of that group reporting negative effects and 32% reporting positive effects. Among parents, 49% say that the standards are being used in their district, with 53% reporting negative effects and just 28% reporting positive effects.

In other words, teachers and parents who say their district is implementing the standards are the ones most likely to offer a critical assessment of their impact. That finding should be of concern to all those hoping to see the Common Core succeed.

Changes in Support for School Reform

In retrospect it looks as if 2014, an election year that swept Republicans into power in Congress and many state capitals, propelled school reform to a high-water mark that has proven difficult to sustain. For three years in a row now, we have asked either identical or quite similar questions on several issues. On a surprising number of them, support for policy changes has slipped in 2015 from peaks attained in 2014, though sometimes the fall is to a level that remains above the one reached in 2013. None of the changes are large, and some of the shifts fall short of statistical significance, leaving it unclear as to whether a true change has taken place. But consider the overall pattern of responses across major parts of the school reform agenda (see Figure 4):

· Charter schools. Support for charter schools has dipped from a high of 54% in 2014 to 51% in 2015, the same level as in 2013. However, the percentage supporting charters remains twice that of the 27% expressing opposition.

· Tax credits for scholarships for low-income students. Support for a tax credit for businesses and individuals who contribute to private-school scholarships for low-income families has also fallen, to 55% from 60% in 2014. (This question was not asked in 2013.)

· Vouchers for low-income students. Backing for the use of “government funds to pay the tuition of low-income students who choose to attend private schools” has fallen steadily—from 41% to 37% between 2013 and 2014, with a further (though not statistically significant) drop to just 34% in 2015.

· Universal vouchers. Public enthusiasm for universal vouchers without regard to income has slipped from 50% in 2014 to 46% in 2015, just a bit higher than the 44% level reported in 2013. (However, these changes are not statistically significant and the comparison is not exact, as the question in 2015 for the first time included the word “all,” clearly presenting vouchers as a universal benefit for every family.)

· Merit pay for teachers. People are not fully embracing policy reforms affecting teachers. Between 2014 and 2015, public support for merit pay has slid from 57% to 51%, about the same as in 2013, when merit pay garnered support from 49% of the population. Even so, just 34% of the population opposes merit pay, with the remainder taking a neutral position.

·Tenure. Between 2014 and 2015, public opposition to teacher tenure has also slipped, from 57% to 51%, just above the 47% level attained in 2013. Nonetheless, current public support for teacher tenure is just 29%, a little more than half the size of the opposition.

One hesitates to read too much into shifts in opinion that are only modestly larger than what a statistical aberration might account for—and in some cases, not even that big. Perhaps the higher levels of support we observed in 2014 reflected temporary shocks to public opinion stemming from events such as Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s recall election and the landmark Vergara v. California decision that struck down California’s teacher evaluation and tenure laws, both of which took place while our survey was in the field. But school reformers might take the 2015 findings as a red light on the dashboard, a warning that efforts to alter the public’s thinking on education policy may be faltering.

Expenditures and Salaries

In its 2016 budget, the Obama administration has proposed a new billion-dollar federal program, Teaching for Tomorrow, which requests an additional $1 billion in federal funding for services to children from low-income families. It also calls for more money for English language acquisition programs, civil rights enforcement, and special education services. Reporters nonetheless have pronounced the budget “dead on arrival,” as Congress is reluctant to increase spending at a time when the country is running a large fiscal deficit. Consistent with these reports, the House of Representatives has passed a budget resolution that calls for a more than 8% cut in federal spending.

Missing from virtually all the media coverage of these developments are answers to a few basic questions: How much do we currently spend per pupil? How much does the federal government contribute to the total expenditure? And does the public think spending should be increased? To gauge people’s knowledge and views on these matters, we asked our respondents a series of questions concerning school spending.

Americans greatly underestimate the amount of money spent on schools. According to the federal government’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the school districts in which our survey respondents resided spent an average of $12,440 per pupil in 2012 (the most recent data available). But when we ask respondents to estimate per-pupil expenditures in their local school district, they guess, on average, just $6,307, a little more than half actual spending levels.

Our survey found that people are often willing to alter their thinking when given additional information. Before asking our respondents if they thought spending in their districts should be increased, we told half of them what the current spending levels were. The other half were left uninformed. Among those not informed, 58% favor increases in spending. That support drops to 42% when people are told the actual level of expenditures (after having provided their own estimate).

Respondents who most seriously underestimate spending levels are the ones most likely to change their minds when told the facts. When those who underestimate school expenditures by $5,000 or less are told real spending levels, their support for increased spending drops by 12 percentage points. Among those who underestimate expenditures by more than $5,000, the downward opinion shift, upon being informed of real levels, is 20 percentage points. On the other hand, those who overestimate expenditures barely budge in their opinions when told their districts spend less than they thought.

Sources of funding: who pays what? Americans are also poorly informed about the sources of funding for the nation’s schools. We asked half of our respondents, randomly selected, to estimate “what percentage of funding for schools currently comes from each level of government”—federal, state, and local. The question required respondents to make their percentages add up to 100. NCES data from 2011–12 (the most recent available) indicate that the actual levels are 10% for the federal government, 45% for state governments, and 45% for local governments. But people greatly overstate the federal share, estimating it as 32% (see Figure 5). In turn, they believe that state and local governments contribute less than they actually do.

The other half of respondents were asked how much funding should come from each of these sources. The average responses are 37% for the federal share, 35% for the state share, and 28% for the local share. In other words, people think the federal government should assume considerably more of the cost of schooling than its current 10% share, and local government should carry a considerably smaller burden than the 45% share it now bears.

Teacher salaries. To explore national opinion on teacher pay, we randomly divided our respondents into four groups. One group was simply asked whether teacher salaries should be raised. Another was asked whether taxes should be raised to fund salary increases. A third group was first told the average teacher salary in their states before being asked whether salaries should be raised. The fourth group was told the average teacher salary and then asked whether taxes should be raised to fund increases.

In the first group, 63% of respondents favor a pay increase for teachers (see Figure 6). Support falls to 45%, however, when the question (posed to the second group) asks about raising taxes to pay for teacher salaries.

In the third group, informed of current salaries, 45% of respondents support pay increases. And only 32% of people in the fourth group, told teacher salaries and asked if taxes should be raised, support a hike in teacher pay.

In sum, it is hard to say whether the public really wants a salary increase for teachers or not. It all depends on how much members of the public know and whether they are keeping in mind that the increment has to be covered by themselves as taxpayers.

Racial Disparities in Suspension Rates

In 2014 the U.S. Department of Education and the Department of Justice sent a joint letter to every school district in the country, urging local officials to avoid racial bias when suspending or expelling students. Officials were advised that they risked legal action if school disciplinary policies had “a disparate impact, i.e., a disproportionate and unjustified effect on students of a particular race.” In the Fall 2014 issue of Education Next, Richard Epstein, a professor at the New York University School of Law, criticized the action of the two departments, averring that it “forces school districts to comply with a substantive rule of dubious legal validity and practical soundness.” But in June 2015, the Supreme Court, in a Texas housing case, bolstered the departments’ position by holding that statistical evidence of “disparate impact” across racial groups could indeed be used as evidence that a government policy was discriminatory.

What do members of the public—and what do teachers—think of federally mandated “no-disparate-impact” disciplinary policies? And what do they think of such policies if set by local school districts? To find out, we split our sample into two randomly selected groups (see Figure 7). The first was asked whether it supported or opposed “federal policies that prevent schools from expelling or suspending black and Hispanic students at higher rates than other students.” Fifty-one percent of the public opposes such policies, while just 21% backs them. That division of opinion is essentially the same among the second group, who was asked about school district policies of the same sort. By a large margin, the public opposes “no-disparate impact” policies, regardless of whether the federal government or the local school district formulates them.

The division of opinion within the teaching profession approximates that of the public as a whole. A hefty 59% of teachers oppose federal “no-disparate impact” policies, while only 23% favor them.

Differences of opinion emerge along racial and ethnic lines. Among whites, only 14% favor the federal policies, while 57% oppose them. Higher levels of support are observed among African Americans—41% are in favor, 23% against. However, only 31% of Hispanic respondents approve of such policies, with 44% opposed.

Union Fees for Nonunion Teachers

In June 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review an appeals court ruling in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a case challenging a California law that allows public-sector unions to levy an agency fee on all teachers who refuse to join the union. Such fees are allowed in 21 states plus the District of Columbia.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), defends the law on the grounds that “unions have a right to collect a fair share from the people [they] represent,” regardless of whether the people want to pay, so that the AFT can “ensure that we’re able to speak for all workers.” But teacher Rebecca Friedrichs, the lead plaintiff, contends that collective bargaining is political speech. Thus, she maintains, the required agency fee denies her constitutional right of free speech because the union uses her money to speak for purposes with which she disagrees.

The California law allows individual teachers to request a refund of the portion of their dues that is used for political purposes—helping to elect candidates, lobbying for union-sponsored legislation, or financially assisting like-minded groups. Such costs run into hundreds of millions of dollars, nearly one-third of the dues unions ask school districts to collect. But every teacher, union member or not, still must pay the remaining two-thirds of the fee to help fund collective bargaining. Friedrichs argues that the act of bargaining with public officials is every bit as political as donating to political campaigns.

Our data indicate that a plurality of people—indeed a decided majority of those with an opinion on the matter—agree with Friedrichs (see Figure 8). Only 34% support agency fees, while 43% oppose them, with the balance taking a neutral position. If we exclude the neutral group, then a clear majority, 56% of those with an opinion, say they want to end mandatory agency fees. This finding comports with the public’s overall opinion of teachers unions, as only 30% of respondents say unions have had a positive effect on schools and 40% say they have had a negative effect.

The more surprising results came from the teachers. Only 38% of teachers favor the agency fee, while 50% oppose it, with the remaining 13% expressing no opinion. In other words, 57% of teachers with an opinion on agency fees disagree with the AFT and the National Education Association. Union members constitute 46% of our teacher sample, roughly equal to national estimates of teachers union membership. Only 52% of these union teachers like the agency fee, and the approval rating plummets to 25% among nonunion teachers. These findings should not be extrapolated to say that teachers are turning against their unions more generally. Fifty-seven percent think the unions have had a positive effect on schools, and only a quarter think they have had a negative impact. But most teachers do seem to agree with Friedrichs that they should be able to decide whether to contribute money to cover collective-bargaining costs.

Academic Emphasis in K–12 Education 

Have federal testing requirements forced schools to place excessive emphasis on math and reading? Have budget squeezes driven the arts out of the curriculum? Or are science, technology, engineering, and math (known as the STEM subjects) being ignored in favor of “softer” subjects? And, quite apart from striking the right balance among academic subjects, do schools place enough emphasis on cultivating
students’ character and creativity, educating them about global warming, and taking steps to prevent bullying? Finally, has the country’s passion for professional sports led schools to place too much emphasis on athletics?

All these questions can provoke passionate discussion. David Drew, an education professor at Claremont Graduate University, insists that “we have de-emphasized STEM … to the point that people who could have become scientists or engineers … didn’t get the educational experience they needed.” To which Rocco Landesmann, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, replies: “We’re going to try to move forward all the kids who were left behind by No Child Left Behind…. It’s very often the arts that catches them.” Meanwhile, journalist Amanda Ripley says that “it’s worth reevaluating the American sporting tradition. If sports were not central to the mission of American high schools, then what would be?”

What do the people think? To find out, we conducted the first-ever experimental inquiry into such matters. We asked a random half of our respondents to estimate (on a scale from 1 to 7) how much emphasis they think their local schools place on each of several subjects and topics. The second half was asked to use the same scale to indicate how much emphasis should be placed on these subjects.

For every subject except sports, respondents in the second group think the subject should be given more emphasis than their counterparts in the first group perceive it is getting. In other words, the public thinks schools should place more emphasis on just about everything. Perhaps it is just human nature to say that other people should be doing more.

But if everyone wants more of almost everything, how much more varies with the subject and the population being interviewed. As illustrated in Figure 9, the public thinks much more emphasis should be placed on reading and math than do teachers and (to a lesser extent) parents. The public says that math and reading should be given a better than 1-point increment over the 5.2-point emphasis (on the 7-point scale) it perceives these subjects are now given. But teachers think the emphasis needs to be increased by only about half a point in reading and even less in math, while parents would increase the emphasis in the two subjects by no more than two-thirds of a point.

Meanwhile, teachers would give much greater (+1.7 points) emphasis to the arts than the 3.6 level teachers estimate it is now getting. Parents would give the arts only two-thirds of a point more emphasis, and the general public would boost its emphasis by only 0.8 more points. A similar, if smaller discrepancy is observed among the three groups when they are asked about history.

On other topics, the three groups—teachers, parents, and the general public—are more like-minded. All three think that character development and creativity deserve much more emphasis. But while parents and the general public also want far more attention given to bullying prevention, teachers think the matter only needs modestly more attention. On all these matters, opinion differences among the groups are marginal.

The extent to which public schools should emphasize global warming has become a political issue. In the recent debate over NCLB reauthorization, for example, Democratic senators sought to create a new program allowing districts to apply for funding to help teach about climate change. The Republican majority killed the proposal, emphasizing the degree to which the issue had become a partisan football. As Senator Lamar Alexander put it, “Just imagine what the curriculum on climate change would be if we shifted from President Obama to President Cruz and then back to President Sanders and then to President Trump.”

The partisan divisions in Congress extend to the public at large. Overall, our results would suggest that people want more emphasis placed on global warming—on average, about two-thirds of a point more. This gap is substantially smaller than the difference between what is perceived and what is desired on most other topics. The modest size of the gap masks substantial partisan divergence. Although Democrats and Republicans respond similarly when asked how much their local schools currently emphasize global warming (3.4 and 3.6 points, respectively), Democrats want the topic to be given 1.5 points more emphasis, while Republicans would give 0.3 points less emphasis. In short, Democrats and Republicans have similar views about the extent to which schools currently emphasize this issue, but they have very different preferences about how much schools should emphasize it.

To sum up, everyone wants more emphasis on just about everything, except athletics. The general public—as well as teachers—thinks sports should be given about a third of a point less emphasis than they believe it currently receives. Parents are less dissatisfied with the sports status quo.

The general public is especially eager for more emphasis on reading and math, while teachers see greater needs in history and the arts. Meanwhile, the attention given to global warming has the potential to generate as much polarization among ordinary citizens as it does among the elites in Washington.

Drawing Conclusions from the 2015 Poll 

Many more findings from the 2015 Education Next poll are available in the full set of results available at www.educationnext.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/2015ednextpoll.pdf. Among them are:

· People think their local schools do a better job of attending to the needs of girls than of boys, with African Americans perceiving the largest gender differences in the way students are treated;

· A clear majority think 30% of high school instructional time should take place “independently through or on a computer”; and

· Support for school vouchers depends heavily on how a question about them is phrased.

Readers will decide for themselves which results are of greatest interest. In our view, the poll yields four especially important findings:

1) Support for standardized testing remains strong. Both teachers and the public at large oppose the idea of letting parents decide whether or not their children should participate in standards-based testing. About two-thirds of the public supports the federal mandate for testing of math and reading in grades 3 to 8 and in high school, although teachers are divided on this requirement.

2) Support for the Common Core State Standards declined a bit further in 2015, after falling sharply between 2013 and 2014. Among the public at large, support for the Common Core has fallen from a high of 65% to 53% in 2014 and to 49% in 2015. Among members of the general public (though not among teachers), those who favor the Common Core continue to outnumber opponents.

3) Union agency fees are not popular. A plurality of the American public—indeed a decided majority of those with an opinion on the matter—objects to the union practice of charging fees to nonmembers. An equally large share of teachers opposes the agency fees imposed on them by California and 20 other states.

4) A majority of people oppose the federal government’s new policy on school discipline. More than 50% disagree with the Obama administration’s mandate that schools must not expel or suspend black and Hispanic students at higher rates than other students. Just 21% back the idea.

Michael B. Henderson is research director for the Public Policy Research Lab at Louisiana State University. Paul E. Peterson, editor-in chief of Education Next, is professor and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School. Martin R. West is associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and deputy director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School.