See the full results of this study here.

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Over the past 25 years, charter schools have offered an increasing number of families an alternative to their local district schools. The charter option has proven particularly popular in large cities, but charter-school growth is often constrained by state laws that limit the number of students the sector can serve. In the 2016 election, for example, voters in Massachusetts rejected a ballot question that would have allowed further expansion of charters in communities that had reached the state’s enrollment ceiling.

As a result, charter schools remain the smallest of the sectors that serve K–12 students. While district-operated schools still serve more than 80 percent of the U.S. school-age population, and private schools serve close to 10 percent, charters serve only about 6 percent (a share that is just slightly larger than that of the home-schooling sector). Yet the charter sector is the most rapidly growing segment of the education marketplace, and nationwide, the number of student names on charter-school waiting lists now exceeds one million, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Despite this rapid growth in the charter sector, little is known about the views of parents who are making use of these schools. Are charter-school parents more—or less—satisfied than parents in the district and private sectors with teacher quality, student discipline, and other characteristics of their children’s schools? Do they perceive more misbehavior there, or less? Are communications between parents and schools more or less extensive? And to what extent do parents’ perceptions of these issues vary within each sector?

To examine parental perceptions of charter, district, and private schools, we administered, in 2016, a survey to nationally representative samples of parents with children enrolled in each of these sectors. To our knowledge, this study, together with a companion investigation by Albert Cheng and Paul E. Peterson (see “How Satisfied are Parents with Their Children’s Schools?” features, Spring 2017), are the first to report results from nationally representative surveys of parents in these three sectors.

We find that charter parents are more satisfied with important aspects of their schools—such as teacher quality, school discipline, and character instruction—than are district-school parents, but they are less satisfied than private-school parents. Charter parents are also less likely to perceive serious problems in their children’s schools than are district-school parents. Charter parents report more extensive communications with their children’s schools than parents in the other two sectors, but they also express greater concern about a paucity of extracurricular activities.

To be clear, these findings speak only to how parents experience their children’s schools; they do not necessarily reflect the on-the-ground reality within each sector. Even so, parents’ opinions affect their choices among schools as well as, likely, the political pressure they may exert on educators and policymakers. What parents think of their children’s schools, therefore, has important implications for the future of the charter-school movement.

Prior Research

Charter schools have features in common with both private schools and those operated by the nation’s local school districts. Like district schools, charter schools receive most of their funding from public sources and are subject to state regulation. Also like district schools, they may not charge tuition and must admit all students who apply, unless they are oversubscribed, in which case they must hold an admissions lottery. But, like private schools, charter schools are operated by nongovernmental entities, and students attend only if their family selects the school.

As mentioned, there is no published comparison of parental perceptions of school life across the charter, district, and private sectors nationwide. However, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), in a series of surveys conducted between 1993 and 2012, reported on parental satisfaction with assigned public schools, public schools chosen by parents, private religious schools, and private nonreligious schools. These reports reveal that private-school parents are generally more satisfied than are those with children in the public sector. They do not, however, present information about parents with children in charter schools. In the companion study to ours, Cheng and Peterson report results for charter parents from the 2012 NCES survey, providing a portrait of differences across sectors that complements the one presented here.

Two existing studies do shed some light on the views of parents with students in charter schools. In 2010, Mathematica Policy Research compared the satisfaction of parents at 36 charter middle schools that held lotteries for admission with that of parents whose children had applied but had not won the lottery. Parents of lottery winners were 33 percentage points more likely than parents of lottery losers to rate their students’ schools as excellent and 10 percentage points more likely to agree that their children liked school. However, the schools, though broadly scattered throughout the United States, do not constitute a representative sample of parental opinion in the charter sector.

From 2001 to 2004, Jack Buckley and Mark Schneider tracked the satisfaction of parents whose children attended public and district schools in Washington, D.C. They found that, initially, charter-school parents rated their children’s schools more highly than their public-school counterparts did. However, this difference diminished over the course of the study, leading the authors to suggest that satisfaction with schools in the two sectors is unlikely to differ in the long run. Again, the study cannot be generalized to the nation as a whole.

Data and Methods

Our results are based on data from the nationally representative 2016 Education Next survey of public opinion, in which we oversampled parents with children in the three school sectors. The survey was conducted from May 6 to June 13, 2016, by the polling firm Knowledge Networks (KN), a GfK company. KN maintains a national probability panel of some 40,000 adults who agree to participate in a number of online surveys.

The Education Next survey was administered to a randomly selected subset of the KN panel, including an oversample of 1,571 respondents who were already identified as currently having school-age children (ages 5 through 18) living in their household. All parents were asked the same set of questions about their children’s schools, modified only to specify the relevant school sector (see methodology sidebar).

The background characteristics of parents in the three sectors differ along many dimensions, including race and ethnicity, education, income, and place of residence. Most notably, parents of charter-school students are more likely to be of minority background than are parents of either district- or private-school students (see Figure 1). Given the differences among families who use the three sectors, we report in an interactive graphic on the Education Next website all survey results both with and without adjustments for background characteristics. In the figures accompanying this essay, we report only the actual, raw percentages of parents in each sector giving a particular response. We do, however, adjust for background characteristics when testing whether differences in parents’ responses across the three sectors are statistically significant.

Parental Satisfaction

We find that in all three sectors an overwhelming majority of parents report that they are satisfied with their schools. Even so, the percentage of parents who say they are “very satisfied” with a given aspect of the school varies markedly across sectors (see Figure 2).

We inquired about parental satisfaction with respect to five key school characteristics where, based on previous studies comparing private- and public-school parents, we expected to see clear differences across those two sectors: teacher quality, discipline, expectations for achievement, safety, and instruction in character and values. We also asked about three other characteristics where we expected less differentiation: ethnic and racial diversity, facilities, and location. Consistent with prior research, we find that parents in the private sector are far more satisfied with most aspects of their children’s schools than are parents with children in district schools. The assessments of charter-school parents, meanwhile, typically fall between those of parents using schools in the district and private sectors.

Charter schools vs. district schools. Charter parents are considerably more satisfied with their schools than are district-school parents. The difference in the share of parents who are very satisfied for the five key characteristics is, on average, 13 percentage points. Smaller differences are observed for racial and ethnic diversity (9 percentage points), buildings and facilities (2 points), and location (-2 points); only the difference for racial and ethnic diversity is statistically significant.

Charter schools vs. private schools. We observe lower levels of satisfaction with charter schools than with private schools. For the five key characteristics, the private-school advantage is 12 percentage points, on average. In three cases (expectations for student achievement, safety, and instruction in character or values), these differences remain statistically significant after adjusting for the characteristics of the parents whom the two sectors serve. We also find a sizable but statistically insignificant difference in satisfaction with school location (13 percentage points). We do not find noteworthy differences between the two sectors with respect to satisfaction with the school building and facilities (4 points) or with ethnic and racial diversity (2 points).

Serious Problems

Few parents acknowledge the existence of serious problems at their children’s schools. Some 47 percent of charter-school parents did perceive a lack of extracurricular activities to be a serious problem, but this was the highest share observed for any item across all three sectors. Nonetheless, the percentage of parents who indicate on a three-point scale that a given problem was either “serious” or “very serious” varies widely between sectors (see Figure 3).

District-school parents are generally more likely to say that various problems are either serious or very serious at their school than are private-school parents. The differences are substantial for four problems: students using drugs, destroying property, fighting, and missing class. Meanwhile, perceptions of charter-school parents again tend to fall somewhere in between.

Charter schools vs. district schools. Charter-school parents report fewer social problems than do district-school parents. On the four indicators of social disruption mentioned above, the district–charter difference in the percentage identifying a problem as serious or very serious is on average 8 percentage points. Each of these differences is statistically significant after adjusting for differences in the background characteristics of parents using district and charter schools.

Although charter parents perceive less social disruption in their schools, they express greater concern about the paucity of extracurricular activities. As compared to parents with children in district schools, charter-school parents are 14 percentage points more likely to perceive a lack of extracurricular activities as a serious problem.

Charter schools vs. private schools. A greater share of parents reported serious problems in the charter sector than in the private sector. However, after we controlled for background characteristics, these differences were statistically significant for only three problems: fighting, students with different abilities being placed in the same classroom, and a lack of extracurricular activities.

In sum, charter parents are more likely to identify serious problems with student behavior at their children’s schools than are private-school parents, but less likely to do so than district-school parents. Charters appear to provide fewer extracurricular activities than either private or district schools, perhaps because they are newer and often have less-lavish facilities and limited space for playgrounds and sports activities.

School Communications

Most parents say they are in communication with staff at their children’s schools. Either a majority or a near majority within each sector say they have spoken to a school staff member at least once within the past year about each of the following: their child’s achievements and accomplishments; their child’s schoolwork or homework; their child’s behavioral problems; volunteering; the quality of teaching; and the behavior of other students at school. On some of these items there is little variation across sectors, but on others charter-school parents seem to be in closer contact with their school than parents in either the district or private sector (see Figure 4).

Charter schools vs. district schools. As compared to parents of children in district schools, charter parents are 15 percentage points more likely to say they have communicated with the school about volunteering, and 7 percentage points more likely to report having spoken to school officials about their child’s accomplishments.

Charter schools vs. private schools. School communications in the charter sector are also perceived by parents to be more extensive than those in the private sector. While private-school parents are as likely as charter parents to report having discussed volunteering, charter parents report that they have communicated with school officials more frequently than private-school parents about their child’s schoolwork or homework, the behavior of other students, their child’s behavioral problems, and the quality of teaching at the school. Only the difference with respect to communications about schoolwork or homework is statistically significant after adjusting for differences in background characteristics. Judging from parental perceptions, however, charter schools appear to have built a more extensive communication system with parents than schools in either the district or private sector.

Variation within Sectors

Charter schools are overseen by autonomous boards free of many state regulations, giving rise to a wide variety of approaches and emphases. District schools are operated by more than 14,000 locally elected boards, and this decentralization also creates the potential for wide disparities in school practice. As for the private sector, it offers parents an extraordinary variety of models from which to choose: Catholic schools, other Christian schools, Jewish schools, Muslim schools, Waldorf schools, Montessori schools, and many more.

But is the degree of variation in parents’ experiences with schools greater in one of these sectors than in the others? To find out, we calculated a metric that gauges the degree of variation in parental perceptions within each sector (see the methodology sidebar for a discussion of our approach). This topic has never been explored previously, making this aspect of our investigation especially groundbreaking.

Variation in parental satisfaction. On four items—school discipline, expectations for student achievement, school building and facilities, and the racial and ethnic diversity among students—we find no significant difference in the variation in satisfaction across sectors. However, we find that charter parents vary more in their satisfaction with the location of their school than do parents of students in district schools. Because district-school enrollment is usually determined by neighborhood while charter schools typically draw students from larger areas, this difference is to be expected.

Charter parents also vary more in their satisfaction with teacher quality than do district-school parents. This is also not surprising, given that teacher hiring in charter schools is often less tightly regulated than it is in the district sector. Some charter schools may use their flexibility to recruit outstanding teachers, while others fall well short of that mark.

When it comes to instruction in character and values, parental satisfaction within the private sector varies less than it does in either the charter or district sector. It may be that private schools consistently live up to their reputation for providing a moral as well as an academic education.

Satisfaction with school safety also varies less in the private-school sector than in the charter arena. It may be that private schools are able to create a more or less consistently safe environment, whereas charter schools, concentrated in areas that serve disadvantaged students, vary substantially in this regard.

Variation in the seriousness of problems. Our results concerning variation in how parents judge the seriousness of potential problems at their children’s schools tell a consistent story: the private sector is easily the most homogeneous of the three sectors. Meanwhile, parents’ perceptions of the seriousness of problems at district schools and charter schools are equally varied.

Variation in school–parent communications. When it comes to discussions of children’s achievements, the behavior of other students at the school, and even volunteering at school, we do not find significant differences across sectors in the degree to which parental perceptions vary. However, there is greater variation among charter parents in how frequently they report communicating about teacher quality than among parents in either private or district schools.

So which sector is the most homogeneous? The award goes to the private sector—at least insofar as parental perceptions are concerned. Private schools are very much alike with respect to how parents gauge the seriousness of potential problems at the school; they are also more homogeneous than the other two sectors in their instruction in character and values, as perceived by parents. And private schools are more homogeneous when it comes to discussions about children’s behavioral problems at school.

On most matters, charters and district schools are equally varied, but we do see greater variation within the charter sector in parents’ satisfaction with school location and teacher quality. We also see greater variation in the amount of parent–school communication about schoolwork and homework among charter parents.

So it is not altogether wrong to emphasize variation in the charter world, but on most of the school characteristics we find no significant difference between the variability in parental perceptions in the charter and district-school sectors. Perhaps the biggest surprise is the markedly greater homogeneity in the perceptions of private-school parents. If private schools operate in response to market demands, while district and charter schools operate in response to government expectations, then one might conclude that the marketplace expects certain fundamentals from all schools. Whatever their differences, all private schools appear to have learned that they must satisfy parental demands with respect to the basics.

Interpretation

What should one make of these results? As noted, our data speak only to parental perceptions and cannot be linked with certainty to the actual conditions in schools. Yet the differences we document are consistent with two classic ethnographic studies of schools in the private and district sectors.

Private schools. One of these studies, a 1993 book by Anthony Bryk and colleagues titled Catholic Schools and the Common Good, provides an unrivaled analysis of Catholic-school life. One cannot generalize to all private schools from an account of Catholic schools, of course. Nonetheless, roughly 50 percent of all private-school students today attend Catholic schools, and we have found a good deal of homogeneity in perceptions within the private sector. Further, many non-Catholic private schools have their own religious heritage that informs institutional practice. Even the elite members of the National Association of Independent Schools, which educate 10 to 15 percent of students in the private sector, usually have historical religious affiliations. We therefore treat Bryk’s account as a window on private schools more generally.

Central to that account is the idea that private schools create a strong sense of community. Teachers play an important role in students’ lives beyond the classroom. Catholic-school teachers also develop strong relationships with one another, both professionally and socially, and these bonds help facilitate harmonious decisionmaking.

The curriculum is largely uniform and based on “a long-standing Catholic tradition about what constitutes a proper humanistic education.” A common academic core does not preclude extensive extracurricular activities, however. These are numerous, and “provide more informal occasions for interactions between students and adults.”

Surprisingly, all this informality and collegiality does not necessarily lead to extensive parental involvement in the life of the school. Parents participate in fundraising and attend school events, but they tend to stay out of day-to-day operations and decisionmaking, putting their trust in the staff to provide a sound academic and moral education.

Trust is key to the Catholic enterprise, which is based on “a set of shared beliefs about what students should learn, about proper norms of instruction, and about how people should relate to one another.” Furthermore, the Catholic-school system is “highly decentralized,” and “considerable deference is accorded to the principal.”

In sum, Bryk’s account suggests that private schools create closed communities of like-minded people. Only those who seem to meet the requisite criteria—both educational and moral—are admitted. Families must pay tuition, unless their student is deemed worthy of a scholarship. Collective bargaining is virtually unknown within the private sector, so teachers can be dismissed if they do not perform to the school’s standards. Students are expected to focus on their studies, perform at a minimally acceptable standard, and conduct themselves according to the school’s code. Students remain at the school throughout their educational careers unless the family situation changes or they are expelled for misbehavior. The mission and ethos of the school are perpetuated by rituals and rites that celebrate the school’s traditions. Strong ties bind parents, students, faculty, and support staff together in service to a common set of values. But parents do not have extensive communication with the school; they trust the institution, which shares their values, to provide appropriate instruction. The role of the parent is to volunteer in support of fundraising and other activities.

District schools. An equally impressive account of district-school life is to be found in The Shopping Mall High School, written by sociologist Arthur Powell and his colleagues in 1985. Its focus on high schools, especially suburban ones, precludes easy extrapolation to middle and elementary schools. Yet these authors seem to have captured fundamental aspects of the district-school system as a whole.

The authors emphasize the grand variety of the student body. “Student inclusiveness is the reality most high schools must cope with: the students are different, and they are there,” they write, and schools accommodate this situation by providing “something for everyone.”

Students are often told that it’s up to them to make the most of school. This produces “a neutral environment where a do-your-own thing attitude prevails. High schools take few stands on what is educationally or morally important. Yet one thing they cannot be neutral about is diversity itself.… But tolerance … precludes schools’ celebrating more focused notions of education or of character. ‘Community’ has come to mean differences peacefully coexisting rather than people working together toward some serious end.”

At the shopping-mall high school, extracurricular activities play a central role. “There is nothing extra about the extracurriculum whether schools are rich or poor, public or private, large or small,” the authors write. “It supplements the rest of the curriculum and … is as integral to high schools as food service and celebrity appearances are integral to shopping malls.”

Parental involvement varies as much as everything else at the shopping-mall school. “Only a few parents understood that it was legitimate to be … active, and fewer still … would actually initiate an appointment with a teacher,” the authors observe. And for any involvement to happen, the initiative had to come from the parent.

If the Powell account remains accurate today, public schools are open communities made up of students from different backgrounds and with diverse values. Admission is entirely open, and the school operates within a framework created by state law and federal requirements. Teachers acquire tenure and seniority rights after a few years’ service, creating a challenge for administrators. Students have legal rights that limit administrators’ capacity to expel or suspend them from school. Rules and procedures provide the structure needed to reduce the likelihood of internal conflict within this diverse community. To ensure fairness in the open, diverse community, a complex bureaucratic structure becomes essential, but students come to resent the requirements that are imposed, which they see as inflexible and onerous. High performance by either teacher or pupil is seldom rewarded. Informal treaties bargained between teachers and students keep the peace. Parental engagement is determined by the parent not the school.

Admittedly, both the Bryk and Powell studies were conducted during the waning decades of the last century, and much has changed, especially the electronic revolution that has produced computers, cell phones, and Internet games. But we suspect that these changes have only accentuated features of the shopping-mall high school Powell captured a quarter century ago.

Conclusion

Our survey results are quite consistent with these ethnographic studies, and suggest that charter schools generally fall somewhere in between those in the district and private sectors. We find higher levels of satisfaction among parents of children attending charter schools than among those attending district schools, but lower levels of satisfaction than among those whose children attend private schools. We find that parents report less social disruption at charter schools than at district schools. Charter-school parents also report more extensive communication with school officials but lament the paucity of extracurricular activities at their children’s schools. As for the extent of variation in parents’ perceptions, it is the private sector that is the most homogeneous, while charter and district schools are for the most part similarly heterogeneous.

None of these results can necessarily be interpreted as identifying the actual characteristics of schools. Parents’ perceptions may be distorted by a lack of knowledge about what really goes on at a school or by an understandable tendency to view life at their own children’s schools through rose-tinted glasses. Nor can the results be interpreted as causal. We do not have experimental evidence as to the impact of attending schools in one sector rather than another. Parents have exercised choice in selecting a charter or private-sector school rather than a district school, making it impossible to say whether parental perceptions of the school are caused by actual school characteristics in each sector or some other factor.

This study, and the companion study by Cheng and Peterson, nonetheless provide the first descriptive accounts of differences in perceptions across the charter, district, and private sectors. Both studies find that charter-school parents’ assessments of their schools generally fall somewhere between those of parents in the district and private sectors. Charter parents’ greater satisfaction with their schools as compared to district parents, and their perceptions of fewer problems and more communication, have important implications for their school choices and, perhaps, their political behavior. If the number of charter schools continues to increase, the parents who use these schools may form a growing constituency in support of the charter-school option.

Samuel Barrows is a postdoctoral 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. Martin R. West, editor-in-chief of Education Next, is associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and deputy director of PEPG.

For a look at findings using data from a U.S. Department of Education survey, see “How Satisfied are Parents with Their Children’s Schools?.”

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Methodology

To obtain representative samples of parents with children in the three school sectors, we oversampled them during the administration of the larger 2016 Education Next survey of public opinion on education policies and practices in the United States. The survey was conducted from May 6 to June 13, 2016, by the polling firm Knowledge Networks (KN), a GfK company. KN maintains a national probability panel of some 40,000 adults who agree to participate in a number of online surveys. Members of this panel are recruited through address-based sampling from a frame of residential addresses covering approximately 97 percent of U.S. households. Internet access is provided to members of the panel who lack it.

The Education Next survey was administered to a randomly selected subset of the KN panel, including an oversample of 1,571 respondents who were already identified in the panel as currently having school-age children (ages 5 through 18) living in their household. After verifying the presence of school-age children in the household, respondents were asked how many of these children currently attend schools in a variety of sectors: district school, charter school, private school, and home school. In order to maximize the number of responses to questions concerning charter and private schools, respondents were classified as charter-school parents if they currently had a child in a charter school, even if they had other children who attended other school types; as private-school parents if they currently had a child in a private school but not in a charter school; or as district-school parents if they had a child in a district school but not in either the charter or private sector. This question served as a screen to allow oversampling of charter-school and private-school parents until we reached numbers large enough to estimate perceptions within each sector with a small margin of error. This process yielded a sample with 774 district-school parents, 428 private-school parents, and 317 charter-school parents. KN provided sample weights to adjust the parent oversample to the demographic profile of the U.S. population with school-age children.

All parents were asked the same set of survey questions, with only a slight variation in language to specify the sector of the school about which they were being asked. To simplify the presentation, we report results in a binary fashion, even though scales with three to five response options were constructed for each item. When testing the statistical significance of differences between sectors, however, we take into account the full distribution of responses across all options. Specifically, we fit proportional odds models that include indicators for the respondent’s child being at a private or district school, while charter-school parents serve as a baseline. These models also include controls for the respondent’s education, income, race, homeowner status, region,
and whether the respondent lives in an urban area. The significance of the coefficients on the private- and district-school indicators allows us to test whether there is a statistically significant difference between charter-school parents and parents from either of the other sectors, after adjusting for differences in the observable background characteristics of the parents they serve.

In order to explore how variation in parents’ responses differs across sectors, we calculate a measure called Leik’s D for each question and sector. We then test for a statistically significant difference in the variation of responses across sectors by estimating bootstrapped confidence intervals for the differences in Leik’s D between sectors.

Executive Summary

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

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

Standards, Testing, and Accountability

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

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

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

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

School Choice Initiatives

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

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

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

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

Teachers

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

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

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

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

Blended Learning

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

Grading Schools

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

Racial Disparities in School Discipline

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

Financing K–12 Education

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

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

Methodology

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

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

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

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

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

Common Core, Accountability, and Testing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

School Choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teacher Performance and Policies

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blended Learning

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

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

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

Grading Schools

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Racial Disparities in Discipline

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

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

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

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

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

Financing Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Methodology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In spite of Tea Party criticism, union skepticism, and anti-testing outcries, the campaign to implement Common Core State Standards (otherwise known as Common Core) has achieved phenomenal success in statehouses across the country. Since 2011, 45 states have raised their standards for student proficiency in reading and math, with the greatest gains occurring between 2013 and 2015. Most states set only mediocre expectations for students for nearly 10 years after the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Now, in the wake of the Common Core campaign, a majority of states have made a dramatic move forward.

Common Core State Standards

In 2009, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers formed a consortium that established Common Core. Put simply, the standards outlined what students should know and be able to accomplish at each grade level in reading and math.

Eventually, 43 states and the District of Columbia fully adopted Common Core, while one other state, Minnesota, adopted only the reading standards. Although much of the debate surrounding Common Core has focused on the nature of the curriculum for each grade level, proponents have also sought to raise the proficiency level on tests that assess student learning. In fact, one of the consortium’s central goals has been to encourage states to set their proficiency standards on par with those set internationally.

To motivate states to adopt Common Core standards, the U.S. Department of Education provided incentives in 2009 via its Race to the Top initiative. The department announced a competition that would award grants totaling more than $4.3 billion to states that proposed to undertake reforms drawn from an extensive list provided by the department. Adopting “college-and-career-ready” standards was among the recommended reforms. All but four states submitted Race to the Top proposals, and 18 states and the District of Columbia received awards.

Subsequently, the Department of Education further encouraged states to adopt Common Core by offering waivers from NCLB requirements, which many states had found increasingly onerous, in exchange for pursuing department-approved alternatives similar to those suggested as part of Race to the Top.

The priority given to Common Core by both Race to the Top and the waiver program provoked outcry among some conservatives, who feared that the national standards would both undermine local control of schools and lower expectations for students. “The Common Core national math standards are not ‘internationally benchmarked,’ … not world class and competitive with the best … and not ‘second to none’ (though advertised as such when announced),” testified Hoover Institution researcher Williamson Evers before the Ohio legislature. Similarly, Jamie Gass at the Pioneer Institute in Boston declared, “Common Core is dumbed down.”

Meanwhile, teachers unions also expressed trepidation that Common Core standards would be used to assess teachers, especially since test-based evaluations of teachers ranked high on the Race to the Top agenda. The District of Columbia Public Schools, for example, had introduced such evaluations over heavy union opposition, and teachers unions across the country mobilized against accountability systems that leveraged statewide tests as a basis for evaluating their members.

With opposition mounting in both liberal and conservative circles, support for Common Core slipped significantly among the public at large, casting doubt on its very viability. But despite staunch political dissent, a careful look at proficiency standards reveals that most states have delivered on their commitments to tighten them.

Measuring State Proficiency Standards

Beginning in 2005, Education Next has published the grades given to state proficiency standards on an A-to-F scale designed by researchers in the Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at Harvard University. In 2005, only six states received an “A,” while just three states earned this distinction as recently as 2011. In 2015, however, 24 of the 49 states (including the District of Columbia) for which data were available as of mid-January 2016 earned an “A.” Meanwhile, the number of states receiving a “D” or an “F” has dwindled from 17 and 13 in 2005 and 2011, respectively, to a grand total of 1 in 2015 (See Figure 1). In short, state standards have suddenly skyrocketed.

State proficiency standards were initially required when Congress passed NCLB in 2002. Under that law and continuing under its successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the U.S. Department of Education has required states to test students in math and reading in grades 3 through 8 and again in high school. States must also set the performance level that students must reach on the exams to be identified as “proficient.” States report proficiency rates for each school as well as for the state as a whole. Importantly, each state chooses its own tests and establishes its own proficiency bar.

Federal law also mandates the periodic administration of tests in selected subjects to a representative sample of students in 4th and 8th grade as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often called “the nation’s report card.” The performance levels that the NAEP deems as proficient are roughly equivalent to those set by international organizations that estimate student proficiency worldwide.

Data from both the NAEP and state tests allow for periodic assessments of the rigor of each state’s proficiency standards. If the percentage of students identified as proficient in any given year is essentially the same for both the NAEP and the state exams, we can infer that the state has established as strict a proficiency standard as that of the NAEP. But if the state identifies a higher percentage of students as proficient than the NAEP, we can conclude that the state has set its proficiency bar lower than that of the NAEP.

To be clear, high proficiency standards do not necessarily reflect high student performance. Rather, good grades suggest that states are setting a high proficiency bar—that students must perform at a high level to be deemed proficient in a given subject at their grade level. Grades gauge “truth in advertising” by indicating the degree to which states inform parents of how well their students are doing on an internationally accepted scale.

Dramatic Rise in Standards

Education Next has evaluated the rigor of state proficiency standards each time results from both state and NAEP tests have been available for the same year. This is the seventh in a series of reports that grade state proficiency standards on the traditional A-to-F scale (see www.educationnext.org/edfacts for a complete list of these reports). Each state earns a grade according to the size of the difference between the percentages of students identified as proficient by state and by NAEP exams in 4th- and 8th-grade math and reading.

Previous reports (most recently “States Raise Proficiency Standards in Math and Reading,” features, Summer 2015) show that states, on average, established proficiency benchmarks that were much lower than those set by the NAEP and that state standards varied widely. Furthermore, prior reports revealed that until 2011, states did not markedly increase their proficiency standards nor did the variation among the states narrow. If anything, trends drifted in the opposite direction.

In Table 1, we report a grade for each state for each of four tests (4th-grade math, 4th-grade reading, 8th-grade math, and 8th-grade reading). An average of the underlying scores generating these grades determines the overall grade for the state. (The differences between state and NAEP proficiency rates, as well as the changes in state standards over time, are shown in an interactive graphic available at www.educationnext.org/edfacts). Table 1 also shows changes in standards over three time periods: a) 2013–2015, b) 2011–2015, and c) 2005–2015.

The results are striking: The last two years have witnessed the largest jump in state standards since they were established as part of the federal accountability program. Overall, 36 states have strengthened their standards since 2013, while just 5 have loosened them, and 7 have left their standards essentially unchanged. In short, the Common Core consortium has achieved one of its key policy objectives: the raising of state proficiency standards throughout much of the United States.

Even more remarkable is that states are earning higher grades even though it was harder to get an “A” in 2015 than ever before. Education Next grades the individual states on a “curve” that includes all observations from all years dating back to 2003. Until now, state standards had changed so slightly from one year to the next that the curve made little difference. Yet so many states raised their standards before the 2015 administration of state tests that every state in every year is being evaluated on a tougher scale. As a result, some states that, for example, obtained an “A” in previous studies have been downgraded to a “B+” in 2015.

The table and the interactive graphic on the Education Next website display the grades under the tougher grading system that has evolved because so many states have raised their standards. In the text, however, we refer to grades as originally earned in prior years. This yields slight discrepancies between the two metrics (see sidebar below, “Grading the States”). Note that the curve does not affect the estimates of the percentage difference in state and NAEP proficiency standards reported in the three right-hand columns of Table 1. These columns reveal the exact estimate of the change in proficiency standards for all states for which data are available.

One should keep in mind that participation rates can affect our estimates. Proficiency standards may appear more rigorous than they actually are if lower-performing students are more likely to participate in state testing, but less rigorous if higher-performing students are more likely to participate (assuming that NAEP samples are representative of all students). In 2015, advocates sought to persuade parents in a number of states—including New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Colorado, and California—to “opt out” of statewide tests. The opt-out movement seems to have been particularly successful with high school students. New Jersey, for example, reports that its highest nonparticipation rates occur among juniors in high school. Our estimates are based on the performances of 4th and 8th graders, making them less susceptible to bias from opt-out activity. We are currently unable to estimate patterns of participation in the opt-out effort, but to the extent that many students who opted out were potential high scorers, proficiency standards may be lower than our calculations suggest.

Reaching for an “A”

In 2015, 24 of 49 states (including the District of Columbia) earned an “A” grade. Since 2013, the average difference between NAEP and state proficiency levels has plummeted from 30 percent to 10 percent, representing a dramatic improvement over the previous two-year period (2011–2013), in which the difference dropped only 5 percentage points, from 35 percent to 30 percent (see Figure 2). Clearly, states are tightening standards more than ever since NCLB took effect. As mentioned earlier, no fewer than 36 states have raised their proficiency standards over the past two years, while just 5 relaxed them. Forty-five states have boosted their standards since 2011.

In 2015, the following 24 states earned an “A” grade: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, New York, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, and Vermont. In 2013, nine states earned an “A,” but of these, only New York, Pennsylvania, and Utah remain in the elite group in 2015. The standards for five of the other six high scorers from 2013—Kentucky, Massachusetts, Missouri, North Carolina, and Tennessee—are among those that slipped in 2015. North Carolina, however, is the only state where the downslide (12.1 percentage points) exceeds 5 percentage points.

The slippage in Massachusetts suggests the importance of viewing proficiency standards in context. In 2015, the state allowed local school districts to choose between the established test, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), or a newly developed test from the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, dubbed the PARCC. To preserve continuity with prior testing, we report results for the MCAS. The percentage of 8th graders identified as proficient on the MCAS, however, is much higher than the percentage identified as proficient on the PARCC. This could be because PARCC standards are higher, or it may simply be that a greater number of high-performing districts chose to retain the MCAS. The state department of education promises to provide more specific information on the students taking the two tests.

The lowest grade, a “D+,” goes to Texas. Four years ago, the Texas Department of Education promised to set in place a staircase that would result in gradual increases in the state’s standards. The Texas commissioner of education at that time, Michael Williams, said the “approach is intended to minimize any abrupt single-year increase in the required … standard for this school year and in the future.” By 2015, however, Texas had yet to move beyond the first step of the stairs, though it promises to do so in 2016. According to officials, the purpose of the delay was to give teachers and students sufficient time to adjust to more-rigorous standards.

State Standards Converge

Not only have standards risen across the country, but the differences in standards among the states narrowed considerably between 2013 and 2015. Figure 3 shows the distribution of the states according to how much they vary from NAEP on the proficiency standard. The 2013 distribution varies widely, while the 2015 distribution is clustered around the NAEP standard. In 2015, the range between the highest- and the lowest-performing state was less than 50 percentage points, as compared to nearly 65 percentage points in 2013. Even more impressive, nearly 80 percent of the states’ proficiency rates are within 15 percentage points of the NAEP rates, with only one state possessing an average proficiency rate differing from the NAEP standard by more than 40 percentage points. By comparison, 25 percent of states differed from NAEP by more than 40 percentage points in 2013.

Race to the Top

The rise in standards between 2013 and 2015 is not concentrated among states that received Race to the Top awards. We do not find that Race to the Top grant winners raised their standards more than other states (results not shown). This does not necessarily mean that Race to the Top was ineffective, however, as the remaining states later came under similar federal encouragement to raise standards when they sought waivers from NCLB requirements.

Not There Yet

Although the overwhelming majority of states have established standards that approximate international benchmarks, and no state set standards so low as to receive an “F” grade, seven states did earn a grade in the “C” range, and one a “D+,” indicating a substantial divergence from the NAEP. Although proficiency standards have climbed overall, an average difference of 10 percentage points remains between the state proficiency levels and the corresponding NAEP proficiency levels. Additionally, two states—Florida and Wisconsin—had yet to report test-score performances at the time the data for this report were prepared.

Since the inception of NCLB, the introduction of higher proficiency standards has been fraught with political controversy. With a rising proficiency bar, student performance appears lower even when it is the bar itself—not student performance—that has changed. Indeed, controversy rocked Florida and New York, two of the first states to raise their proficiency bars after 2011. Amid the furor, the state education commissioner in Florida resigned, and in New York, the tougher standards fueled the parental opt-out movement.

Such political storms might be avoided in the future because states no longer need to comply with many NCLB provisions. With the passage of ESSA, which has eliminated NCLB sanctions for most schools, states find themselves under less pressure to set lax proficiency standards. Previously, districts had strong incentives to resist high proficiency standards, as they feared their schools might be subject to increasingly severe penalties for not producing improved test results. Because most schools no longer need to worry about sanctions, the waivers from NCLB and the subsequent passage of ESSA may facilitate the increasing rigor of state standards.

If Common Core works as its proponents expect, higher proficiency standards could propel schools to achieve at more impressive levels and thus raise the nation’s ranking on international tests. Of course, it is imperative that parents, teachers, administrators, and policymakers recognize the low levels of student proficiency now being identified in most states as a serious warning that action is needed. Otherwise, raising the proficiency bars will be for naught. Still, it is a hopeful sign that standards have moved in the right direction. If student performance shifts upward in tandem, it will signal a long-awaited enhancement in the quality of American schools.

Paul E. Peterson, editor-in-chief of Education Next, is professor of government and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School, where Samuel Barrows and Thomas Gift are postdoctoral fellows.