Albert Cheng, Author at Education Next

School Choice and “The Truly Disadvantaged”

Albert Cheng — Tue, 18 May 2021 10:00:05 +0000

How can we improve academic achievement and college attainment for disadvantaged students? To address this question, education researchers typically assess the impact of various interventions on all students whose family income falls under the limit for free or reduced-price school lunch—a broad category that fails to account for the effects of ethnicity and class in combination, as well as the considerable differences in economic and cultural resources among lower-income families in the United States.

This includes an earlier study co-authored by one of us, which used a randomized control trial to evaluate a school-voucher intervention in New York City and found modest positive impacts on college enrollment of African American and Hispanic American students (see “The Impact of School Vouchers on College Enrollment,” research, Spring 2013). That study, like many others, did not explore whether the program’s effects differed based on varying levels of disadvantage. We return here to the New York City voucher program to do just that.

Our study looks at the impact of using a voucher on college enrollments and on degree attainment. We also estimate effects of just being offered a voucher, even if it is not used to enroll in a private school. Our data now cover a span of 21 years, which allows us to record college enrollment and attainment up to seven years after a student’s anticipated date of high-school graduation and observe students’ college-going behavior even if their education was interrupted.

We find large differences in impacts between moderately and severely disadvantaged students. An offer of a voucher has no detectable benefit for severely disadvantaged students—minority students from either extremely low-income households or whose mothers did not enroll in college. However, for minority students who are either from a moderately low-income household or whose mother has attended college, being offered a voucher increases college-enrollment rates by about 15 percent and four-year degree attainment by about 50 percent. Those impacts are even larger if students actually use the voucher to enroll in a private school: enrollment at any college increases by up to 30 percent and four-year degree attainment increases by nearly 70 percent.

The voucher intervention we study did have its intended effects—but only for students from disadvantaged families that nonetheless had a certain amount of material and cultural capital. Our findings point to the limitations of half-tuition vouchers to promote college enrollment and graduation among the least-advantaged students, as well as their potential value for those with access to greater fiscal and cultural resources.

Unpacking “Disadvantage”

Evaluations of education interventions seldom account for differences among students in terms of their relative disadvantage. But other branches of research have drawn more nuanced distinctions.

For example, a number of sociologists and anthropologists have drawn contrasts between moderately disadvantaged and more severely deprived groups. In a classic study, William Julius Wilson emphasized the “social isolation” of deeply impoverished, racially segregated neighborhoods, where quality schools, suitable marriage partners, and “exposure to informal mainstream social networks and conventional role models” are in short supply. He theorized that programs designed to promote equality of opportunity that have positive impacts on the moderately disadvantaged may have little or no impact on “the truly disadvantaged.”

Consistent with this theory, quantitative research has documented sizeable differentials in educational attainment between those who are moderately and severely disadvantaged. For example, Martha Bailey and Susan Dynarski find important differences in the college-enrollment practices of students from the poorest families and those who are less so. Only 29 percent of high-school students born between 1979 and 1982 who lived in households in the lowest quartile of the distribution enrolled in college. But for students in the second-lowest quartile, the rate of college enrollment was 47 percent. The difference was starker still in those students’ college graduation rates: 9 percent among those in the lowest quartile versus 21 percent among those in the second quartile.

Meanwhile, qualitative research has deepened our understanding of the cultural and material challenges of those who are truly disadvantaged by both ethnic and class isolation. In his influential 1969 book examining an inner-city neighborhood in Washington, D.C., ethnographer Ulf Hannerz distinguishes between residents he labels “mainstreamers” and “street families.” The former, he says, are “stable working-class people” who “conform most closely to mainstream American assumptions about the ‘normal’ life.” By contrast, “street families” experience periodic unemployment and rely on government transfers.

Like Wilson, some sociologists focus on the structural effects of neighborhoods on the educational attainment and social mobility of the two groups. For example, John Kasarda has shown how the lack of private transport in large cities limits the access of the isolated urban poor to employment and other opportunities distant from the immediate neighborhood. But anthropologists note that poor neighborhoods contain diverse populations, and culture is not easily reduced to structural factors. The truly disadvantaged do not need to concentrate in specific places to lack cultural and material resources.

Despite the range of deprivation to be found among those perceived to be disadvantaged, researchers typically use participation in the National School Lunch Program as their poverty indicator, a blunt measure. Students are eligible for free or reduced-price meals at school if their household income is as much as 185 percent of the federal poverty line. In 1997, when the voucher program we study here launched, 37 percent of U.S. students received subsidized lunches. The income limit for free lunch was set at $16,874 for a family of three and $20,280 for a family of four, or $27,518 and $33,072 in 2020 dollars. Since then, Congress has allowed entire school districts to provide free meals to all students without collecting individual income-based applications if at least 40 percent of enrolled students receive other subsidized services, such as food stamps. By 2015, some 52 percent of U.S. students were eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches. When over half the student population are defined as poor, the definition of poverty is a very generous one.

In short, eligibility for participation in the school-lunch program does not provide a precise indicator of the population that Wilson characterized as truly disadvantaged. Yet a good deal of education research uses it as the sole indicator of socioeconomic status.

Revisiting a School-Choice Study

Alyesha Taveras (center) graduated from high school in 2012 and went on to attend Seton Hall University.

School-choice programs also define the eligible population in fairly broad terms that include not only those who are truly disadvantaged but also those who are only moderately disadvantaged. But to be effective, the exercise of choice would seem to require at least a certain amount of economic and cultural resources. Parents must have the time and energy to select the appropriate setting for their child, and the family may be expected to cover the cost of school uniforms, educational materials, and travel to and from the school. Beyond material considerations, schools may have rules for behavior with which students must comply if they are to remain in the school and demanding expectations for family involvement.

Yet evaluations of school-choice interventions typically ignore important differences in family capacities. Estimates of program impacts are typically made for the entire participating population or for all members of specific ethnic groups. This was the case in the earlier study of the New York City voucher program, to which we now turn.

Jason Tejada went to college at Columbia University in New York, on a full scholarship.

In 1996, when New York City public schools did not open on time, the archdiocese responsible for the city’s Catholic schools offered to accept the public school’s one thousand “worst” students. The chancellor of the city’s school system rejected the proposal, but Mayor Rudy Giuliani embraced it, setting off a political firestorm over the proper boundaries between church and state. In the midst of this controversy, the nonprofit School Choice Scholarships Foundation was formed to provide private-school scholarships to any participating secular or religious private school in New York City. The foundation announced in February of 1997 that it would provide half-tuition scholarships for at least three years to 1,000 eligible elementary-school students. The scholarships were worth up to $1,400 per child per year and were for students entering grades 1 to 5 who qualified for free or reduced-price school lunch. Some 85 percent of the scholarships were reserved for students attending schools that had average reading and math scores below the citywide median on state tests.

More than 20,000 students applied. A sample of voucher applicants participated in an in-person eligibility screening, during which students took basic-skills tests in reading and math and the accompanying adult completed a questionnaire asking them about the child’s current school and the family’s demographic background. The vouchers were awarded by lottery in May 1997 and recipients entered private schools in the 1997–98 school year. Although the initial voucher offer was limited to three years, the scholarships were later extended to the end of 8th grade for students who had remained continuously in participating private schools.

Chelsea Gil and Geanylyn Romero both graduated from high school in 2012 and went on to attend the Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Our analysis includes 2,634 students: a “treatment” group of 1,356 who received an offer of a voucher and a “control” group of 1,278 students who did not. The treatment and control groups have similar overall characteristics. Forty-two percent of the treatment group and 41 percent of the control group are African American, and 42 percent of the treatment group and 47 percent of the control group are Hispanic American. About one third of both groups report having an absent father.

To identify students deprived by both ethnicity and socioeconomic background, we restrict our analysis to students who are identified as a member of a minority group — that is, if the accompanying adult at the information verification session said that the ethnicity of the mother is either African American or Hispanic American. We then distinguish between “moderate” and “severe” disadvantage based on whether a minority student’s mother has any education beyond a high-school diploma. That decision is informed by research about first-generation college students, who are less likely to complete a degree. Among students offered a voucher, about 55 percent are at moderate disadvantage because their mothers have at least some college education; the other 45 percent are at severe disadvantage because their mothers did not go beyond high school, including 17 percent whose mothers dropped out.

We also look across levels of family income among minority students to distinguish between moderate and severe disadvantage. Some 49 percent of students live in households we consider “extremely low income” because they earn less than $13,067 a year (in 2020 dollars). That is half of the poverty line for a family of four and the level the U.S. Department of Agriculture uses to indicate “severe poverty.” We consider the other 51 percent of the treatment group, whose households earn at least $13,068 annually, to be “moderately low income,” including 10 percent whose households earn $32,670 or more.

With data from the National Student Clearinghouse on college outcomes as of 2017, we are able to compare college enrollment and degree attainment between the treatment and control groups after at least seven years of every student’s anticipated high-school graduation date. We are thus able to detect enrollment and degree acquisitions even if progress by students is delayed for an additional four years beyond what was observed in the prior study of this program. During the intervening period, enrollments at four-year institutions in the study sample increased to 29 percent from 26 percent and the four-year graduation rate increased to 16 percent from 10 percent, a 60 percent increase.

Results

Our analysis considers enrollment and degree attainment at both two-year and four-year schools. We look at the impact of the voucher program in two ways: the effect of being offered a voucher, whether or not it was ever used, and the effect of actually using the voucher to attend a private school for some period of time. About 78 percent of students who were offered $1,400 tuition vouchers actually used them for at least some period of time.

Impacts of a Voucher Offer. In looking at the entire treatment group, the offer of a voucher did not have a significant impact on students enrolling in or graduating from college. However, when looking separately at students who are at moderate or severe disadvantage, we find different impacts depending on student ethnicity, mother’s education, and household income. Minority students whose mothers have some college education are 8 percentage points more likely to enroll in any college if a voucher was offered, but those whose mothers did not progress beyond high school are about 4 percentage points less likely to enroll if offered a voucher (see Figure 1). In looking at degree attainment, we find a difference of 9 percentage points. Minority students with college-educated mothers are 7 percentage points more likely to graduate if offered a voucher—both for any college and four-year colleges. But we find that would-be first-generation minority students, those whose mothers did not attend college, are about 2 percentage points less likely to graduate—an impact that is not significantly different from zero.

We also observe a difference of 11 percentage points in rates of college enrollment among minority students who are at either moderate or severe economic disadvantage. Among minority students from moderately low-income households, the offer of a voucher boosts college enrollment by 8 percentage points and degree attainment by 5 percentage points. But the offer of a voucher does not have a positive impact on minority students from the lowest-income households, who are 3 percentage points less likely to enroll in college and no more likely to earn a degree than those in the control group. The voucher offer seems to have a noticeable impact on college enrollment and degree attainment for students who are only moderately disadvantaged by income, but no significant effect on students with severe income constraints.

For the most part, we do not observe differential effects on enrollment or degree completion at two-year colleges by either mothers’ education or household income. Apparently, the effects of the voucher offer on moderately advantaged students is to increase the overall percentage of college enrollments and to shift college choice from pursuit of a two-year degree to that of a four-year degree.

Impacts on Using a Voucher to Attend Private School. Children at moderate disadvantage, based either on their mother’s level of education or household income, are not significantly more likely than their less-advantaged peers to use a voucher to attend private school for at least some period of time. But the effects of the use of that voucher vary considerably by degree of deprivation.

For minority students whose mothers have some college education, using a voucher to attend private school boosts their enrollment rates at any college by 11 percentage points—a 21 percent increase (see Figure 2). For minority students whose households are moderately low-income, voucher use boosts enrollment by 15 percentage points. Moderately disadvantaged minority students who use vouchers also are more likely to earn a college degree. We find an impact of 10 percentage points on degree attainment both for students whose mothers have some college education and for students from moderately low-income households.

We underscore the especially notable impact on moderately disadvantaged students earning four-year degrees. Minority students at moderate disadvantage who use a voucher are 10 percentage points more likely to go on to earn a four-year college degree than those in the control group. Given the relatively low levels of college enrollment and degree attainment by disadvantaged students, this represents an increase of almost 70 percent.

In contrast, voucher use did not have a statistically significant effect on either college enrollment or degree completion for severely disadvantaged students. The difference in the impact of voucher use on minority students whose mothers did and did not attend college is 17 percentage points for enrollment and 12 percentage points for degree completion. The difference in the impact of voucher use on minority students from extremely and moderately low-income families is 19 percentage points for college enrollment and 10 percentage points for degree completion.

Discussion

As with the earlier study, our analysis finds little impact from the offer of a voucher when looking at the entire sample. But with data from four additional years, as well as by looking for differences in effects between moderately and more severely disadvantaged students, we find important differences. The voucher intervention has sizeable, positive impacts for students who, while still disadvantaged by most definitions, have more cultural and financial resources at home. This resembles conclusions drawn by qualitative research, which suggest that students and families often find it difficult to take advantage of school-choice opportunities unless their cultural and material resources have reached a certain minimum.

These results raise policy questions about voucher size. The New York City vouchers covered only half the costs of private-school tuition and were capped at $1,400. That amount seems unlikely to be helpful for the most disadvantaged families, who were unlikely to be able to pay the balance of the bill.

In addition, the significant moderating effects of mothers’ levels of education suggest that cultural factors may be at work. As numerous studies have shown, social and cultural capital are crucial for educational attainment. Nurturing social networks and institutions that enable parents to participate fully in voucher programs may be necessary to reap the benefits they provide. Schools, too, need to tend to the cultural needs of students and families if they wish to serve them effectively. In the presence of gaps in financial and cultural capital, school choice may do little to alleviate inequalities within the low-income community, as the most disadvantaged families remain in less effective educational institutions. This has evoked criticism, such as Diane Ravitch’s assertion that schools of choice “will leave regular public schools with the most difficult students to educate, thus creating a two-tier system of widening inequality.” But other commentators, such as Robert Pondiscio, say there is little reason why “low-income families of color should not have the ability to send their children to school with the children of other parents who are equally engaged, committed or ambitious for their children, [as that] is what affluent parents do.”

Whatever the merits of these alternative judgments, the results reported here suggest that the opportunity to attend a private school does not provide uniform benefits to disadvantaged students. Students whose households are in the most dire economic distress, and those whose mothers did not graduate or progress beyond high school, do not experience the same substantial, positive impacts as their less-disadvantaged peers. The New York City voucher program may have enhanced the educational opportunities for some low-income students, but the tools, policies, and institutions needed to ensure all students, including the “truly disadvantaged,” can realize their academic potential remain elusive.

Albert Cheng is assistant professor in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas College of Education and Health Professions. Paul E. Peterson, professor of government at Harvard University, directs the Program on Education Policy and Governance and is senior editor of Education Next. This article is adapted from a study published in Sociology of Education.

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

Cheng, A. and Peterson, P.E. (2021). School Choice and “The Truly Disadvantaged”: Vouchers boost college going, but not for students in greatest need. Education Next, 21(3), 52-58.

The post School Choice and “The Truly Disadvantaged” appeared first on Education Next.

Public Support Climbs for Teacher Pay, School Expenditures, Charter Schools, and Universal Vouchers

Albert Cheng — Tue, 21 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Teacher walkouts in North Carolina (above) and five other states this spring seem to have lent new urgency to teacher demands for salary raises and increased financial support for schools.

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.

Methodology

This is the 12th annual Education Next survey in a series that began in 2007. Results from all prior surveys are available at www.educationnext.org/edfacts.

The results presented here are based upon a nationally representative, stratified sample of 4,601 adults (age 18 and older) and representative oversamples of the following subgroups: parents with school-age children living in their home (2,129), teachers (641), African Americans (624), and Hispanics (799). Respondents could elect to complete the survey in English or Spanish; 293 respondents elected to take the survey in Spanish. Survey weights were employed to account for non-response and the oversampling of specific groups.

The survey was conducted from May 1 to May 22, 2018, 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, Hispanics, white respondents with household incomes below $75,000, white respondents with household incomes of $75,000 or more, white respondents without a four-year college degree, white respondents with a four-year college degree, and 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 2018 EdNext survey sample, 53% of respondents identify as Democrats and 42% as Republicans; the remaining 5% identify as independent, undecided, or affiliated with another 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 (teachers, African Americans, and Hispanics). The margin of error for binary responses given by the full sample in the EdNext survey is roughly 1.4 percentage points for questions on which opinion is evenly split. The specific number of respondents varies from question to question, owing to item non-response and to the fact that, for several survey questions, 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 available 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.

This article appeared in the Winter 2019 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Cheng, A., Henderson, M., Peterson, P.E., and West, M.R. (2019). Public Supports Climbs for Teacher Pay, School Expenditures, Charter Schools, and Universal Vouchers: Results from the 2018 EdNext Poll. Education Next, 19(1), 8-26.

The post Public Support Climbs for Teacher Pay, School Expenditures, Charter Schools, and Universal Vouchers appeared first on Education Next.

Both Teachers and the Public Back Janus Decision by Supreme Court

Albert Cheng — Wed, 27 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In Janus v. AFSCME, the Supreme Court strikes down agency fees. The unions have said that the case is a corporate attack on teacher interests. Eric Heins, the 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.

But a majority of the public—and of teachers themselves, don’t see it that way.

A month ago we and our colleagues at the Program on Education Policy and Governance in the Harvard Kennedy School asked a nationally representative cross-section of 2,230 Americans the following question: “In some states, all teachers must pay fees for union representation even if they choose not to join the union. Do you support or oppose requiring all teachers to pay these fees even if they do not join the union?” The question was posed as part of a broader survey of public opinion on education topics which is scheduled for release by Education Next later this summer.

When it comes to agency fees, the nays have it by a clear majority. No less than 56% of the general public and 54% of public school teachers are opposed. Only 25% of the public and 37% of teachers favor collecting union dues from non-members. The remaining respondents say they neither support nor oppose the idea.

Opposition is greatest among those living in right-to-work states (61% opposed, 20% in favor), which already have laws that allow employment without union membership or fee payment. But even in states that allow agency fees, a clear plurality is opposed to the practice (51% to 31%).

Support for fees ticks up when those surveyed are given arguments in favor and against them. Before another equally representative group of respondents was asked for its opinion, it was told 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 41% support agency fees. Among the general public, support for agency fees budges upward to 37%, but the negative view, at 44%, still commands a plurality.

The implications of the Janus ruling are serious for teacher unions. When we asked teachers how pleased they were with their local union’s political activities, we discovered that many union members are less than enthusiastic about what is being done in their name. Only 46% of teachers are satisfied with their local union’s political activities, while 23% say they are dissatisfied and another 32% take a neutral position.

Without the ability to impose agency fees, unions could lose a hefty share of their revenue. Leaked documents drawn up by the National Education Association indicate the union is already preparing a 13% budget cut of $50 million. That may be an optimistic projection.

— Paul E. Peterson and Albert Cheng

Paul E. Peterson is senior editor of Education Next and professor of government and director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, where Albert Cheng is a postdoctoral fellow.

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The Rebound in Charter Support — But Also a Widening Partisan Divide

Albert Cheng — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Charters are making a rebound—at least among Republicans and African Americans. Last fall, the 2017 Poll administered by Education Next (EdNext) reported a steep drop in support for the formation of charter schools. Only 39 percent of the public supported charters, a remarkable change from the 51 percent level of support registered in 2016. With 36 percent of the public opposing charter schooling in 2017, this 3 percentage point margin is the smallest that EdNext has observed since it posed the issue to the public in 2007. Over the previous decade, support for charters had consistently outpaced opposition by 20 to 30 percentage points.

Critics cheered that public opinion had finally vindicated their position on charter schools. Advocates rushed to the defense. But amidst this hysteria, Frederick Hess and Amy Cummings at the American Enterprise Institute wondered: “Could the dip be a blip?” Thanks to the Understanding America Study (UAS), a survey regularly administered to a nationally-representative sample of US adults by the University of Southern California, we had an opportunity to find out. In January 2018, we once again asked public about charters.

The question asked in both the EdNext and UAS surveys runs as follows: “As you may know, many states permit the formation of charter schools, which are publicly funded but are not managed by the local school board. These schools are expected to meet promised objectives, but are exempt from many state regulations. Do you support or oppose the formation of charter schools?”

The latest result: 47 percent of US adults support charter schools and 29 percent oppose them, with the remaining not having an opinion. These results show a sizeable rebound in support for charters since 2017 (See Figure 1).

Figure 1: Opinion on Charter Schools among the General Public

Notes: N = 4,617 for the Understanding America Study. N = 4,214 for the 2017 Education Next Poll. Respondents were asked: “As you may know, many states permit the formation of charter schools, which are publicly funded but are not managed by the local school board. These schools are expected to meet promised objectives, but are exempt from many state regulations. Do you support or oppose the formation of charter schools?”

We also found greater support for charter schools among black and white Americans. These results are shown in Table 1. The results from the two surveys show a 10 percentage-point higher level of support among blacks and a 7 percentage-point higher level of support among whites in January 2018 than in the summer of 2017. Meanwhile, Hispanic support for charters increased 5 percentage points from 39 to 44 percent.

Table 1. Public Opinion of Charter Schools from the Understanding American Study and the 2017 Education Next Survey

	Understanding America Study			2017 Education Next Poll
	Support	Oppose	Neither	Support	Oppose	Neither
All	47	29	24	39	36	25
Blacks	47	25	28	37	35	28
Hispanics	44	26	31	39	33	28
Whites	47	30	22	40	37	23
Parents	49	26	25	44	33	23
Republicans	58	19	23	47	30	22
Democrats	38	46	15	34	41	26

Support for charter schools among parents likewise increased by 5 percentage points from 44 to 49 percent across the two surveys.

How do these numbers fit into broader trends? Figure 2 reproduces eleven years of polling about charter schools based on the Education Next Poll and adds new results from the UAS. (Note that the percentages reflect the proportion of respondents who strongly or somewhat supported charter schools among respondents who had an opinion on the matter.)

Figure 2: Trends in Public Opinion on Charter Schools for the Full Sample and by Political Affiliation

Note: The percentages shown are for those taking a side on the issue by saying they either “strongly” or “somewhat” supported the policy; those giving the neutral response —”neither support nor oppose”—are omitted. In the 2008 through 2012 Education Next Polls, the neutral category was placed as the middle option among five response categories. Beginning in 2013, the neutral category was placed as the fifth option, a change indicated in the figure with a vertical black line. The neutral category was also placed as a fifth option in the Understanding America Study. Trends that take place across the vertical black line could be due to this change in the survey’s design.

The uptick in charter support in January among the general public is sizeable, jumping 10 percentage points from 52 to 62 percent. Much of this change in support is attributable to the 14 percentage-point increase among Republicans. Support among Republicans rebounded to 75 percentage points — a level that, besides 2017, has persisted since 2013 (see Figure 2).

On the other hand, support for charters among Democrats continues to remain at record lows. According to both the 2017 Education Next Poll and the UAS, only 45 percent of Democrats who have an opinion on charter schooling support them.

Still, support for charter schools is up among Black and Hispanic respondents. About 66 percent of Hispanics with an opinion on the issue indicate support for charter schools, while 68 percent of Black respondents hold the same position. These percentages based on the UAS represent double digit rebounds from the 2017 Education Next Poll, where 54 and 57 percent of Hispanic and Black respondents, respectively, expressed support for charter schooling. In fact, the proportion of Blacks who support charter schools has not been this high since 2013, eclipsing the steady decline in support that has occurred beginning that year.

Figure 3: Trends in Public Opinion on Charter Schools among Blacks and Hispanics

Note: The percentages shown are for those taking a side on the issue by saying they either “strongly” or “somewhat” supported the policy; those giving the neutral response —”neither support nor oppose”—are omitted. The solid line depicts data from the annual Education Next Poll. The dotted line depicts data from the 2017 end-of-year survey from the Understanding America Study. In the 2008 through 2012 Education Next Polls, the neutral category was placed as the middle option among five response categories. Beginning in 2013, the neutral category was placed as the fifth option, a change indicated in the figure with a vertical black line. The neutral category was also placed as a fifth option in the Understanding America Study. Trends that take place across the vertical black line could be due to this change in the survey’s design.

So what are we to make of this new polling? The charter school — like many other issues — is marked by partisanship. Such polarization continues to reflect a remarkable change since the inception of charter schooling when it enjoyed majority support from both Democrats and Republicans. Yet a coalition among Republicans and racial-minority communities remains a possibility. Time will tell how the politics surrounding the charter issue will continue to evolve.

Later this year, EdNext will be releasing new results based on its annual poll. So stay tuned.

— Albert Cheng and Paul E. Peterson

Albert Cheng is a Post Doctoral Fellow at the Program on education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and Senior Editor of Education Next.

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How Satisfied are Parents with Their Children’s Schools?

Albert Cheng — Tue, 13 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

See the full results of this study here.

All four sectors in K–12 education compete for the support of their customers—that is, the parents of their prospective students. Those parents have more choices today than in decades past: they may send their children to the public school automatically assigned to them by their school district, or opt for a private school, charter school, or district-run school of choice. These choices include a range of cost and convenience—and, not surprisingly, a range of customer satisfaction levels.

The assigned-school-district sector has a strong competitive advantage because assigned-district schools are free and universally available, and 76 percent of American students attend them, according to a 2012 survey by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), part of the U.S. Department of Education. The three choice sectors do not enjoy those advantages and enroll fewer students: 10 percent of U.S. students attend private schools, 9 percent attend district schools of choice, and 6 percent attend charters, according to NCES. The private sector has a strong disadvantage because most families must pay tuition. The charter sector has the advantage of its programs being tuition-free but is limited to operating in specific places where charters have been approved by a state-determined authorizer. Similarly, district schools of choice also are tuition-free but cannot operate in competition with assigned-district schools unless school boards specifically allow them.

To maintain and enlarge their market share, all schools of choice must satisfy the families who make use of them, who specifically opt out of the free, more convenient assigned-district alternative. So how favorably do parents rate their children’s programs? How do the choice sectors compare with one another? With which aspects of schooling are choice parents most satisfied? Do these patterns vary across different segments of the population? We explore these questions by comparing parental satisfaction ratings for all four sectors: assigned-district schools, private schools, charter schools, and district schools of choice.

Data and Methods

NCES has regularly gathered data on the educational activities of the U.S. population since 1991 through its National Household Education Surveys Program. In 2012, it administered the “Parent and Family Involvement in Education Survey” to a nationally representative sample of households with children enrolled in K–12 schools. Families of school-age children were mailed a questionnaire asking about one of their children’s schools, and the parent most familiar with that child’s school was asked to respond. In the end, 17,166 families, representing a response rate of 58 percent, completed the survey. (An additional 397 families of home-schooled children, who are not included in survey results below, also took part.) This survey was conducted by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), and findings were released in 2015 and updated in 2016. The data were weighted so that results would be representative of the school-age population as a whole.

Among other topics, parents were asked how satisfied they were with various aspects of the school their child attended, including the school overall, the teachers their child had that year, academic standards, order and discipline, and the way the school staff interacted with parents. Respondents were given the option of indicating whether they were very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, somewhat dissatisfied, or very dissatisfied.

In their initial report, AIR and NCES researchers divided parents into four categories: parents with a child at an assigned district-operated school, and parents with a child at one of three types of chosen schools; either a public school that they chose (including district-operated schools and charter schools), a religiously affiliated private school, or a private school that did not have a religious affiliation. Students were classified as attending a chosen school if the parent indicated that their child attended a private school or if the parent indicated that their child attended a public school but also responded “No” to the question: “Is [this public school] [your child’s] regularly assigned school?” Some 76 percent attended an assigned public school, 14 percent attended a chosen public school (including charter schools), and 10 percent attended either a religiously affiliated or secular private school.

Charter-school parents are 39 percent of families using chosen public schools and 6 percent of all students in the sample. By separating out these students (most of whom were presumably attending 1 of the 5,274 charter schools operating across the U.S. in 2011), we are able to compare parent satisfaction of students at charter schools with students in private schools, assigned-district schools, and choice district schools.

Those choice district schools, which are attended by the 9 percent of students in chosen public schools who did not attend charters, cannot be further classified by type. We know only that the parent filling out the questionnaire said the school had not been assigned to their child by the district. These chosen district schools largely comprise the country’s 2,722 “magnet” schools (according to 2011 data), most of which offer themed programs and were originally designed to encourage desegregation by attracting a multi-racial clientele. In addition, they likely include some of the estimated 165 competitive “examination schools” like Stuyvesant High School in New York City, a district-run school that offers accelerated academic programs for students who meet rigorous entry standards. District schools also could be chosen when families participate in open enrollment or inter-district choice programs, which allow students in one school district to attend schools in another, often as part of a voluntary desegregation strategy. A few cities, such as Denver and Boston, have quasi–open enrollment plans that allow families to rank the preferred choices for their children’s school rather than following automatic assignments. Whether magnet, exam, or open-enrollment schools, one may infer that many of these chosen schools were selected by parents for the superior educational opportunities they seemed to offer.

Findings on School Composition

Family demographics vary among the four different school sectors, with larger shares of African American and Hispanic students at tuition-free charters and district schools of choice than at private schools or assigned-district schools (Figure 1). Hispanics account for 27 percent of families at charters, 24 percent at district schools of choice, 20 percent at assigned-district schools, and 12 percent at private schools. African American students account for 23 percent of students at charters, 17 percent at district schools of choice, 14 percent at assigned-district schools, and 10 percent at private schools.

Compared to other sectors, charter-school parents report much lower family incomes and private-school parents report much higher incomes. Charter-school parents are also the least likely to have earned a college degree. Nearly half of charter-school and district-choice-school parents live in urban areas, compared to one-third of private-school parents and one-quarter of families whose children attend assigned-district schools. Parents at charters and district schools of choice are more likely to live in the West.

Adjustment for demographic differences. On the web site of the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance (https://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/), we present our unabridged analysis, including estimates of sector differences in satisfaction that adjust for the variation in the demographic background of parents across sectors. The statistical significance of these adjusted differences as shown in Figures 2 and 3 are estimated by models that take into account the entire distribution of responses (e.g., very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, somewhat dissatisfied, or very dissatisfied). However, for ease of presentation in the text and figures that follow, we simply report the percentage of parents in each sector who say they are “very satisfied” with a particular aspect of their child’s school. An interactive graphic at www.educationnext.org provides additional information.

Findings on Parental Satisfaction

Although parents in all four sectors report high levels of satisfaction with their child’s school, the percentage saying they are “very satisfied” varies by school type. Satisfaction levels are the highest among private-school parents, with parents at charter schools and district schools of choice reporting lower, but similar, rates of satisfaction (Figure 2). Among the four sectors, parents of students attending assigned-district schools are the least likely to say they are “very satisfied” with their child’s school.

Charter schools vs. other sectors. Charter-school parents report higher satisfaction levels than parents with children in assigned-district schools. The size of that difference varies, however, depending on the specific aspect of the school under consideration. Compared to parents at assigned-district schools, charter-school parents are 6 percentage points more likely to say they are “very satisfied” with teachers at the school, 13 percentage points more likely to be “very satisfied” with academic standards, and 10 percentage points more likely to be “very satisfied” with both school discipline and communication with families.

Charter-school parents also report slightly higher levels of satisfaction than parents whose children attend a district school of choice. However, the differences, which vary between 2 percentage points and 5 percentage points, are not statistically significant.

Charter-school parents report lower levels of satisfaction than parents of children at private schools. Differences in satisfaction levels vary between 14 percentage points and 18 percentage points, depending on the aspect of the school.

Lowest- vs. highest-income groups. Parent satisfaction levels vary by household income, with large differences observed for families with incomes of $30,000 or less and those with incomes of $100,000 or more (Figure 3). High-income parents are more likely than low-income parents to express satisfaction with charter schools: 72 percent say they are “very satisfied” with their child’s school compared to 62 percent of low-income parents. We find a similar pattern for the other four aspects of the school—teacher quality, academic standards, discipline, and communication.

Despite these differences, both low- and high-income parents whose children attend charter schools are considerably more satisfied than comparable parents at assigned-district schools. When asked to assess the school itself, the share of low-income parents saying they are “very satisfied” is 10 percentage points higher at charters than at assigned-district schools. For high-income parents, this difference is also 10 percentage points. Averaging across all five assessment indicators, the percentage of low-income parents saying they are “very satisfied” is 9 percentage points higher at charters than at assigned-district schools. Among high-income parents, that difference is 14 percentage points.

Parental satisfaction with charter schools and district schools of choice is similar for both low- and high-income families. These differences are not statistically significant. Both high- and low-income families express higher levels of satisfaction with their school if it is in the private sector rather than the charter sector. The difference in satisfaction levels between a charter school and a private school is 15 percentage points for low-income families and 8 percentage points for high-income families. The latter difference is not statistically significant. Averaging across all indicators, the difference in the share of low-income families who are “very satisfied” with aspects of their child’s private school is 25 percentage points, which is similar to the difference of 22 percentage points among high-income families. This suggests that school vouchers or other programmatic interventions that expand families’ access to private schools have a good chance of boosting levels of parental satisfaction.

Age of student. Because the data include information about students’ ages, we are able to compare degrees of satisfaction by grade span in each sector. Students age 10 and under are assumed to be attending elementary schools, those age 11 to 13 are assumed to be in middle school, and those who are 14 to 18 are assumed to be in high school. These estimates are not perfectly accurate, but even this rough classification system allows for estimates of the extent to which parental assessments vary by their child’s grade level.

We find that charter-school parents of elementary-age children are more satisfied with their school than parents whose children are in middle or high school. Whereas 72 percent of those with an elementary-age child are “very satisfied,” only 62 percent of those with children in the middle-school years and just 56 percent of parents of students in high school are similarly satisfied. However, for all three age groups, charter-school parents are more satisfied than parents at assigned-district schools. By student age, charter-school parents are more likely to report they are “very satisfied” with their school by 6, 5, and 9 percentage points, respectively, compared to parents whose children attend an assigned-district school. Across all five satisfaction indicators, the differences are, on average, 8, 5, and 11 percentage points for parents of children at the three age levels, respectively. In other words, the charter advantage, from the perspective of parents, is at least as great at the high-school level as at the elementary level. If charters want to mobilize parental support, they might consider greater investments in the final years of schooling.

Urban, suburban, and rural regions. One finds little variation in the degree of satisfaction with charter schools by region: across the country, more than 60 percent of parents in urban, suburban, and rural communities say they are very satisfied with the charter school that their child is attending. However, the charter-school advantage vis-à-vis assigned-district schools is somewhat greater in urban and rural settings than in suburban ones. In both urban and rural communities, 64 percent of parents say they are “very satisfied” with their child’s charter school, compared to 54 percent of urban parents and 56 percent of rural parents who say they are “very satisfied” with their child’s assigned-district school. By contrast, the difference in the percentage of charter-school and assigned-district-school parents who say they are very satisfied is only 4 percentage points in suburban areas. It is worth considering, however, that suburban parents may well have already exercised school choice as part of their house-hunting process, by choosing their neighborhood based in part on where their child or future children would be assigned to go to school. Private schools generate similarly higher levels of satisfaction than choice and district schools in all three types of communities, but significant differences between charters and chosen district schools are not observed in any of the three areas.

Racial and ethnic differences. White and Asian families are clearly more satisfied with their charter schools than African American families, and somewhat more satisfied than Hispanic families. Among charter-school parents, 70 percent of Asian parents and 67 percent of white parents say they are “very satisfied,” compared to 63 percent for Hispanic parents and 54 percent for African American parents. The differences in reported levels of satisfaction between charter and assigned-district schools are wider among Asian and white families, too: for assigned-district schools, the difference is 16 percentage points for Asian families and 9 for white families, compared to a statistically insignificant 6 percentage points and 5 percentage points for African American and Hispanic parents, respectively.

Comparing levels of satisfaction among charter-school parents to parents at district schools of choice, there are no significant differences by race or ethnicity. With the exception of Asian parents, parents of all ethnicities prefer private schools to charter schools by a double-digit margin.

Interpretation

Our findings echo those reported by the 2016 Education Next survey, which examined the opinions of parents whose children attend public, charter, and private schools (see “What Do Parents Think of Their Children’s Schools?,” features, Spring 2017). That survey found that private-school parents are much happier with their children’s schools than parents at district schools. The study also found charter parents, though not as pleased as private-school parents, are more satisfied than district parents.

District schools of choice: The magnet school. When comparing satisfaction levels with charter schools to district schools of choice, it is helpful to keep in mind that magnet schools serve approximately two-thirds of the students in district schools of choice. This can be inferred from other surveys conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, which have found that 2011–12 enrollments in magnet schools constitute 2.1 million students, slightly more than the 1.8 million students attending charter schools. If parents are accurately reporting the type of school their child is attending, roughly 6 percent of all students are going to magnet schools. That implies that two-thirds of the 9 percent of all students said by parents to be attending a chosen district school are attending magnet schools.

Unlike charter schools, which usually must admit students by lottery if they are over-subscribed, many magnet schools have admission standards. Others offer specialized curricular programs that are expected to promote racial integration by attracting students from all racial and ethnic backgrounds to seek admission. According to the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) of 2011–12, a nationally representative survey of schools conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, 28 percent of magnet schools give admissions preferences to academically gifted students, three times the rate of charter schools. Likewise, nearly half of magnet schools (45 percent) are said to have special emphases in the performing arts, math and sciences, or foreign languages, while only 12 percent of charter schools are said to have a similar emphasis. Nearly a quarter of magnet schools report administering admissions tests as part of the application process. In contrast, only 8 percent of charter schools report doing so. Conversely, about 5 percent of charter schools are dedicated to serving students with special needs or at-risk students, whereas less than 1 percent of magnet schools do the same.

The SASS also suggests that magnet schools receive many more resources than charter schools, on average. For example, teacher salaries, even after incorporating cost-of-living adjustments, are 5 percent to 12 percent higher at magnet schools than in charter schools, on average. And almost all magnet schools have a library media center, while only half of charters do.

Despite the greater exclusivity and resource advantages enjoyed by magnet schools, parental satisfaction with magnet schools and the other district schools of choice is no greater—and may be less—than the level of satisfaction of parents with a child at a charter school. This does not demonstrate that charter schools are superior to magnet schools, as we do not have any direct evidence about school quality independent of parental perceptions. But if parental satisfaction is a desirable, policy-relevant outcome in its own right, the data suggest that charters are a viable—and perhaps the preferred—option for those seeking to expand choice within the public sector.

Private schools. By a wide margin, parents with children in the private sector express much higher levels of satisfaction than parents in the assigned-district sector. That certainly helps to explain the viability of a sector that charges tuition when other sectors are offering seemingly comparable services without charge. Private schools are also providing higher levels of satisfaction than either charter schools or district schools of choice. These choice-based schools pose a greater threat to the private sector because the differences in satisfaction level are, roughly speaking, only half as large as between private schools and the assigned-district sector. Yet the high level of satisfaction with private schools provides encouragement for those who support school voucher initiatives, which increase access to the private sector by paying some or all of students’ tuition.

Assigned-district schools. The assigned-district school, which currently provides services to 76 percent of all students, may be an endangered species. Since all three choice sectors—private, charter, and district schools of choice—are offering parents educational options that are considerably more satisfying, one must expect the market demand for educational alternatives to increase. It will take a strong political defense of the district-operated school system, which assigns children to the specific place where they are to be educated, to thwart an underlying trend toward greater choice that has gathered support among the families that are most directly affected.

Albert Cheng is a post-doctoral fellow at the Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at the Harvard Kennedy School. Paul E. Peterson, senior editor of Education Next, is professor of government at Harvard University and director of PEPG.

For a look at findings on parental satisfaction using data from the 2016 Education Next survey, see “What Do Parents Think of Their Children’s Schools?.”

This article appeared in the Spring 2017 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Cheng, A., and Peterson, P.E. (2017). How Satisfied Are Parents With Their Children’s Schools? New evidence from a U.S. Department of Education survey. Education Next, 17(2), 20-27.

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