Caught between extraordinary public expectations and relatively modest constitutional authority, U.S. presidents historically have fashioned all sorts of mechanisms—executive orders, proclamations, memoranda—by which to move their objectives forward. Under President Barack Obama’s administration, presidential entrepreneurialism has continued unabated. Like his predecessors, Obama has sought to harness and consolidate his influence outside of Congress. He also has made contributions of his own to the arsenal of administrative policy devices. The most creative, perhaps, is his Race to the Top initiative, which attempted to spur wide-ranging reforms in education, a policy domain in which past presidents exercised very little independent authority.

This study examines the effects of Obama’s Race to the Top on education policymaking around the country. In doing so, it does not assess the efficacy of the particular policies promoted by the initiative, nor does it investigate how Race to the Top altered practices within schools or districts. Rather, the focus is the education policymaking process itself; the adoption of education policies is the outcome of interest.

No single test provides incontrovertible evidence about its causal effects. The overall findings, however, indicate that Race to the Top had a meaningful impact on the production of education policy across the United States. In its aftermath, all states experienced a marked surge in the adoption of education policies. This surge does not appear to be a statistical aberration or an extension of past policy trends. Legislators from all states reported that Race to the Top affected policy deliberations within their states. The patterns of policy adoptions and legislator responses, moreover, correspond with states’ experiences in the Race to the Top competitions.

In the main, the evidence suggests that by strategically deploying funds to cash-strapped states and massively increasing the public profile of a controversial set of education policies, the president managed to stimulate reforms that had stalled in state legislatures, stood no chance of enactment in Congress, and could not be accomplished via unilateral action.

Asking States to Compete

On February 17, 2009, President Obama signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), legislation that was designed to stimulate the economy; support job creation; and invest in critical sectors, including education, in the aftermath of the Great Recession.  Roughly $100 billion of the ARRA was allocated for education, with $4.35 billion set aside for the establishment of Race to the Top, a competitive grant program designed to encourage states to support education innovation.

From the outset, the president saw Race to the Top as a way to induce state-level policymaking that aligned with his education objectives on college readiness, the creation of new data systems, teacher effectiveness, and persistently low-performing schools. As he noted in his July 2009 speech announcing the initiative, Obama intended to “incentivize excellence and spur reform and launch a race to the top in America’s public schools.”

The U.S. Department of Education (ED) exercised considerable discretion over the design and operation of the Race to the Top competition. Within a handful of broad priorities identified by Congress in ARRA, the Obama administration chose which specific policies would be rewarded, and by how much; how many states would receive financial rewards, and in what amount; and what kinds of oversight mechanisms would be used to ensure compliance. Subsequent to the ARRA’s enactment, Congress did not issue any binding requirements for the design or administration of the program. From an operational standpoint, Race to the Top was nearly entirely the handiwork of ED.

Race to the Top comprised three distinct phases of competition. Both Phase 1 and Phase 2 included specific education-policy priorities on which each applicant would be evaluated. States were asked to describe their current status and outline their future goals in meeting the criteria in each of these categories. The education policy priorities spanned six major scoring categories and one competitive preference category (see Table 1).

To assist states in writing their applications, ED offered technical assistance workshops, webinars, and training materials. Additionally, nonprofit organizations such as the National Council on Teacher Quality published reports intended to help states maximize their likelihood of winning an award. Nonetheless, substantial uncertainty shrouded some components of the competition, including the exact grading procedures, number of possible winners, total allocated prize amount per winning state, and prize allocation mechanism and timeline.

When all was said and done, 40 states and the District of Columbia submitted applications to Phase 1 of the competition. Finalists and winners were announced in March 2010. Phase 1 winners Tennessee and Delaware were awarded roughly $500 million and $120 million, respectively, which amounted to 10 percent and 5.7 percent of the two respective states’ budgets for K‒12 education for a single year. Figure 1 identifies all winners and award amounts.

Thirty-five states and the District of Columbia submitted applications to Phase 2 of the competition in June 2010. Ten winners were each awarded prizes between $75 million and $700 million in Phase 2.

Having exhausted the ARRA funds, the president in 2011 sought additional support for the competition. That spring, Congress allotted funds to support a third phase, in which only losing finalists from Phase 2 could participate. A significantly higher percentage of participating states won in Phase 3, although the amounts of these grants were considerably smaller than those from Phases 1 and 2. On December 23, 2011, ED announced Phase 3 winners, which received prizes ranging from $17 million to $43 million.

States that won Race to the Top grants were subject to a nontrivial monitoring process, complete with annual performance reports, accountability protocols, and site visits. After receiving an award letter, a state could immediately withdraw up to 12.5 percent of its overall award. The remaining balance of funds, however, was available to winning states only after ED received and approved a final scope of work from the state’s participating local education agencies. Each winning state’s drawdown of funds, then, depended upon its ability to meet the specific goals and timelines outlined in its scope of work.

Impact on State Policy

In its public rhetoric, the Obama administration emphasized its intention to use Race to the Top to stimulate new education-policy activity. How would we know if it succeeded? To identify the effects of Race to the Top on state-level policymaking, ideally one would take advantage of plausibly random variation in either eligibility or participation. Unfortunately, neither of these strategies is possible, as all states were allowed to enter the competition and participation was entirely voluntary. To discern Race to the Top’s policy consequences, therefore, I exploit other kinds of comparisons between policy changes in the 19 winning states and the District of Columbia, the 28 losers, and the 4 that did not participate; commitments that different states made in their applications and subsequent policymaking activities; and changes in policymaking at different intervals of the competitions.

Policy Adoptions. Perhaps the most telling piece of evidence related to the effect of Race to the Top is the number of relevant education reforms adopted as state policy in the aftermath of the competition’s announcement. To determine that number, my research team and I documented trends in actual policy enactments across the 50 states and the District of Columbia.  We tracked numerous policies that clearly fit the various criteria laid out under Race to the Top, and covered such topics as charter schools, data management, intervention into low-performing schools, and the use of test scores for school personnel policy, as well as three additional control policies—increased high-school graduation requirements, the establishment of 3rd-grade test-based promotion policies, and tax credits to support private-school scholarships—that were similar to Race to the Top policies but were neither mentioned nor rewarded under the program (see sidebar, opposite page, for specific policies tracked for Race to the Top applications and state adoptions).

Across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, we examined whether a state legislature, governor, school board, professional standards board, or any other governing body with statewide authority had enacted a qualifying policy each year between 2001 and 2014. Policies that were merely proposed or out for comment did not qualify. We also examined whether each state in its written application claimed to have already enacted each policy or expressed its clear intention to do so, as well as the number of points the application received in the scoring process.

These data reveal that the Race to the Top competitions did not reward states exclusively on the basis of what they had already done. Race to the Top, in this sense, did not function as an award ceremony for states’ past accomplishments. Rather, both states’ past accomplishments and their stated commitments to adopt new policies informed the scores they received—and hence their chances of winning federal funding.

We also found that states around the country enacted a subset of these reform policies at a much higher rate in the aftermath of Race to the Top than previously. Between 2001 and 2008, states on average enacted about 10 percent of reform policies. Between 2009 and 2014, however, they had enacted 68 percent. And during this later period, adoption rates increased every single year. At the rate established by preexisting trends, it would have taken states multiple decades to accomplish what, in the aftermath of the competitions, was accomplished in less than five years.

Policy Adoptions in Winning, Losing, and Nonapplying States. The surge of legislative activity was not limited to states that were awarded Race to the Top funding. Figure 2 illustrates the policy adoption activity of three groups of states: those that won in one of the three phases of competition; those that applied in at least one phase but never won; and those that never applied. In nearly every year between 2001 and 2008, policy adoption rates in these groups were both low and essentially indistinguishable from one another. In the aftermath of Race to the Top’s announcement, however, adoption rates for all three groups increased dramatically. By 2014, winning states had adopted, on average, 88 percent of the policies, compared to 68 percent among losing states, and 56 percent among states that never applied.

Regression analyses that account for previous policy adoptions and other state characteristics show that winning states were 37 percentage points more likely to have enacted a Race to the Top policy after the competitions than nonapplicant states. While losing states were also more likely than nonapplicants to have adopted such policies, the estimated effects for winning states are roughly twice as large. Anecdotal media reports, as well as interviews conducted by my research team, suggest that the process of applying to the competitions by itself generated some momentum behind policy reform. Such momentum, along with the increased attention given to Race to the Top policies, may explain why those states that did not even apply to the competition nonetheless began to enact these policies at higher rates.

Winning states were also more likely to have adopted one of the control policies, which is not altogether surprising, given the complementarities between Race to the Top policies and the chosen control policies. Still, the estimated relationship between winning and the adoption of Race to the Top policies is more than twice as large as that between winning and the adoption of control policies.

My results also suggest that both winning and losing states were especially likely to adopt policies about which they made clear commitments in their Race to the Top applications. Though the effects are not always statistically significant, winning states appear 21 percentage points more likely to adopt a policy about which they made a promise than one about which they did not; put differently, they were 36 percentage points more likely to adopt a policy about which they made an explicit commitment than were nonapplying states, which, for obvious reasons, made no promises at all. Losing states, meanwhile, were 31 percentage points more likely to adopt a policy on which they had made a promise than on a policy on which they had not.

Closer examination of winning, losing, and nonapplying states illuminates how Race to the Top influenced policymaking in all states, regardless of their status. One winning state, Illinois, submitted applications in all three phases before finally winning. Its biggest policy accomplishments, however, happened well before it received any funds from ED. The rapid enactment of Race to the Top policies in Illinois reflected a concerted effort by the state government to strengthen its application in each competition. Before the state even submitted its Phase 1 application, Illinois enacted the Performance Evaluation Reform Act (PERA), a law that significantly changed teacher and principal evaluation practices.

After losing in Phase 1, Illinois went on to adopt several other Race to the Top policies prior to submitting Phase 2 and Phase 3 applications. The competition served as a clear catalyst for education reform in the state. As Illinois state senator Kimberly Lightford noted, “It’s not that we’ve never wanted to do it before. I think Race to the Top was our driving force to get us all honest and fair, and willing to negotiate at the table.”

Whereas persistence eventually paid off for Illinois, California’s applications never resulted in Race to the Top funding. As in Illinois, lawmakers in California adopted several significant education reforms in an effort to solidify their chances of winning an award. Prior to the first-round deadline, the director of federal policy for Democrats for Education Reform noted that in California, “there’s been more state legislation [around education reform] in the last eight months than there was in the entire seven or eight years of No Child Left Behind, in terms of laws passed.”

California was not selected as a Phase 1 or Phase 2 winner, and a change in the governor’s mansion prior to Phase 3 meant the state would not compete in the last competition. While the state never did receive any funding, California did not revoke any of the policies it had enacted during its failed bids.

What about the four states that never applied for Race to the Top funding? By jump-starting education policy reform in some states, the competition may have influenced policy deliberations in others. Alaska provides a case in point. When Race to the Top was first announced, Alaska’s education commissioner, Larry LeDoux, cited concerns about federal government power and the program’s urban focus as reasons not to apply.

Still, in the years that followed, Alaska adopted a batch of policies that either perfectly or nearly perfectly aligned with Race to the Top priorities. One of the most consequential concerned the state’s teacher-evaluation system. In 2012, the Alaska Department of Education approved changes that required that 20 percent of a teacher’s assessment be based on data from at least one standardized test, a percentage that would increase to 50 by the 2018‒19 school year. In defending the rule, Governor Sean Parnell recognized the importance of keeping pace with other states’ policy achievements: “Nearly 20 states in the nation now weight at least 33 percent, and many 50 percent, of the performance evaluation based on student academic progress. I would like Alaska to lead in this, not bring up the rear with 20 percent of an evaluation focused on student improvement.” Those 20 states that had made the changes, it bears emphasizing, had participated in Race to the Top.

Policymaker Perspectives. To further assess the influence of Race to the Top on state policymaking, I consulted state legislators. Embedded in a nationally representative survey of state legislators conducted in the spring of 2014 was a question about the importance of Race to the Top for the education policy deliberations within their states. Roughly one-third of legislators reported that Race to the Top had either a “massive” or “big” impact on education policymaking in their state. Another 49 percent reported that it had a “minor” impact, whereas just 19 percent claimed that it had no impact at all.

Lawmakers’ responses mirror my finding that Race to the Top influenced policymaking in all states, with the greatest impact on winning states. Winners were fully 36 percentage points more likely to say that Race to the Top had a massive or big impact than losers, who, in turn, were 12 percentage points more likely than legislators in states that never applied to say as much. If these reports are to be believed, Race to the Top did not merely reward winning states for their independent policy achievements. Rather, the competitions meaningfully influenced education policymaking within their states.

Even legislators from nonapplying states recognized the relevance of Race to the Top for their education policymaking deliberations. Indeed, a majority of legislators from states that never applied nonetheless reported that the competitions had some influence over policymaking within their states. Although dosages vary, all states appear to have been “treated” by the Race to the Top policy intervention.

From Policy to Practice. None of the preceding analyses speak to the translation of policy enactments into real-world outcomes. For all sorts of reasons, the possibility that Race to the Top influenced the production of education policy around the country does not mean that it changed goings-on within schools and districts.

Still, preliminary evidence suggests that Race to the Top can count more than just policy enactments on its list of accomplishments. As Education Next has reported elsewhere (see “States Raise Proficiency Standards in Math and Reading,” features, Summer 2015), states introduced more rigorous standards for student academic proficiency in the aftermath of Race to the Top. Moreover, they did so in ways that reflected their experiences in the competition itself.

Figure 3a tracks over a 10-year period the average rigor of standards in states that eventually won Race to the Top, states that applied but never won, and states that never applied. Throughout this period, eventual winners and losers looked better than nonapplicants. Before the competition, though, winners and loser looked indistinguishable from one another.  Between 2003 and 2009, the rigor of their state standards declined at nearly identical rates and to identical levels. In the aftermath of Race to the Top, however, winning states rebounded dramatically, reaching unprecedented heights within just two years. While losing states showed some improvement, the reversal was not nearly as dramatic. Nonapplying states, meanwhile, maintained their relatively low standards.

The impact of Race to the Top on charter schools, which constituted a less significant portion of the competition, is not nearly so apparent. In winning states, higher percentages of public school students attend charter schools than in either losing or non-applying states. But as Figure 3b shows, post-Race to the Top gains appear indistinguishable from the projections of previous trends. While Race to the Top may have helped sustain previous gains, it seems unlikely. Between 2003 and 2013, the three groups of states showed nearly constant gains in charter school enrollments.

Conclusions and Implications

With Race to the Top, the Obama administration sought to remake education policy around the nation. The evidence presented in this paper suggests that it met with a fair bit of success. In the aftermath, states adopted at unprecedented rates policies that were explicitly rewarded under the competitions.

States that participated in the competitions were especially likely to adopt Race to the Top policies, particularly those on which they made explicit policy commitments in their applications. These patterns of policy adoptions and endorsements, moreover, were confirmed by a nationally representative sample of state legislators who were asked to assess the impact of Race to the Top on education policymaking in their respective states.

Differences in the policy actions of winning, losing, and nonapplying states, however, do not adequately characterize the depth or breadth of the president’s influence. In the aftermath of Race to the Top, all states experienced a marked surge in the adoption of education policies. And legislators from all states reported that Race to the Top affected policy deliberations within their states.

While it is possible that Race to the Top appeared on the scene at a time when states were already poised to enact widespread policy reforms, several facts suggest that the initiative is at least partially responsible for the rising rate of policy adoption from 2009 onward. First, winning states distinguished themselves from losing and nonapplying states more by the enactment of Race to the Top policies than by other related education reforms. Second, at least in 2009 and 2010, Race to the Top did not coincide with any other major policy initiative that could plausibly explain the patterns of policy activities documented in this paper. (Obama’s selective provision of waivers to No Child Left Behind, a possible confounder, did not begin until later.) Finally, state legislators’ own testimony confirms the central role that the competitions played in the adoption of state policies between 2009 and 2014, either by directly changing the incentives of policymakers within applying states or by generating cross-state pressures in nonapplying states.

The surge of post-2009 policy activity constitutes a major accomplishment for the Obama administration. With a relatively small amount of money, little formal constitutional authority in education, and without the power to unilaterally impose his will upon state governments, President Obama managed to jump-start policy processes that had languished for years in state governments around the country. When it comes to domestic policymaking, past presidents often accomplished a lot less with a lot more.

William G. Howell is professor of American politics at the University of Chicago.

The Common Core State Standards initiative (CCSS) seeks to “provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn” at various grade levels. For some education observers, CCSS will finally clarify for students, parents, and educators what students need to know and be able to do if they are to be prepared for college or a career. For others, CCSS interferes with local control of schools, limits teacher creativity, and diverts classroom time and energy away from instruction to test preparation. But as pundits and practitioners thrust and parry over these issues, they may be overlooking the potential impact of CCSS on public perceptions of school quality and public support for school reforms.

If CCSS is fully implemented as proposed by its most ardent adherents, including the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, it can be expected to alter the information Americans have about student performance at their local schools. Currently, the public has no national metric to guide its assessments of local school performance. At best, one can find out the percentage of students deemed proficient by state standards, which are known to vary widely in their definitions of proficiency. Were a common metric used to assess student performance, as CCSS promises, each school district could be ranked nationally as well as within its state.

Recently, the state of New York embraced CCSS, and in the process adopted a much higher definition of proficiency. When the new test results were released, the percentage of students identified as proficient in math dropped from 65 to 31, and in English from 55 to 31. The gap between white and minority students remained wide, as only 16 percent of black students and 18 percent of Hispanic students were deemed proficient in English. Asked for his opinion, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan replied that “the only way you improve is to tell the truth. And sometimes that’s a brutal truth.” The results ignited debate in New York City’s mayoral campaign, where candidates searched for ways to differentiate themselves from the Bloomberg administration’s education agenda.

Are the developments in New York unique to that state? Or is there reason to think that rigorous national standards, with accompanying measures of student performance, have the power to generate the political attention needed to refocus public opinion? To shed light on this topic, we report here experimental results from the 2013 Education Next poll, which consists of a representative sample of the American public, and which was conducted under the auspices of the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance.

Our findings reveal that when respondents learn how their local schools rank in comparison to the performance of schools elsewhere in the state or in the nation as a whole, they become more supportive of school choice proposals, such as making school vouchers available to all families, expanding charter schools, and giving parents the power to trigger changes in their local school. Upon learning the rankings of their local public schools, Americans also give lower evaluations to these institutions, just as they express less confidence in and support for teachers. A majority remain supportive of federal accoutnability provisions, however, whether or not they are informed of their district’s rankings.

Survey Methodology

Experiments generating these results were conducted as part of a 2013 Internet survey of several thousand members of the U.S. public, including oversamples of teachers, parents, African Americans, and Hispanic respondents. To carry out the experiments, we divided respondents randomly into groups of roughly 1,000. One representative group was left uninformed as to the performance of students at its local schools. (We realize, of course, that some within this group may have acquired knowledge about student performance independently from sources other than our survey questionnaire. The group is uninformed, therefore, only in the technical sense that its members were not given specific items of information supplied to the other groups.)

Other groups were given specific information about the performance of students in their local public schools. The information given to two of the groups is especially relevant for gauging the possible effects of the Common Core on public opinion. Members of these groups were told about either the state ranking of the average student in the respondent’s district on standardized tests of achievement or the national ranking of the performance of the average student in the district. The difference between the opinions of the uninformed group and those of each of these two groups provides clear estimates of the impacts of new student-performance information on public assessments of local schools and public views about school reform policies.

Once introduced, information on state and national rankings was available to the respondent throughout the survey, allowing respondents to make use of the data while contemplating their evaluations of schools and considering their views on policy matters. By making the information available, all policy questions are subjected to the treatment information. (See sidebar below for details on survey design; for full survey results, go to www.educationnext.org.)

We expect new information about local district rankings across the state and nation to alter public opinion in four domains. If the new information surprises respondents by indicating the district is doing less well than previously thought, the public, upon learning the truth of the matter, is likely to 1) lower its evaluation of local schools; 2) become more supportive of educational alternatives for families; 3) alter thinking about current policies affecting teacher compensation and retention; and 4) reassess its thinking about school and student accountability policies. In this regard, we expect the largest changes to occur in those districts that rank below the median district nationwide. Meanwhile, should local schools perform higher than expected, as they may for at least some respondents living in districts in the upper half of the national rankings, then the opposite pattern of results may emerge. In the remainder of this report, we show the extent to which our findings are consistent with such expectations.

Accountability Standards

Critics of CCSS in New York are calling for a moratorium on the use of new standards and testing. As Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, recently penned, “In New York, officials rushed to impose tests and consequences way before students were ready…. That’s why last spring I called for a moratorium—not on the standards or even on the testing, but on the stakes that could unfairly hurt students, teachers and schools during this transition to the Common Core. Tens of thousands have supported this moratorium.” But we find little evidence of a public backlash against Common Core and test-based accountability, at least on the basis of new information about local school district rankings. In the absence of any information about local student performance, 64 percent of Americans support CCSS and only 13 percent oppose them. Support among those residing in below-average districts does drop by 7 percentage points when statewide ranking information is provided, but even among this group a clear majority remains supportive. Respondents in more highly ranked districts remain unfazed.

We also asked respondents what they think about requiring 3rd-grade students to pass a state reading test before moving on to the 4th grade. Nearly four in five uninformed Americans support this requirement, and information about local district ranking does not reduce support for this sort of high-stakes testing in either above-average or below-average districts. Knowledge of district rankings, however, has a slight effect on support for high school graduation exams. As with high-stakes tests for 3rd graders, Americans come out strongly in favor of graduation requirements. In both high- and low-performing districts, however, support for this requirement drops 5 percentage points when respondents are informed of how students in their community compare with the rest of the nation. Even then, however, roughly 70 percent of respondents express support for graduation requirements.

In short, there seems to be some evidence that better information about a district’s ranking weakens support for accountability, but the downward shift is modest relative to the overall support for these policies, and it is generally limited to residents of below-average districts.

Evaluations of Schools

When asked to evaluate their local public schools, uninformed Americans give much more positive assessments than they offer when asked about the nation’s schools. Overall, 49 percent say that their local public schools deserve an “A” or a “B” on the scale traditionally used to evaluate students, but only 20 percent say so when respondents are asked about schools nationwide. The distance between these two judgments narrows, however, when Americans are told the ranking of their local school districts either within their state or in the nation as a whole. Those giving local schools one of the two highest grades stands at 49 percent among the uninformed but just 41 percent among those told their own district’s ranking relative to other districts across the state (see Figure 1). When given the district’s national ranking, the portion of respondents giving these high evaluations drops to 38 percent. Interestingly, the size of the decline is roughly the same whether the respondent lives in a school district ranking above or below the state or national average.

While information about local district rankings shifts evaluations of local schools downward, it has little impact on assessments of the nation’s schools. This should not surprise, given that the provided information concerned the ranking of the respondent’s own local school district rather than the nation’s schools as a whole. Moreover, the public already has a pretty good understanding of the quality of the nation’s schools. Before introducing the experiment, we asked all respondents to give their best estimate of the U.S. high-school graduation rate within four years of students entering 9th grade. The public estimate is 66 percent, a bit lower than the 72 percent estimated by the U.S. Department of Education. We also asked the public to estimate international ranking for the math performance of U.S. 15-year-olds. On this matter, the public’s knowledge is surprisingly accurate. On average, the public thinks U.S. students rank about 19th internationally, just a bit better than the 25th place that a test administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has shown. In other words, Americans are clearheaded—even somewhat skeptical—about the nation’s schools. It comes as no surprise, then, that their perceptions of schools across the country remain unmoved when they receive information on their local district’s ranking.

Education observers have long noted an apparent “paradox” created by the public’s skeptical assessments of the nation’s schools and the much more favorable ratings given to local schools. Theoretically, the ratings should be identical (since a representative sample of local schools is the same as the schools in the nation as a whole). Our findings reveal that the size of the differential drops from 29 percentage points to 18 percentage points once information about the local district’s national ranking is supplied. In other words, the supposed paradox attenuates rather substantially once some basic information is supplied about the performance of local public schools.

School Choice

Information about local district rankings increases public support for school choice programs, including charter schools, parent trigger mechanisms, and, especially, school vouchers for all students.

Vouchers. It is generally thought that targeted school vouchers, i.e., vouchers limited to students from low-income families, have more widespread support than does a universal voucher program, which would allow any family to make use of a government voucher to attend a private school. Accordingly, the school voucher programs enacted by legislatures in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and Washington, D.C., have all been targeted to students from low-income families. But we find that support for universal vouchers expands when the public learns about the relative ranking of the local district schools, while support for targeted vouchers actually declines somewhat (see Figure 2).

Overall, 43 percent of the uninformed American public support “a [universal voucher] proposal that would give families with children in public schools a wider choice by allowing them to enroll their children in private schools instead, with government helping to pay the tuition,” while just 37 percent oppose the idea, with the remainder taking no position on the issue. Support for universal vouchers increases from 43 percent to 56 percent when respondents are told how students in their local district rank nationally, and to 54 percent when a state ranking is provided. In districts that perform in the bottom half of the test-score distribution, support for vouchers climbs even higher, to 62 percent, when information is supplied. In short, information about student performance dramatically increases public support for universal vouchers.

Not so, though, when the public is asked about a proposal “that would use government funds to pay the tuition of low-income students who choose to attend private schools.” Such a targeted voucher proposal leaves uninformed Americans evenly divided between support and opposition, with 41 percent in favor, 45 percent opposed, and the remainder holding no opinion. When respondents are told how well local students rank nationally, however, support for targeted voucher programs falls to 34 percent. Receiving information on state rankings has a similar, if less pronounced, effect on public opinion: support slips to 38 percent, while opposition increases slightly to 47 percent.

Respondents in lower-performing districts who are told of their own district’s national ranking do not respond to the targeted voucher proposal differently from those left uninformed. But when respondents are told of their district’s state ranking, support for targeted vouchers falls by 9 percentage points. Just the opposite pattern is found for respondents in higher-performing districts. For them, information about their district’s rankings within their state does not change opinions about targeted vouchers. But when they are told about their district’s national ranking, their support for targeted vouchers falls by 11 percentage points. Apparently, learning about their district’s national ranking shocks those living in above-average districts, even when learning about their district’s state ranking does not.

In sum, 56 percent of those informed of their local district’s national rankings favor universal vouchers, but only 34 percent support targeted vouchers. That differs sharply from the 43 percent and 41 percent support for universal and targeted vouchers, respectively, among those not provided this information. A statistically insignificant 2-percentage-point difference in support for targeted and universal vouchers widens to a dramatic 22-percentage-point difference when basic information about school rankings is supplied.

Why should learning about a local district ranking sharply increase support for universal vouchers but have the opposite impact on targeted vouchers? The most plausible explanation is that the public is shocked at the low ranking of the local district and, in response, exhibit greater support for alternatives to the traditional public school. Such alternatives, however, should be open to all families, not just those with low incomes. Having learned that school quality in the local district is lower than previously thought, the public endorses a policy solution that reaches beyond the particular problems of low-income residents.

Charters. As it does on vouchers, new information also affects public opinion about charter schools. Among uninformed Americans, 51 percent “support the formation of charter schools,” and only 26 percent oppose their formation, with another 24 percent indicating that they neither favor nor oppose charters. When respondents are given the state and national ranking of local district schools, charter support shifts upward to 56 percent and 58 percent, respectively (see Figure 3).

Respondents in below-average districts are particularly likely to back charters when informed about their schools’ state and national rankings. For them, support for charter schools jumps by 14 percentage points and by 11 percentage points when they learn about the state and national ranking, respectively. Meanwhile, the opinion of respondents in districts whose national ranking is above average does not change in response to information about district ranking.

Parent trigger. A similar pattern appears for the “parent trigger” proposal, which would allow a majority of parents whose children attend a low-performing traditional public school “to sign a petition requiring the district to convert the school into a charter.” Providing information about state or national rankings increases support for a parent trigger to 46 percent and 47 percent, respectively, from the 42 percent of uninformed Americans who back the proposal. This effect is confined to those living in districts that rank below average. In these districts, support jumps from 38 percent to 46 percent when respondents are informed of performance relative to other districts within the state, and to 49 percent when they are informed of relative performance nationwide. Those living in districts with above-average rankings do not change their opinions with respect to the parent trigger when given information.

Overall, public support for school choice increases when the public is informed of the local district’s ranking in the state or nation. The jump in support is particularly large among those residing in districts that have below-average ranking. Just as information on state and national ranking lowers evaluations of the public schools, it increases the willingness of the public to support alternatives to the traditional public school. When it comes to vouchers, however, the upward shift is conditional on school choice being provided for all students, not just those from low-income families.

Teachers and Teacher Policy

Information about local district rankings not only alters public readiness to consider educational alternatives, but it also changes public opinion on teacher quality, teachers unions, teacher tenure, and teacher compensation.

Evaluating teachers. Uninformed Americans’ tepid evaluation of the nation’s schools carries over to their assessments of public school teachers. Only 41 percent of Americans say they have either “a lot” or “complete” trust and confidence in public school teachers. Meanwhile, 59 percent say they have only a “little” or just “some” trust and confidence in public school teachers. Overall, information about state and national rankings does not alter these assessments. But when respondents in below-average districts are told about state and national rankings, the level of confidence in teachers falls by 7 and 8 percentage points, respectively. No statistically significant impacts are observed in the districts with above-average rankings.

Teachers unions. To gauge the public’s assessment of teachers unions, we asked the following question: “Some people say that teachers unions are a stumbling block to school reform. Others say that unions fight for better schools and better teachers. What do you think? Do you think teachers unions have a generally positive effect on schools, or do you think they have a generally negative effect?” Only 32 percent of uninformed Americans respond favorably, while 43 percent claim that teachers unions have a generally negative effect. (Another 25 percent adopt a neutral stance.) It is interesting to note, though, that uninformed respondents from districts with below-average rankings express much more favorable views of teachers unions. No less than 39 percent have a positive view of unions, compared to just 27 percent in those districts with above-average rankings (see Figure 4).

When informed about district rankings, Americans’ opinions about teachers unions shift in opposite directions. In below-average districts, positive evaluations of unions drop from 39 percent to 27 percent when state ranking information is supplied, while in above-average districts, positive assessments shift upward from 27 percent to 32 percent. A similar but less dramatic turnaround is observed when national ranking information is supplied.

Although informing people of the ranking of the local school district changes their views of teachers unions, the shift in opinion depends on whether the local district has a high or low ranking relative to other districts. Evaluations of unions climb by 5 percentage points if the respondent’s district is ranked high relative to other districts statewide, but falls by 12 percentage points if it is ranked low.

Teacher tenure. Information about local school rankings also depresses support for teacher job protections. Nearly half of the uninformed members of the public oppose teacher tenure, a third favor the policy, and the remainder do not take a position either way. When respondents are told how their local schools rank either in the state or country, support for teacher tenure falls even further, dropping by 6 or 8 percentage points, respectively. The difference between the informed and the uninformed in below-average districts is slightly larger: 6 percentage points when given state ranking and 11 percentage points when given national ranking.

Teacher compensation. When it comes to teacher pay, the influence of information is more complex. Among uninformed respondents, 55 percent of Americans favor a salary increase. When respondents are told the state rankings of their local schools, that percentage climbs to 63 percent, and to 58 percent when told the national rankings (the latter change is not statistically significant). The public seems to be perfectly willing to pay teachers more in order to address the poorer-than-expected quality of local schools (see Figure 5).

As it turns out, though, that conclusion is not altogether warranted, for when the public is informed about current teacher salary levels, its enthusiasm for salary increases wanes noticeably. Instead of 55 percent in favor, only 38 percent of those informed of current pay levels endorse salary increases. A further downward shift—to 30 percent support—occurs among respondents residing in school districts ranked below average nationally when both salary and ranking information are given. Among those living in above-average districts, however, support for raising teacher salaries remains essentially unchanged once they learn of their district’s standing nationally.

In other words, public views on teacher compensation are influenced by both information on current levels of spending and information about a local district’s ranking nationwide. If information on current salaries is not provided, support for salary increments goes up in those districts that rank above average when respondents learn this fact. However, information on current spending reduces public support for increased expenditure in all districts, and support for salary increments drops further in below-average districts when respondents are informed of both current salaries and of their district ranking.

Teacher policy overall. Taken as a whole, information about local school rankings has a less substantial impact on public thinking about teacher policy than it has on thinking about school choice policies. Whereas the impacts on school choice were large and consistent (other than for targeted vouchers), the impacts on teacher policy depend more on the district’s national ranking. Informed respondents living in below-average districts are more likely to lower their assessment of teacher quality, withdraw their support for teachers unions, become more opposed to teacher tenure, and grow more reluctant to back salary increments for teachers. Informed respondents living in above-average districts, however, actually back higher salaries for teachers (if uninformed of current levels) and give greater support to teachers unions.

Common Core and Public Opinion

If CCSS were to enhance public knowledge of the performance of local schools as compared to schools elsewhere in the state and nation, the impact on the school reform debate could be substantial, especially (but not exclusively) in those districts that are ranked below average nationally. Public assessments of local schools would shift in a more skeptical direction; support for universal voucher initiatives, charter schools, and the parent trigger would increase; limits to teacher tenure would gain greater public support; and both teachers unions and demands for increases in teacher salaries would confront greater public skepticism.

These conclusions come with caveats, however. When information is supplied as part of a survey, it is not subject to dispute by those who have an interest in obfuscating certain facts and emphasizing others. Further, our findings do not touch upon the substantive merits of a CCSS-based curriculum that is the focus of so much public discussion. And perhaps most consequentially, a long stride separates changes in public opinion and political action. Indeed, we find very little evidence that people would become more politically engaged if they actually knew the state and national rankings of their local school districts. It would take considerable leadership and political mobilization to capitalize on any changes in public opinion that CCSS might arouse.

Still, there is a certain irony in the fact that CCSS’s opponents favor many of the reforms that seem primed for winning greater public approval should the standards be fully implemented. Some have said that conservative opponents of CCSS are shooting themselves in the foot. Our evidence does not contradict that suggestion.

Michael B. Henderson is assistant professor of political science at the University of Mississippi. William G. Howell is professor in American Politics at the University of Chicago’s Harris School and co-director of the Program on Political Institutions. Paul E. Peterson is the director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Complete survey results available here.

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In the following essays, we identify some of the key findings from the sixth annual Education Next-PEPG Survey, a nationally representative sample of U.S. citizens interviewed during April and May of 2012 (for survey methodology, see sidebar). Highlights include

• the Republican tilt of the education views of independents

• the especially high marks that Hispanics give their public schools

• strong support among the general public for using test-score information to hold teachers accountable

• lower confidence in teachers than has previously been reported

• the public’s (and teachers’) growing uneasiness with teachers unions

• the shaky foundations of public support for increased spending

• majority support for a broad range of school choice initiatives.

In addition to the views of the public as a whole, in this year’s survey special attention is paid to Hispanics, African Americans, parents, and teachers, all of whom were oversampled in order to obtain a sufficient number of observations. And in an effort to assess the sensitivity of respondents’ opinions to information and question wording, we embedded in this survey, as we have done in previous ones, various experiments. Responses to all questions are posted on our website, www.educationnext.org.

Independents lean Republican in their views of teachers unions and school spending—and support private school choice.

With Barack Obama and Mitt Romney running neck and neck, the nation’s eyes are trained on independent voters, who will likely decide the presidential election. And in the days leading up to the national conventions, education policy, though hardly at the top of the public agenda, did assume a more prominent role in both campaigns. Which candidate is best positioned to use education to bring undecided voters into the fold? The answer may be surprising.

Just one-third of independents report that President Obama has done an “excellent” or “good” job of handling education issues, while the rest assign him a “fair” or “poor” rating. And on the education policy issues that most clearly divide the parties—the role of teachers unions and support for school spending—the views of independents hew closer to those of Republicans than of Democrats. Moreover, independents are more supportive than members of either party of expanding private school choice for disadvantaged students, the centerpiece of Governor Romney’s proposals for K–12 education reform.

Whereas 25 percent of respondents to the EdNext-PEPG survey report that they are Republicans and 34 percent say that they are Democrats, fully 41 percent claim no affiliation with either major party. Of this group, 52 percent claim that they lean Democratic, while just 40 percent lean Republican. On key education issues, however, these independents express views that better align with Republicans.

No single education issue divides Republicans and Democrats more sharply than the role of teachers unions (see Figure 1). Seventy-one percent of Republicans report that the teachers unions have a generally negative effect on schools, as compared to just 29 percent of Democrats. Though independents come down in between, a majority of them (56 percent) agree with Republicans that unions have a negative effect.

Republican and Democratic voters also diverge in their preferences on school spending and teacher salaries. Figure 2 shows that when not provided with information about current spending levels, 79 percent of Democrats say that spending on public schools in their local district should increase, as compared with 50 percent of Republicans. Among independents, 57 percent support increased spending, again placing them closer to Republicans in their view of the issue. And when respondents are informed about current spending levels, the gap between Republicans and independents vanishes: 39 percent of both groups support spending increases, compared to just 51 percent of Democrats.

The same pattern holds for teacher salaries: when respondents are not provided with information about current salary levels, 60 percent of independents support increasing teacher salaries, placing them closer to Republicans (54 percent of whom support increases) than to Democrats (75 percent). Providing information on current teacher salaries in their state reduces support for salary increases among independents to 34 percent—exactly the same as among Republicans. Information also shrinks the share of Democrats supporting salary increases to 41 percent.

Governor Romney has made the expansion of school choice for disadvantaged students central to his campaign, calling for the expansion of the Washington, D.C., voucher program and for allowing low-income and special education students to use federal funds to enroll in private schools. It is perhaps surprising, then, to find that Republicans are less supportive of this concept than are Democrats (see Figure 3). Just 42 percent of Republicans express support for the idea, compared to 52 percent of Democrats. Voucher support among independents appears to be as high as (or greater than) it is among Democrats, at 54 percent.

Hispanics like public schools but not all union demands in contract negotiations.

Increasingly, both the Republican and Democratic parties have sought ways to court Hispanics. Though they lean Democratic—63 percent of Hispanic adults approve of the way President Barack Obama is handling his job as president—they are not as blue as is the African American community, 92 percent of whom give Obama a thumbs-up.

Those seeking the Hispanic vote in 2012 should know that education is an issue that resonates with the Latino community. Almost 60 percent of those we surveyed say they are “very” or “quite a bit” interested in education issues, as compared to less than 40 percent of African American and white voters.

On many topics—including school vouchers, charter schools, digital learning, student and school accountability, common core standards, and teacher recruitment and retention policies—the views of Hispanic adults do not differ noticeably from those of either whites or African Americans.

But in certain domains—estimates of school costs and school quality, support for teachers unions, teacher tenure, and teacher pensions—the views of Hispanics differ rather substantially. Their judgment of the American school is generous, perhaps because they compare public schools in the United States to much less effective institutions in Mexico, Cuba, and other parts of Latin America. They also underestimate the costs of running public schools, though they revise their thinking rather substantially about the merits of spending increases once they learn the facts. They are less supportive of unions and union demands than are African Americans.

Nearly 40 percent of Hispanic adults give the nation’s public schools a grade of an “A” or a “B” on the traditional scale used to evaluate schools (see Figure 4). When asked about the public schools in their community, no less than 55 percent give such favorable assessments. By comparison, whites and African Americans express significantly less enthusiasm about the nation’s schools. Less than 20 percent of whites and African Americans accord the nation’s schools an “A” or a “B,” and only around 40 percent give the schools in their community one of these two top grades.

Hispanic respondents think American students perform better academically than is actually the case. American 15-year-olds ranked no better than 25th among the 34 developed democracies participating in the latest round of international tests. Yet nearly 45 percent of Hispanics say student math performance in the United States ranks among the top 15 countries in the world in math. Only 30 percent of white and African American respondents place the United States that high.

Hispanic respondents also think the public schools cost a lot less than they actually do. While annual per-pupil expenditures run around $12,500, Hispanics, on average, estimate their cost at less than $5,000. Whites and African Americans estimate the costs to be more than $7,000.

The same goes for teacher salaries, which average about $56,000 a year. On average, Hispanics think teachers are paid little more than $25,000 a year; blacks, on average, think they are paid around $30,000 a year; and whites estimate salaries at $35,000.

When told just how much schools cost, however, Hispanic respondents adjust their thinking quite dramatically. When informed about actual per-pupil expenditures, Hispanics’ support for higher taxes to fund spending increases drops from 46 percent to 25 percent. When given the actual amount teachers receive, their support for higher salaries plummets nearly in half—from over 60 percent to little more than 30 percent.

Although learning the truth about costs and salaries has a similar impact on white opinion, African Americans remain more committed to higher spending. Thirty-seven percent of African Americans favor higher taxes, even when told how much is currently being spent, only a slight dip from the 42 percent favorable when that information is withheld. When given the facts about teacher salaries, African American support for higher salaries drops 20 percentage points—from 74 percent to 54 percent.

Like other ethnic groups, Hispanics do not appear especially sympathetic to teachers union demands in collective bargaining negotiations. Sixty-two percent of Hispanic adults think teachers should pay 20 percent of their pension and health care costs, as do 56 percent of African Americans.

By an overwhelming margin (87 percent), Hispanic respondents favor proposals to condition teacher tenure on their students’ making adequate progress on state tests. Whites and African Americans also favor such proposals but not to the same degree (75 percent and 80 percent, respectively). When it comes to whether teachers unions are playing a more positive or a more negative role in their local community, Hispanic adults come out in the middle—at 59 percent in support, they are more supportive than whites (45 percent) but less supportive than African Americans (75 percent).

Use test scores for evaluations, says the public (but not the teachers).

Teachers have long been paid primarily on the basis of their academic credentials and years of experience, creating in most parts of the country a lockstep pay scale that does not account for a teacher’s classroom performance. This approach is often justified on the grounds that it precludes favoritism on the part of principals, school board members, and other administrative officials.

As teacher effectiveness has become an increasingly visible policy issue, standard approaches to salary and tenure decisions are undergoing substantial change. More than 20 states now require that student test-score gains be used in key personnel decisions, often including tenure and salary determinations. Four states go so far as to prohibit a teacher from receiving a top rating if students do not exceed a certain level of accomplishment, while another 10 require that achievement gains constitute at least 50 percent of each teacher’s evaluation.

Is the public onboard with these changes? And what do teachers think about them? To find out, we randomly divided those interviewed into two groups (see Figure 5). The first group was given a stark choice: How much weight should be given to test scores and how much should be given to principal recommendations?

Given this simple dichotomy, the public says test-score gains should be given more than half the weight (62 percent) in making salary and tenure decisions. Teachers, by contrast, are prepared to place only a quarter of the weight (24 percent) on this information, with the other three-fourths of the weight being given to principal recommendations.

The second half of the sample was asked a more complex question, which required giving weights to test scores and evaluations from four different sources: principals, parents, students, and fellow teachers.

When the question was posed this way, the public and the teachers once again disagree. The public would place about one-third of the weight (32 percent) on test scores, but teachers would assign them less than one-fifth (19 percent). Conversely, teachers would give principal recommendations nearly half the weight (44 percent), while the public would give their recommendations less than one-quarter (23 percent).

Perhaps surprisingly, teachers are unenthusiastic about being evaluated by their fellow teachers. Like the rest of the public, they divide up the remaining weight more or less equally among the three remaining sources of evidence (students, parents, and fellow teachers).

An even bigger gap between teachers and the public emerges on the desirability of releasing information about teacher performance to the public at large. In both New York City and Los Angeles, newspapers have published such information, provoking an outcry among teachers, who felt their privacy had been invaded. When we asked respondents about this as a general practice, 78 percent of the public expresses support, compared to just 33 percent of teachers (see Figure 6).

When given the option of expressing neutrality on the issue (as another randomly chosen half of the sample was), 60 percent of the public still says it supports the publication of information about teacher performance, while only 13 percent is opposed, the remaining 27 percent taking the neutral position. Teacher opinion is almost the mirror image. Fifty-four percent oppose making information on test-score impacts publicly available, 30 percent express support, with the remaining 16 percent not taking a clear position either way.

Are teachers unions undermining teacher popularity?

Teachers have long held a cherished place in American popular culture. In such films as Blackboard Jungle, Stand and Deliver, and Dead Poets Society, Hollywood has highlighted the power of teachers to utterly transform the lives of their students.

But is this now changing? Are Waiting for Superman, Bad Teacher, and Won’t Back Down (forthcoming “A Takeover Tale,” cultured, Winter 2013) harbingers of a new, more skeptical depiction of teachers? At first, it would seem that public trust in teachers is widespread. When we asked half of the respondents in our survey whether they “have trust and confidence in the men and women who are teaching children in the public schools,” no less than 72 percent say “yes” (see Figure 7). This is almost exactly what Phi Delta Kappan (PDK), a publication sympathetic to teachers unions, found in its 2012 poll and about the same as in PDK polls in previous years.

When we expand the possible response categories, however, a somewhat different picture emerges. Only 4 percent of the American public has “complete” trust and confidence in teachers, and just 38 percent has “a lot” of trust and confidence in them. Meanwhile, 49 percent has “some” trust and confidence, and 9 percent has “little” trust and confidence. In other words, 58 percent of those surveyed express less than “a lot of trust and confidence” in the teaching force.

Since this is the first time the public has been asked to break its assessment of teachers into four categories, we cannot document any trends over time. But we do know that public opinion toward teachers unions—and teachers’ opinions of them, too—has turned in a negative direction. The portion who thinks that teachers unions have had a positive effect on their local schools has dropped by 7 percentage points over the past year. Among teachers, the downward shift is no less than 16 percentage points.

In this year’s survey, as we have done in the past, we asked the following question: “Some people say teachers unions are a stumbling block to school reform. Others say that unions fight for better schools and better teachers. What is your opinion? Do you think teachers unions have a generally positive view on your local schools, or do you think they have a generally negative effect?” Respondents could choose among five options: very positive, somewhat positive, neither positive nor negative, somewhat negative, and very negative.

In our polls from 2009 to 2011, we saw little change in public opinion. Around 40 percent of respondents took the neutral position, saying that unions had neither a positive nor a negative impact. The remainder were divided almost evenly, with the negative share just barely exceeding the positive.

This year, however, the teachers unions lost ground. While 41 percent of the public still takes the neutral position, the portion with a positive view of unions dropped 7 percentage points in the last year, from 29 percent to 22 percent.

The drop is even greater, in both magnitude and significance, among our nationally representative sample of teachers. At a time when, according to education journalist and union watchdog Mike Antonucci, the National Education Association has lost 150,000 members over the past two years, and projects to lose 200,000 more members by 2014, teacher discontent appears to be rising. Whereas 58 percent of teachers had a positive view of unions in 2011, only 43 percent do so in 2012. Meanwhile, the percentage of teachers holding negative views of unions nearly doubled during this period, from 17 percent to 32 percent.

But when that same question was posed in either/or terms to the public as a whole, respondents split down the middle: 51 percent say unions had a negative impact, while 49 percent say their effect was positive. Teachers, meanwhile, offered a more positive assessment. When forced to choose between just two options, 71 percent of teachers claim that unions are a force for good, whereas 29 percent see them as a stumbling block to reform.

Support for school spending is shaky.

With the U.S. economy trying to crawl back to recovery, an unemployment rate above 8 percent, and state and local governments facing the prospect of insolvency, many school districts have found it necessary to cut expenditures and personnel. In California, the cities of Stockton and San Bernardino have declared bankruptcy. In Michigan, the financially bankrupt Muskegon schools have been handed over to a for-profit charter organization. Cuts in arts programs and extracurricular activities are becoming commonplace. Nationwide, the number of school employees has drifted downward by as much as 5 percent in the past few years.

Still, the American public continues to support increasing spending on local public schools. Or at least it appears to do so (see Figure 8). Sixty-three percent of the general public says it prefers an increase in school expenditures in the local district, well up from levels in 2007 when only 51 percent of the public called for expenditure increases. Not surprisingly, teachers are even more enthusiastic about increasing expenditures, 68 percent of whom like the idea.

When one investigates the issue just a bit further, however, fractures can be detected in the public’s willingness to spend more on public schools. Though most Americans still offer their support for spending increases in the abstract, their enthusiasm ebbs rather substantially when the taxes needed to pay for the increased expenditures are broached and when information about actual expenditures and salaries is provided.

Part of the explanation for this is the widespread ignorance on the part of the general public about just how much already is spent on public schools. When asked to estimate per-pupil expenditure in their district, Americans guess that expenditures are about $6,500 annually, when in fact they are around $12,500. That is only a slightly better set of estimates than the ones given in 2009, when Americans thought $4,231 was being spent per pupil and the reality was closer to $10,000 (see “Educating the Public,” features, Summer 2009).

When respondents are told the correct figure, support for spending on public schools shifts sharply downward. Support for increased spending on our standard question drops by 20 percentage points, a much bigger drop than what was observed in 2009, when support for increased spending fell only 8 percentage points (from 46 percent to 38 percent).

In another sign of less-than-wholehearted support for an education spending spree, only 35 percent of the public says taxes should increase to fund the schools. Support drops by another 11 percentage points—to just 24 percent—when those interviewed were first told how much was currently being spent.

Teachers, who stand to benefit from increased expenditure, remain committed to more spending when told the realities of the expenditure situation in their district. Their support slips only 8 percentage points from the high of 68 percent when no information is supplied about current expenditures. But even teachers are 17 percentage points less likely to support higher taxes to fund increases in education spending.

When the subject turns from per-pupil expenditures to teacher salaries, the same pattern emerges (see Figure 9). When asked without any accompanying information, nearly two out of three Americans think that teacher salaries should go up. Among teachers, support for a salary boost registers at no less than 85 percent.

As they do on per-pupil expenditures, however, Americans hold markedly inaccurate views about actual teacher salaries. When asked to hazard a guess, Americans estimate that public school teachers in their states receive, on average, about $36,000 in salary annually. The true figure, even without accounting for benefits, pensions, and the like, sits at about $56,000 nationwide.

Support for higher salaries plummets, however, when Americans are told how much teachers actually make in their states. Of those given the facts, only 36 percent favor an increase, which amounts to a whopping 28-percentage-point decline from the 64 percent favoring an increase when no information is supplied.

When teachers were given accurate information about salary levels in their state, their support slips by only 10 percentage points, probably because they are thinking about their own paycheck. Also, they have a better sense of teacher salaries in their state than the public has, estimating them to be about $44,000 annually.

Is public support for charters really that much higher than for vouchers and tax credits?

As a policy reform, school choice shows no signs of slowing. The number of states with school-voucher and tax-credit programs has escalated since 2010, the number of students attending charter schools climbs steadily year by year, and new technologies for online learning are being promoted by a cascade of new entrepreneurs.

The contours of elite debate about school choice, however, are not replicated in the larger public. While charter schools and digital learning are thought to be the safest choice options for political elites to promote, tax credits are even more popular than charters, and vouchers, the most controversial proposal, also command the support of half the population when the idea is posed in an inviting way.

Vouchers and tax credits. When it comes to school vouchers, apparent levels of public support turn on the wording of the question. For the past two years, PDK has asked whether respondents “favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense.” Even with the rather loaded “at public expense” phrasing, PDK reported that support shifted upward from 34 percent to 44 percent between 2011 and 2012.

If one asks the question in a more inviting manner, as we have, support jumps further still (see Figure 10). Told about a proposal “that would give low-income families with children in public schools a wider choice, by allowing them to enroll their children in private schools instead, with government helping to pay the tuition,” 50 percent of the American public comes out in support and 50 percent expresses opposition.

Still, support for vouchers does not match public willingness to back tax credits, even though most economists think the difference between vouchers and tax credits more a matter of style than substance. Nearly three-fourths (72 percent) of the public favors a “tax credit for individual and corporate donations that pay for scholarships to help low-income parents send their children to private schools.” We find little evidence that support for tax credits has changed significantly since 2011.

Charters. Figure 11 shows that when given a choice of supporting or opposing charter schools, 62 percent of the public says it favors ”the formation of charter schools,” nearly identical to what PDK finds (66 percent favoring ”the idea of charter schools”). Support for charters, however, is softer than it might seem. When respondents are given the opportunity to take a neutral position that neither supports nor opposes charters, no less than 41 percent choose that option. Among the remainder, the split is nearly three to one in favor of charters.

Meanwhile, public knowledge about charters remains as impoverished as ever. As our survey did two years ago, we asked respondents a variety of factual questions: whether charter schools can hold religious services, charge tuition, receive more or less per-pupil funding than traditional public schools, and are legally obligated to admit students randomly when oversubscribed. We found little change in the level of public information over the past two years. Large percentages of respondents still say they don’t know the answers to these questions. Among those who hazard a guess, they are as likely to give the wrong answer as the correct one. Although teachers do a better job of accurately identifying the characteristics of charter schools, even a majority of teachers get many of the answers wrong or say they don’t know.

Online education. As major universities—Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and others—are joining community colleges and state universities in a nationwide dash toward online learning in higher education, many states are exploring ways of incorporating new digital technologies into secondary schools.

A substantial share of both the public and the teaching force seems ready to consider the expansion of online learning. When asked if high school students should be allowed to take “approved classes either online or in school,” opinion splits down the middle, with a bare majority (53 percent to 47 percent) favoring the idea. Teachers are more enthusiastic, among whom no less than 61 percent feel students should be given an online option.

The public, however, is not equally enthusiastic about all uses of the online tool, nor is support for the idea gaining strength. The most popular uses are for rural education and advanced course taking. Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed think students in rural areas should have online opportunities, with only 14 percent opposing the idea. That is down modestly from the 64 percent who supported this use in 2008. Similar percentages of support and opposition are expressed for advanced courses taken online for college credit. But once again, levels of support have slipped since 2008 (from 68 percent to 57 percent in 2012).

Less popular are online courses for dropouts and home schoolers. Only 44 percent favor, and 30 percent oppose, using public funding to help dropouts take courses online. Many home schoolers find online courses to be a valuable tool, but the public remains dubious. Only 28 percent favors public funding for such uses, and 38 percent opposes it. Those percentages have not changed materially since 2008.

William G. Howell is professor of American politics at the University of Chicago. Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and deputy director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. Paul E. Peterson is the director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Complete survey results available here.

Education Next readers took this survey as well. See how their responses compared.

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Public education has rarely been far from the national headlines over the past year. Efforts to limit teachers’ collective-bargaining rights led to mass protests in several states. The enactment of voucher programs renewed the debate over the role of private school choice in American education. Meanwhile, the first significant bud­get cuts in recent memory forced public school districts to tighten their belts in unprecedented ways. The Obama administration has encouraged a nationwide effort to develop common school standards. And let’s not forget Waiting for “Superman,” the high-profile documentary whose poignant portrayal of the charter-school admissions process, coupled with a critique of union power in public schools, was expected to have a significant impact on national opinion.

But how have Americans actually responded to these developments? Have they grown more supportive of the current direction of school reform, or are there instead signs of a backlash? And how do the views of teachers compare to those of the public at large?

These are among the questions we explore in this, the fifth-annual Education Next–PEPG Survey, which interviewed a nationally representative sample of some 2,600 American citizens during April and May of 2011 (see sidebar for survey methodology). In addition to the views of the public as a whole, we pay special attention in this year’s survey to two potentially influential types of participants in school politics: the affluent and teachers. To our knowledge, this is the first survey of a nationally representative sample of affluent Americans, defined as college graduates who are in the top income decile in their state. This is the third year we have surveyed a nationally representative sample of teachers, defined as full-time teachers currently working in public schools. Both the affluent and teachers pay more attention to public education and participate more actively in school politics than the general public, making their views worthy of close scrutiny (see sidebar).

Teachers and the Affluent: Paying Attention, Participating, and Holding Opinions

A highly decentralized, democratic system of education affords all sorts of opportunities for average citizens to weigh in on public schools. Through votes, school board meetings, petition drives, and direct advo­cacy, all citizens, at least in principle, can influence public education.

Principle and practice, however, often part ways. That all citizens can influence public education is not to say that all citizens do so. Generations of political science research confirm that higher-income and, especially, better-educated citizens are orders of magnitude more likely to partici­pate in politics. And recent evidence demonstrates that teachers are far more likely to vote in school board elections than is the general public.

In our own survey, 37 percent of the American public claims to pay either “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of attention to issues involving education, while 54 percent of the affluent and an overwhelming 84 percent of teachers do so.

Public opinion surveys routinely overstate the levels of turnout in elections. Hence, it is difficult to know what to make of the absolute numbers of any particular group that reports voting. By comparing across groups, though, we can generate reasonable estimates of the relative tendency of people to vote. When we do, we find further evidence of the high rates of political participation among both the affluent and teachers. Compared to the American public at large, members of the affluent group are 16 percentage points more likely to report having voted. Teachers are fully 18 percentage points more likely to report having done so.

These two groups also are more likely to pronounce a clear view about the quality of schools and the value of different education reforms. The percentage that selects the “don’t know” or “neither support nor oppose” categories is almost always larger for the general public than for either the affluent or teachers.

Our findings reveal more stability than change in public opinion over the five years since the Education Next–PEPG survey began, suggesting that the momentous policy develop­ments of the past year were not caused by—nor have they yet produced—broad changes in popular views. The one exception to that generalization is a significant turnaround in support for school vouchers, which until this year had been in decline.

The views of the affluent resemble those of the general pub­lic, except that the affluent are more likely to hold strong opin­ions and even larger percentages support the positions taken by a plurality of the general public. However, the well-to-do are more skeptical of online learning. They also hold the public schools in their own community in comparatively high regard, perhaps because they have better access to good public schools.

Teacher opinion often diverges from that of both the afflu­ent and the general public. Teachers are much more likely to give schools high marks; on many issues, a majority of teachers takes the side opposite to that of the larger public, revealing tensions between what Americans overall think is best and what employees within the education industry prefer.

Teacher Rights and Policies

Wisconsin’s curtailment of the collective bar­gaining rights of teachers and other public employees was undoubtedly the top education news story of early 2011. In protest, teachers called in sick in droves, union members crowded the state capitol, and Democratic senators refused to attend legislative sessions. President Obama supported the protests, while Republi­can leaders lent their support to the embattled Wisconsin governor. Similar issues involving union rights and teacher prerogatives percolated in other states as well, including Indiana, Ten­nessee, Ohio, and even Massachusetts.

What was the public response? Are the opin­ions of teachers and the public converging or diverging? The short answer: Public opinion on issues involving teacher rights and prerogatives has remained essentially unchanged, but teach­ers’ opinions are diverging on key issues.

Teachers Unions. When asked whether teachers unions have a generally positive or negative effect on the nation’s public schools, 33 percent of the public gives a negative response, virtually unchanged from the 31 percent and 33 percent who perceived a negative impact in 2009 and 2010, respectively (see Figure 1). The share perceiving a positive union impact on schools hardly budged, changing only from 28 percent in 2009 to 29 percent in 2011. A siz­able plurality of 38 percent continues to hold a neutral position, suggesting that the debate over the role of teachers unions is hardly over. The views about teachers unions held by the affluent are more negative, with no less than 56 percent saying unions have a negative impact on their schools.

Among teachers themselves, opinion is moving in pre­cisely the opposite direction from that of the public at large. Only 17 percent now say that unions have a negative impact on the nation’s schools, down from 25 percent in 2010. Fifty-eight percent think they have a positive impact, up from 51 percent the previous year.

Teacher Tenure. Opposition to teacher tenure edged upward, but not to a significant degree. Between 2009 and 2010, those opposed to tenure shifted slightly from 45 percent to 47 percent, and in 2011 that percentage again ticked upward to 49 percent. Moreover, tenure supporters slipped from 25 percent in prior years to 20 percent in 2011. Unless the trend continues in future years, not much should be made of these small shifts. Among the affluent, opposition to tenure was much greater—no less than 67 percent. Meanwhile, teachers like tenure more than ever. Fifty-three percent now say they support tenure, up from 48 percent a year ago.

If tenure is to be given at all, the public thinks it should be based on demonstrated success in raising student perfor­mance on state tests. Those who say tenure should be based on student academic progress increased from 49 percent to 55 percent between 2010 and 2011. The well-to-do also like the idea, with 61 percent giving it their support. Teachers, how­ever, were far less enthusiastic about the idea, only 30 percent giving it a favorable nod.

Merit Pay. The issue of merit pay made national news in 2010 when then Florida governor Charlie Crist vetoed a controversial bill requiring that teachers statewide be paid based on their classroom performance. Although Crist’s veto brought him favor with the state’s teachers unions, his successor signed similar legislation in 2011. Meanwhile, states and districts around the nation continue to experi­ment with new models of teacher compensation.

The public tends to favor merit pay, and recent developments have not altered that fact in one direction or another. A near majority (47 percent) of the American public favors paying teachers, in part, based on the academic progress of their students on state tests, about the same percentage as in 2007. Only 27 percent of the public opposes the idea, with the balance undecided. Affluent respondents were only mod­estly more likely (52 percent) to favor merit pay. The idea remains anathema to teachers, however, with only 18 percent in favor, and 72 percent opposed (see Figure 2). Despite the Obama adminis­tration’s continued efforts to build sup­port for merit pay among teachers, the vast majority remains unconvinced.

Teacher Compensation. If teach­ers and the public disagree on many things, the public nonetheless wants to pay teachers well. Fifty-five percent of the public thinks salaries should increase, virtually the same percent­age that voiced that opinion two years ago. Support for higher teacher salaries among the affluent is slightly higher (59 percent). Those who do not favor increases think salaries should remain at current levels. Only 7 percent of the public as a whole thinks teacher salaries should be cut. Needless to say, salary increases for teachers is hardly an issue among teachers themselves. Eighty-two percent of them give the proposal their wholehearted support (see Figure 3).

Support drops, however, when those surveyed are told how much the average teacher in their state is currently paid. It falls to 43 percent, although a majority (52 percent) of the well-to-do still favors a salary increase. Learning the actual sal­ary levels had little impact on the think­ing of teachers themselves, over three-quarters (76 percent) of whom continue to back the idea.

When Americans are asked to choose between increasing teacher salaries and reducing class sizes, they regularly select the latter option. Even when they are told that “reducing average class sizes by three students would cost roughly the same amount as increasing teacher salaries by $10,000,” 44 percent of Ameri­cans select class-size reduction, whereas 28 percent select increasing teacher salaries. The affluent have similar views. By contrast, roughly equal numbers of teachers would choose salary increases as would choose class-size reduction.

Of course, teacher remuneration goes well beyond sala­ries. On average, teachers enjoy considerably larger pension benefits and health-care packages than do comparable profes­sionals in the private sector, a point of contention in recent policy debates. In April 2011, for example, Ohio enacted leg­islation requiring all public employees, including teachers, to contribute at least 15 percent of the cost of their health-care benefits. Yet the battle over the issue is far from over: The Ohio Education Association recently collected a one-time assessment of $54 from each of the state’s teachers, raising $5 million to advocate for the law’s repeal.

It is of interest, then, that the American public tends to look favorably on a proposal that would require teachers “to pay from their salaries 20 percent of the cost of their health care and pension benefits, with the government cov­ering the remainder.” By a nearly two-to-one margin, the American public favors this policy. The margin of support is even larger among the affluent, a majority of whom back this requirement. Teachers overwhelmingly reject this cost-cutting measure, with opponents outnumbering supporters more than two to one.

Teacher Certification. In most states, teachers must take approximately 30 hours of instruction at a school of education before they may be certified as a teacher. A substantial body of research demonstrates that such instruction does not translate into higher student performance. And the American public seems to have caught on. A plu­rality of Americans supports (42 percent, while 31 percent oppose) allowing principals to “hire col­lege graduates who they believe will be effective in the classroom even if they do not have formal teaching credentials.” As for the affluent, no less than 61 percent support the relaxation of teacher hiring requirements. Existing teachers, by contrast, steadfastly oppose the practice, perhaps because virtually all of them underwent the formal credential­ing process. Fully 60 percent of teachers object to the idea of prin­cipals being allowed to hire col­lege graduates who do not have formal teaching credentials, and only 28 percent support it.

All in all, the Wisconsin controversy seems to have con­tributed to a divergence of opinion between teachers and the general public. The biggest changes in opinion took place within the teaching profession, which moved further away from the views of the public at large. The public, and espe­cially the affluent, nonetheless want to pay teachers more.

 

 

School Choice

A strong case can be made that 2010 and 2011 were among the very best years school choice has yet enjoyed. The number of students in charter schools grew to 1.7 million, and several states raised caps on the number of charter schools that will be permitted to open in the future. Indiana, Ohio, Florida, Ari­zona, and New Mexico all passed voucher legislation of one kind or another, and Congress restored the federal school-voucher program it had previously shut down in Washington, D.C. What has been the public’s response?

Vouchers. Opinion on vouchers varies, depending on how the question is posed. We therefore randomly assigned respondents to two groups, one of which was asked a question that might be termed “voucher-friendly” in that it emphasizes giving a choice to parents. The other half was asked a question that might be termed “voucher-unfriendly” in that it empha­sizes students going to private school at public expense. Not surprisingly, members of the public are more likely to say they like vouchers (47 percent) if asked the first question than if asked the second (39 percent). (See Figure 4 for the wording of the questions and the pattern of responses to each.)

There is little scientific basis for deciding which of these questions is the “right” one to ask. Instead of focusing on the number obtained by either ques­tion, therefore, it often is more informative to look at differences between groups and changes that take place over time.

Viewed in these ways, three facts stand out. First, support for vouchers increased by 8 per­centage points between 2010 and 2011. This was the largest shift of public opinion over the course of the past year. If the public debate altered anything, it was regard­ing this specific topic. That the change in opinion is registered by responses to both questions leads one to conclude that the sur­vey identified a genuine political development. Second, the afflu­ent express more opposition to vouchers than the general pub­lic. The level of opposition is 12 percentage points higher in response to one version of the question and 4 percent­age points higher on the other. Third, teachers are the least enthusiastic about vouchers. Although their opinions, like those of the general public, shifted in a favorable direction in 2011, teachers are still as much as 25 percentage points more opposed to vouchers than is the public as a whole.

Tax Credits. Public opinion on other school-choice issues remains stable. When it comes to tax credits for education expenses for families attending either public or private schools, a majority is in favor, and opposition is less than 20 percent. Almost the same can be said for the more common approach of offering tax credits for individual or corporate donations to scholarship programs. On both items, though, little change is detected from previous years. Nor do either the affluent or teachers think much differently.

Charter Schools. When asked about charters, 43 percent of the American public comes out in support, hardly differ­ent from the percentage that did so in 2010 (see Figure 5). The most common response, though, continues to be “nei­ther support nor oppose.” When one segment of respondents was asked to choose between “support,” “oppose,” and “don’t know,” a similar proportion selected ”don’t know” as had selected “neither support nor oppose,” again suggesting that Americans either do not understand what charter schools are or have not made up their minds about them (see “Edu­cating the Public,” features, Summer 2009). These findings are all the more remarkable given that charter schools are now two decades in the making, and in just the last year they have received substantial media attention, been the subject of a major documentary, and enjoyed the endorsement of leaders of both political parties, including key members of the Obama administration.

The affluent are especially likely to favor charter schools, with 64 percent offering their endorsement. Interestingly, the biggest jump in support for charters seems to have taken place among teachers. Those favoring the idea increased from 39 percent to 45 percent over the past year, while opposition remained unchanged.

Single-Sex Schools. Once pervasive in American educa­tion, gender-specific public schools were until quite recently a vanishing species. The notion of educating boys and girls separately, however, received a boost in 2006 with the pub­lication of new federal regulations clarifying the legal status of single-sex schools and classrooms. The National Associa­tion for Single Sex Public Education reports that 524 pub­lic schools now offer students opportunities for single-sex education, including 103 in which students have all of their educational activities in a gender-specific setting.

Thirty-four percent of Americans support proposals that would give “parents the option of sending their child to an all-boys or all-girls school,” while only 23 percent are opposed. Opinion has not changed since the same question was last posed back in 2009. Interestingly, the well-to-do are even more favorably disposed to the idea, with no less than 47 percent giving it their support. Teachers, too, like the idea. Given the widespread support for providing families a single-sex option, it is surprising no politician has made this issue an election platform component.

Grading Public Schools

Last year we reported that the public’s evaluations of the nation’s public schools had reached an all-time low. Only 18 percent of the public was willing to give the schools an A or a B, while 27 percent said they deserved no better than a D or an F. Those evaluations were decidedly lower than the grades given by those asked by the Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll earlier in the decade, and even lower than the percentage reported by Education Next in 2007 (when only 22 percent gave their schools top marks).

Happily, in 2011, evaluations of public schools have ticked upward ever so modestly, with 22 percent again willing to give their schools an A or B, though 25 percent of those evaluations are still handing out either a D or F. The affluent are by far the toughest graders, with only 15 percent of them giving the nation’s schools the highest marks. Teachers, by contrast, are much more generous in their evaluations, with 37 percent saying that the nation’s schools deserve an A or B (see Figure 6).

The portrait of public satisfaction changes dramatically, however, if one inquires about Americans’ local public schools. No less than 46 percent of those surveyed give their community schools an A or a B, a slightly higher percentage than in 2007 (43 percent). The affluent, as critical as they are of the nation’s schools, are more content with their local schools than the public at large: 54 percent say their local schools deserve one of the two high grades. Teachers espe­cially like their own community’s schools, with 64 percent of them giving out an A or a B.

Spending on Public Schools

For the United States economy, the past three years have been hard times: The country has yet to recover fully from the recession that began in 2008. Unemployment hovers around 9 percent, salary increases are hard to come by, and public treasuries are steeped in debt. The stimulus package of 2009 provided a short-term revenue fix for school districts, but those dollars, at best, barely offset sharp declines from local tax revenues. In the spring of 2011, when this survey was administered, no one thought it would be easy for school districts to balance their budgets. Under the circumstances, it would not be surprising if the public concluded that cutbacks in school expenditures were appropriate.

Not so. When the public was asked whether govern­ment funding for public schools in their district should increase, decrease, or stay the same, 59 percent selected the first option, only slightly less than the 63 percent that gave that opinion in 2010, and dramatically more than in 2009 (46 percent). Affluent respondents were less willing to spend more for their district schools, but even among them a clear majority (52 percent) preferred an increase in expenditures.

A segment of those surveyed were asked the same ques­tion except that they were first told the level of per-pupil expenditure in their community, which averaged $12,300 for the respondents in our sample. For every subgroup con­sidered, this single piece of information dampened public enthusiasm for increased spending. Support for more spend­ing fell from 59 percent to 46 percent of those surveyed. Among the well-to-do, the level of support dropped dramati­cally, from 52 percent to 36 percent. Among teachers, sup­port for expenditure increases fell even more sharply—from 71 percent to 53 percent (see Figure 7).

When asked about the possibility of raising taxes to fund public schools, support for greater spending dropped further still. Only 28 percent of Americans believe that local taxes to support public schools should be increased, while over half believe that they should stay the same, and 16 percent believe that they should decrease. The views of the affluent do not differ notably from the public as a whole and even among teachers only 42 percent support higher taxes.

Digital Learning

Online education has become a growth industry, as a rapidly increasing number of high school and college students are taking some of their courses over the Internet. Some, includ­ing Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christian­sen, have gone so far as to predict that half of all high school courses will be taken online within a decade.

A year ago such projections seemed plausible, as public support for learning over the Internet jumped 10 points, to a total 52 percent, from where it had been the previous year. But if online learning is going to sweep the country, that percentage needs to continue to climb, and in 2011, support slipped modestly to 47 percent. Twenty-six percent of Ameri­cans now say they are opposed, up 3 percentage points over 2010 (see Figure 8).

Contrary to the standard image of the educated well-to-do as the first to adopt new technologies, the affluent were somewhat less supportive of the idea than the public as a whole. In fact, the affluent were evenly divided, with opposition as high as 43 per­cent. Nearly half (49 percent) of teachers also expressed approval, although that percentage was down by 6 percent from 2010.

In short, there are signs that support for online learning is reaching a political plateau, and important segments of the population—teachers and the affluent—are resistant to the idea. Yet, when respondents were asked about their own children, high levels of sup­port for online education are observed across the American public. A majority of Ameri­cans overall, and roughly two in three teach­ers, expresses a willingness to have one of their children take “some academic courses” in high school over the Internet.

School and Student Accountability

Nine years after the enactment of No Child Left Behind, the public’s appetite for stan­dardized tests appears undiminished. More than two in three Americans believe that the federal government should “continue to require that all students be tested in math and reading each year in grades 3–8 and once in high school,” whereas less than 10 percent actually oppose this requirement. Roughly three in four affluent respondents sup­port the regular administration of tests, as do similar shares of African Americans and Hispanics. Only among teachers does there appear a nontrivial segment of the population that opposes existing testing practices. Even so, majorities of teachers support annual testing of lower-school students and a single test for high school students.

Breaking from existing law, however, Americans support the creation of a single national test in both reading and math. Under No Child Left Behind, each state develops its own test and benchmarks for determining student proficiency. Solid pluralities of both the general public and all subgroups, how­ever, believe that there should be one test and one standard for all students across the country. Roughly one in five, by contrast, supports different tests and standards in different states. A paltry number of respondents think that all state and federal tests should be abolished.

Just as Americans support tying teacher pay to student performance on standardized tests, so too do they want students’ eligibility to be promoted from one grade to the next and to graduate from high school to depend on dem­onstrated success on tests. Fully 70 percent of Americans support a requirement that students pass an exam before being eligible to move on to the next grade. Another 72 percent support a requirement that students pass an exam before being allowed to receive a high school diploma. Sup­port for student accountability, moreover, runs deep across all the subgroups we analyze, including teachers. Sixty per­cent of teachers support the idea of tying grade promotion to test performance, while 66 percent support high school graduation exams, even as these same teachers overwhelm­ing oppose the idea of linking their own remuneration to student test scores.

That Americans want students to be tested, however, does not mean that they are convinced that current test­ing provides accurate information about school quality. Indeed, only 7 percent of Americans claim that their state’s standardized test provides “excellent” informa­tion about the schools in their state, and only 34 percent claim that it provides “good” information. Forty-seven percent, however, believe that the test provides either “fair” or “poor” information. With just one exception, all of the subgroups follow national trends on this question. As their responses to other questions about testing might indicate, teachers hold standardized tests in the lowest regard. Only one in four teachers claims that the state’s standardized tests offer excellent or good information about the quality of schools, compared to the 69 percent who believe that the information is either fair or poor.

Conflicts with Teachers Likely to Persist

We have discussed only a few highlights from this year’s survey. The reader can glean much more information by taking a careful look at the survey questions and responses, available on the Education Next web site. Here we draw only three broad conclusions:

On many questions of education policy, opinion has not changed materially over the past year, despite the headline news coming from Wisconsin and elsewhere. We are not the first to have documented stability in the policy posi­tions taken by members of the American public. Only when external events require a rethinking of their position are they inclined to alter their views. For that reason, we find it to be of some significance that over the course of the past year the public has become much more supportive of school vouchers.

On most questions of public policy, differences between the affluent and the public at large are on the margins. In no case did we find the well-to-do favoring a policy that the general public opposed. Instead, those with ample resources tend to be even more supportive of the positions that were taken by a plurality of the public. Our data do not allow us to discern whether the affluent are leading or following public opinion more generally, but the findings do suggest a general synchronization of viewpoints. Still, it is the case the affluent are more skeptical of online learn­ing and more satisfied with their local schools than is the general public.

Finally, we find that a majority of teachers often takes posi­tions contrary to those of a plurality of both the public and the affluent on key issues such as teachers unions, the rights and prerogatives of teachers, and school vouchers. Plainly, the battles over school reform are far from over.

William G. Howell is professor of American politics at the University of Chicago. Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and deputy director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. Paul E. Peterson is the director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Video: Marty West and Paul Peterson discuss the survey.

Complete survey results available here.

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Democrats and Republicans in Washington, D.C., are more polarized today than they have been in nearly a century. And among the general public, party identification remains the single most powerful predictor of people’s opinions about a wide range of policy issues. Given this environment, reaching consensus on almost any issue of consequence would appear difficult. And when it comes to education policy, which does a particularly good job of stirring people’s passions, opportunities for advancing meaningful policy reform would appear entirely fleeting.

Against this backdrop, the results of the 2010 Education Next–Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) Survey are encouraging. With the exceptions of school spending and teacher tenure, the divisions between ordinary Democrats and Republicans on education policy matters are quite minor. To be sure, disagreements among Americans continue to linger. Indeed, with the exception of student and school accountability measures, Americans as a whole do not stand steadfastly behind any single reform proposal. Yet the most salient divisions appear to be within, not between, the political parties. And we find growing support for several strategies put forward in recent years by leaders of both political parties—most notably, online education and merit pay.

Nearly 2,800 respondents participated in the 2010 Education Next–PEPG Survey, which was administered in May and June of 2010 (see sidebar for survey methodology). In addition to a nationally representative sample of American adults, the survey included representative samples of two populations of special interest: 1) public school teachers and 2) adults living in neighborhoods in which one or more charter schools are located. With a large number of respondents, we were able, in many cases, to pose differently worded questions to two or more randomly chosen groups. In so doing, we were able to evaluate the extent to which expressed opinions change when a person is informed of certain facts, told about the president’s position on an issue, or simply asked about a topic in a different way.

Grading the Nation’s Schools

Americans today give the public schools as a whole poor marks. When asked to grade the nation’s schools on the same A to F scale traditionally used to evaluate students, only 18 percent of survey respondents give them an “A” or a “B.” This equals the percentage that awarded one of the top two grades in 2009, which had been the lowest level observed across the three years of our survey. More than one-quarter of respondents, meanwhile, continue to give the nation’s schools a “D” or an “F.” These sentiments are shared widely. Fewer than one-quarter of African Americans and Hispanics give the nation’s schools an “A” or “B,” as do just 18 percent of parents of school-aged children. Most telling, perhaps, only 28 percent of teachers give the nation’s schools an “A” or a “B,” while 55 percent give them a “C” and 17 percent a “D” or “F.”

However, as in the past, the public’s assessment of the local schools is far higher. No less than 65 percent of those surveyed are willing to give the school they identified as their local elementary school one of the two highest grades, and 55 percent are willing to give one of those grades to their local middle school. Only 6 percent assign their local elementary school a “D” or and “F,” while 12 percent assign those low grades to their local middle school.

School Spending and Teacher Salaries

Though evaluations of schools remain low, the public appears as willing as ever to support more spending on schools—until, that is, it becomes clear that their own community would foot the bill. In 2010, amid mounting national, state, and local deficits, 63 percent of the public favor an increase in “government funding for public schools in your district,” about the same level as in early 2008, just before the economic recession.

Public support for additional spending is more fragile than it appears, however. When asked whether “local taxes to fund public schools in your district should increase, decrease, or stay the same,” only 29 percent of the public favor an increase (see Figure 1a). Such strong resistance to local taxation suggests that any increases in school spending are likely to come, if at all, from higher levels of government.

Whether or not the public supports higher teacher salaries also depends on how the question is worded. When the survey asked whether teacher salaries should be increased, 59 percent of respondents favor the idea in 2010 (see Figure 1b), well below the 69 percent support observed in 2008. Support for increased teacher salaries falls sharply when respondents are first told the average annual salary of teachers in their state. Supplied with that information, only 42 percent favor a salary increase.

It should come as no surprise that teachers are more supportive of additional school spending. Seventy-two percent favor more spending if no mention is made of taxes, and 45 percent continue to favor spending more even if that means a local tax increase. Teachers are also far more likely to think that their salaries should increase. In 2010, 75 percent support the idea, regardless of whether they are informed of average state salary levels.

Support for Reform

The public’s willingness to consider alternatives to traditional public schools and traditional public-school practices has expanded in many, though not all, directions. The public remains friendly to school choice, but the kinds of choices it prefers are changing. Meanwhile, support for policies that base compensation on teacher performance has risen, but backing for other proposals to introduce standard business practices into the education sector has stayed about the same. The public’s long-standing support for school and student accountability measures remains high, though it is expressed in slightly more qualified terms than in the past.

School Choice

When it comes to school choice, charter schools and online education are “in,” while private school vouchers are “out.” The charter option is especially popular among minorities and parents in neighborhoo ds where charter schools are already present.

Charters. Charter schools have emerged as the most widely discussed alternative to traditional public schools. Initiated in 1991 by a Minnesota law allowing private non-profit entities to receive public funding to operate schools if authorized by a state agency, the idea has spread to more than 40 states, and some 1.5 million students today attend charter schools. Charters have been praised for opening the schoolhouse door to entrepreneurial, energetic teachers and leaders as well as for raising student achievement in high-need regions. But the practice of chartering has also been criticized for allowing low-quality schools to remain in operation and for siphoning resources away from district schools.

To see whether the presence of a charter school within a neighborhood is correlated with public opinion—either favorable or unfavorable—we surveyed a representative sample of residents living in zip codes in which at least one charter school is located. The presence of charter schools in the community has not gone unnoticed. Forty-eight percent of all adults—and 50 percent of parents of school-aged children—living in a neighborhood with at least one charter school were aware of that fact.

After describing a charter school in neutral language, the survey asked respondents if they favor or oppose “the formation of charter schools.” The survey also gave respondents the option of staying neutral by saying they neither favor nor oppose the policy. Those holding the neutral position declined from 44 percent to 36 percent between 2009 and 2010, likely reflecting the heightened attention to charter schools in national debates over education reform (see Figure 2). Among African Americans and Hispanics, indications that opinion has begun to solidify were even stronger: The portion of African Americans holding the neutral position crashed from 48 percent to 23 percent between 2008 and 2010. For Hispanics, the drop was from 46 percent to 33 percent. Similarly, only 27 percent of the parents who live in charter neighborhoods take the neutral position.

Support for charter schools has remained reasonably steady over the last several years. Between 2008 and 2009, the portion of the public saying they favor charters fell from 42 percent to 39 percent, but that trend reversed in the past year, putting charter support at 44 percent in 2010. Opposition to charters now stands at 19 percent, giving supporters a better than two-to-one advantage over opponents.

Within minority communities, however, support for charters appears to be rising. Among African Americans the portion who support charters grew from 42 percent to 49 percent between 2008 and 2009 and leapt to 64 percent in 2010, with only 14 percent expressing opposition. Among Hispanics, levels of support grew from 37 to 47 percent across the three annual surveys.

In communities where at least one charter school is located, overall levels of support are only somewhat higher: 48 percent of the public favor the formation of charters, while 20 percent are opposed. But fully 57 percent of the parents in communities with charter schools favor them, compared to 51 percent of parents nationwide (a group that includes some parents living in communities with a charter school presence).

Both proponents and critics have noted that charter schools are over-represented in communities with high concentrations of minorities, yet this fact alone does not explain the higher levels of support in areas with a charter school. Among residents of communities with a charter school, 63 percent of white parents express support for the idea, as compared with 50 percent of white parents nationally. These numbers may be encouraging, then, for those who hope that the gradual spread of charters will strengthen support for this reform strategy. However, our data do not tell us whether the charter presence is causing opinion to change or whether charters took root in these areas because of underlying public support for charter schools. What we can say with confidence is that the presence of charters—and the intense local debates it often generates—has not been sufficient to undermine popular support for this policy option.

Bucking all of these trends, teacher opposition to charters has intensified. Support for charters among public school teachers fell from 47 percent to 39 percent between 2008 and 2010, while opposition grew slightly from 33 percent to 36 percent. Once leaning toward charters, teacher opinion is now almost evenly divided between support and opposition.

Although overall public support for charters shows signs of solidifying, key facts about charters remain unknown. Only 18 percent of the public know that charters cannot hold religious services, 19 percent that they cannot charge tuition, 15 percent that students must be admitted by lottery (if the school is oversubscribed), and just 12 percent that, typically, charters receive less government funding per pupil than traditional public schools. In each instance, the remaining portions either answer the question incorrectly or, more often, confess that they simply don’t know.

In several respects, parents in communities with a charter presence are only marginally more knowledgeable than the public at large. However, 30 percent of parents are aware that charters cannot charge tuition, and 28 percent realize charters must use lotteries if oversubscribed. In other words, parents with a charter nearby appear better informed about the mechanics of enrolling a child but no more informed than the broader public about other regulations on charter practices.

Virtual education. Online learning is rapidly penetrating the higher education system, and, according to some estimates, more than 1 million high school and middle school students are also taking courses online. As these changes take place, online learning is growing more acceptable to the public at large. In 2009, 42 percent of the public said they thought high school students should receive credit for state-approved courses taken over the Internet. Within one year, that number jumped to 52 percent. Opposition meanwhile fell from 29 percent to 23 percent. One-quarter of the public express indifference (see Figure 3).

Support for online coursework by middle schoolers, though not as great as for high schoolers, also increased from 35 percent to 43 percent between 2009 and 2010. Still, the practice of online learning remains nascent. Less than one-tenth of those interviewed said they personally know any high school or middle school student who has taken a course online.

School vouchers. Compared to charter schools and online learning, private school vouchers have long been a more controversial feature of the school politics landscape. In recent years, voucher supporters have suffered political defeat at least as often as they have enjoyed success. A recent federal study of the much-watched voucher program in Washington, D.C., for example, showed that using a voucher boosted a student’s chances of graduating from high school. That positive development for voucher supporters, however, was offset by congressional action, supported by President Barack Obama, that shut down the program.

So even as support for charters and online learning has grown, the popularity of vouchers has slipped. When in 2007 we asked the public about a program that would “use government funds to help pay the tuition of low-income students…to attend private schools,” 45 percent favored the idea, but that number has steadily fallen in the three subsequent years. In 2010, only 31 percent express approval. Meanwhile, opposition has grown from 34 percent to 43 percent (see Figure 4).

Support for vouchers is greater within the African American and Hispanic communities, but declines are evident there as well. Sixty-eight percent of African Americans and 61 percent of Hispanics supported vouchers in 2007, but only 51 percent and 47 percent of the two groups, respectively, take a similar position in 2010.

Interestingly, support for vouchers is higher in communities where charter schools are located. Forty-six percent of the parents in these neighborhoods support vouchers, as do 40 percent of all residents. Again, however, our data do not tell us whether the charter presence has caused opinion to change or whether charters have simply located in areas that are more hospitable to school choice.

Tax credits. A number of states—Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, for example—provide tax credits for low-income families who send their children to private schools or to those who give to charities established for such purposes. Support for tax credits is much higher than for vouchers, especially if the question makes clear that credits may be used for school expenses at both public and private schools. Still, support for this policy has also lost ground in the past three years. In 2008, 64 percent of the public favored tax credits, whereas only 55 percent do so in 2010. Opposition has grown from 15 percent to 20 percent (see Figure 5).

The idea remains extremely popular among African Americans, however, with levels of support hovering around 70 percent during the last three years. Among Hispanics, support fell from 75 percent to 65 percent between 2008 and 2010.

Tax credits for donors to scholarship programs that help low-income students attend private schools garner twice as much support as opposition. Half the public support the idea, while only 22 percent oppose it. Support for this form of school choice is again greater in neighborhoods where charters are located, both among parents and the general public. And in contrast to other policies that would expand access to private schools, support for this idea increased modestly in the past year.

Teacher Policy and Teachers Unions

Public discussions of the best way to recruit, evaluate, and compensate teachers have proliferated of late, largely due to research demonstrating the importance of teacher quality for student achievement. But with one exception, public opinion on these issues has remained relatively stable.

Merit pay. That exception, paying teachers according to their classroom performance, received support from the Obama administration when it invited states to include this innovation in their proposals to obtain federal funds from its signature education reform initiative, Race to the Top.

To assess public support for this policy, commonly known as merit pay, the survey asked respondents in 2009 whether they favored “basing a teacher’s salary, in part, on students’ academic progress on state tests.” Only 27 percent opposed the idea, while 43 percent welcomed it. In 2010, support increased to 49 percent (see Figure 6), although one-quarter of the population continue to oppose the idea.

Teacher tenure. In February 2010, the superintendent of schools in Central Falls, Rhode Island, announced the dismissal of all teachers at her district’s high school on the grounds that the school was persistently underperforming. To the surprise of many, her actions received presidential approval. “If a school continues to fail its students year after year, if it doesn’t show signs of improvement, then there’s got to be a sense of accountability,” President Obama announced. “And that’s what happened in Rhode Island.” Eventually, the board and local teachers union reached a compromise, and media attention shifted to other topics.

Obama’s comments reflected the balance of opinion in the public at large. Opponents of the practice of offering tenure to public school teachers outnumber its supporters in 2010 by a margin of nearly two to one. Forty-seven percent of the public oppose teacher tenure, while only 25 percent are in favor (see Figure 6). Not surprisingly, the distribution of teacher opinion is almost exactly the opposite. The events in Rhode Island apparently were too isolated to alter national opinion on tenure policy, as responses remain essentially the same in 2010 as they had been one year earlier.

Teachers unions. Nor did public opinion concerning teachers unions change significantly, despite rising union opposition to many of the Obama administration’s education reform initiatives. Those who think unions have a “negative effect” on their local schools ticked upward from 31 percent to 33 percent between 2009 and 2010, while those who think unions have a “positive effect” remained unchanged at 28 percent. In both years, a plurality of roughly 40 percent took no position on the question.

Student and School Accountability

Few ideas are more popular than holding students accountable for their performance. In 2007, 85 percent of those interviewed said they thought students should be required to “pass an examination” in order to graduate from high school, as they are required to do “in some states.” In 2010, 76 percent of the public continue to express such sentiments. In both years, opposition hovered around 10 percent of the total. Support is high even among teachers, of whom 63 percent think students should be required to pass an exam to receive their degree.

Hardly less popular is the more stringent rule that students must pass a test before moving on to the next grade, as is currently required for 3rd graders in both Florida and New York City. Eighty-one percent supported that idea in 2007 and nearly the same percentage—79 percent—favor it in 2010. Again, in both years, opposition amounted to no more than 9 percent of the total. Teachers are nearly as likely to favor the idea, perhaps because it would help to ensure that their students are prepared for the material they are asked to impart.

It is surprising that an idea that is so popular does not find its way into the national political agenda. To be sure, there are some signs that the public’s appetite for student accountability measures may have waned somewhat. Overall levels of support have declined of late, and the percentage of Americans who profess to “strongly support” either of the proposals discussed above has dropped by even larger margins. More likely, though, elite politics are responsible for the exclusion of this policy reform from public debate. Teachers unions, which are core constituents of the Democratic Party, oppose these measures. And the Republican Party, with its historical support for local control, has thus far proved unwilling to step into the fray.

The nationwide practice of releasing to the public the average test scores for every school is slightly less popular than holding students accountable. The survey posed the question, “Do you support or oppose making available to the general public the average test scores of students at each public school?” In 2007, 60 percent voiced support, and 57 percent favor the practice in 2010. Opposition stood at 20 percent in both years. But only 45 percent of the teachers favor making this information available to the public. Clearly, school transparency is more popular with the public than with those who work inside the schools (see Figure 7).

Given the general level of support for student and school accountability, it is to be expected that the public supports those provisions of No Child Left Behind that require regular testing in grades 3 through 8 and once more in high school. When the survey asked whether respondents favor maintaining current federal testing requirements, 62 percent of the public say yes, though only 50 percent of teachers agree (see Figure 7). If the respondent is informed that President Obama proposed that these provisions be continued, support increases slightly to 66 percent of those surveyed (see Figure 8). If the president’s endorsement seems to have only slight general effect, it helps solidify support among a key constituency, as support among teachers moves decisively upward to 59 percent.

To further explore Obama’s capacity to shape public opinion, the survey asked half the respondents whether they favor “toughening” state standards used to evaluate student performance. Even with no mention of the president’s views, the idea appears to be popular, as 58 percent say they support the idea and only 15 percent oppose it. The support level is still higher among the half of the sample informed of Obama’s support for the proposal. Among this group, 65 percent support more rigorous standards.

Bipartisan Agenda?

A clear plurality, even a majority, of the American public support a wide range of policy innovations ranging from charter schools and tax credits to tougher standards, accountability measures, and merit pay for teachers. But pluralities and bare majorities are often not enough to alter public policy in a country where power is divided between two highly competitive and increasingly polarized political parties. If Republicans and Democrats disagree strongly on the options for school reform, changes are unlikely—despite clear signs that the public is concerned about the quality of public education.

To examine the extent to which self-identified Democrats and Republicans differ on education issues, we calculated the difference between the average position on key issues held by Democratic respondents and the position held by Republican respondents. On each issue, individual responses were placed on a 1–5 scale, ranging from “strongly oppose” (1) to “strongly support” (5). Figure 9 shows the extent to which Democrats, on average, differ from Republicans on a given issue. The longer the bar, the more polarized the party supporters. If the bar falls to the left side of zero, Democrats support the policy more than Republicans; if the bar falls to the right, Republicans support the policy more than Democrats.

Overall, there appears to be far less polarization between the parties than might be expected. On questions concerning their overall assessment of the nation’s schools, student and school accountability, and even the creation of charter schools, the distance between the parties amounted to less than 0.2 points on the 5-point scale. In the case of accountability measures, the combination of strong overall support and minimal partisan conflict suggests that such policies will continue to be central to the nation’s education reform agenda. In the case of charter schools, for which overall support is more mixed, it appears that the important divisions in public opinion are within rather than between the nation’s major political parties.

The divergence between the parties is slightly larger on school vouchers and tax credits for education expenses, at 0.22 and 0.25, respectively. But in contrast to the patterns observed among elected officials, ordinary Democrats are somewhat more supportive than Republicans of these policies, in part due to the strong support for private school choice within the heavily Democratic minority community. Thirty-five percent of Democrats express support for vouchers, compared to 30 percent of Republicans. And Democrats are more likely than Republicans to support tax credits by a 60 percent to 53 percent margin.

The key exceptions to the general story of cross-party agreement involve school spending, teacher tenure, and the influence of teachers unions. Democrats are more supportive than Republicans of increasing teacher salaries and especially overall school spending, for which the difference in average positions is larger than 0.5 on the 5-point scale. Fully 70 percent of Democrats support increased spending if no mention is made of taxes, compared to only 40 percent of Republicans. The differences on teacher tenure policy are even larger, as 62 percent of Republicans but only 34 percent of Democrats altogether oppose the practice. Most strikingly, Democrats have a far more sanguine view of the influence of teachers unions on their community’s schools: 39 percent consider them to have a positive effect, while only 19 percent see their effect as negative. Among Republicans, only 17 percent believe that teachers unions have a positive effect, and 50 percent believe they have a negative effect.

President as Opinion Maker

Our data do not allow us to identify all the factors that are reshaping public opinion. But inasmuch as the president of the United States has the largest “bully pulpit” and is in the best position to set the public agenda, it is reasonable to suppose that the Obama administration has contributed to some of the changes in opinion reported above.

At the same time, the president’s persuasiveness is likely to depend on his popularity with the general public. To investigate this possibility, we asked parallel sets of questions in March 2009, when President Obama was at the peak of his popularity, and in May 2010, when his approval ratings had fallen below 50 percent. On both occasions, one-half of respondents were asked their opinion on several issues only after being told the president’s position, while the other randomly chosen half were asked the question outright.

In early 2009, exposure to the president’s views had the effect of shifting public opinion in the direction of the president’s by 13 percentage points on merit pay and 11 percentage points on charters and vouchers (see Figure 8). Sizable increases were observed for both Democrats and Republicans. But one year later, Obama’s influence foundered. In the summer of 2010, public support for merit pay actually decreased by 1 percentage point when respondents were told that the president favored the idea. Among Democrats, knowing the president’s position increased support by 8 percentage points, enough to bring the share in favor of merit pay to 53 percent. Among Republicans, however, being told of the president’s position reduced support for merit pay by 12 percentage points, from 55 to 43 percent. Public opinion on maintaining federal testing requirements shifted in the president’s direction by only 4 percentage points when respondents were told of his position, with support falling by 1 percentage point among Republicans and increasing by 6 percentage points among Democrats. Finally, when respondents were told that the president opposed vouchers, public support fell by only 5 percentage points—less than half the decline observed on the same issue in 2009 (see Figure 8).

These experimental data suggest that by 2010 President Obama wielded few of the persuasive powers he brandished during the honeymoon months of his presidency. It is possible, though, that his influence in 2009 was put to good use. Between 2009 and 2010, public opinion on merit pay, charter schools, and vouchers all shifted closer to the president’s position. The public became 6 percentage points more supportive of merit pay, 5 percentage points more supportive of charter schools, and 4 points less favorable to vouchers. Of course, these data do not establish that presidential appeals are responsible for these changes in public opinion. The president, after all, is hardly the only opinion maker in society. But if opinion reflects the cross-currents of conversations taking place in a society, then the holder of the nation’s highest office may be able to alter opinion on the issues of the day, at least at those moments when presidential popularity is high.

Conclusions

Democrats and Republicans are at each other’s throats in the nation’s capital. On cable news and talk radio, the Left rants about the Right, and vice versa. More than any time in recent memory, American politics is defined by hectoring, sniping, and bullying. For those fond of democratic deliberation and consensus building, these are unhappy times.

The results of the 2010 Education Next–PEPG Survey, however, suggest that the public does not necessarily subscribe to all the positions taken by the most vocal elements in our society. Indeed, our results suggest the possibility of advancing meaningful policy reform. The American public shows growing support for online learning and merit pay for teachers and continued support for accountability, standards, testing, and charter schools—education innovations that have been endorsed by leaders in both major parties. No less important is the fact that opinion on many key education issues does not polarize the public along partisan lines. Moreover, we find suggestive evidence that while the current president’s persuasive powers may have waned, they appear to have had an impact.

Clearly, we mustn’t get carried away. With the exception of student accountability measures, no single policy reform garners the support of huge swaths of the American public. But taken as a whole, the results from this year’s Education Next–PEPG survey are cause for some optimism among school reformers. With appropriate leadership, a bipartisan majority may yet rally in support of a significant school reform package.

William G. Howell is professor of American politics at the University of Chicago. Paul E. Peterson is professor of government at Harvard University. Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Complete survey results available here.

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What do Americans think about their schools? More important, perhaps, what would it take to change their minds? Can a president at the peak of his popularity convince people to rethink their positions on specific education reforms? Might research findings do so? And when do new facts have the potential to alter public thinking? Answers to these questions can be gleaned from surveys conducted over the past three years under the auspices of Education Next and Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG). (For full results from the 2009 survey, download the PDF; for the 2007 and 2008 surveys see “What Americans Think about Their Schools,” features, Fall 2007, and “The 2008 Education Next—PEPG Survey of Public Opinion,” features, Fall 2008).

In a series of survey experiments, we find a substantial share of the public willing to reconsider its policy prescriptions for public schools. But this responsiveness is not uniform: presidential appeals are more persuasive to fellow partisans than to those who identify with the opposition party, research findings have the greatest impact when an issue remains unsettled, and learning basic facts has the biggest impact when those facts are not well known. None of this comes as a surprise, until one considers how stable aggregate public opinion has been over time.

Individual Volatility but Collective Stability
The opinions expressed by individuals, when surveyed on political issues to which they have not given much thought, can appear so fragile as to be meaningless. More than one psephologist has shown that it is not uncommon for people, when repeatedly asked the same question, to give a positive response the first time, offer a negative one on the second occasion, and then return to a positive position the third time around. In such situations, opinions seem to be so lightly held they lack any content whatsoever.

Our own data likewise reveal a fair amount of volatility in the views expressed in the three Education Next—PEPG surveys by individual respondents, many of whom participated in multiple years. Of those asked to grade the nation’s public schools in both 2008 and 2009, for example, only 59 percent assigned the same grade both years. Among those who gave a grade of “A” or “B” in 2008, 46 percent awarded a grade of “C” or lower in 2009.

Numerous respondents also expressed different views on controversial policy issues across survey years. Among those who either completely or somewhat supported merit pay in 2008, 34 percent did not give that support one year later. Conversely, 29 percent of respondents who either completely or somewhat opposed the policy in 2008 did not express that opposition the next year. Similar churning is evident in the responses to questions concerning single-sex public schools, charter schools, and national standards.

The flip-flop that characterizes as much as one-third of individual responses does not produce equally large fluctuations in aggregate public opinion, however. On the contrary, the percentage of Americans holding to a particular point of view typically remains stable from one year to the next. On two-thirds of the domestic issues studied by political scientists Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro, opinion did not change by more than 5 percentage points, despite the fact that years separated the fielding of different surveys. In the aftermath of major events—wars, economic recessions, or a terrorist attack—the views of the public as a whole may change abruptly and dramatically. More commonly, though, public opinion either holds firm or eases slowly in one direction or another.

Thinking on education policy follows the general pattern. In the three years of Education Next—PEPG surveys, we found little change in the responses to many of the questions posed in identical or similar ways across successive years (see Figure 1). Public opinion held steady on such issues as the introduction of merit pay for teachers, setting of uniform educational standards across the country, and the desirability of single-sex education.

Nor did the public’s evaluation of American schools change much between 2007 and 2009, despite the media drumbeat of negative information about dropout rates and test scores. Indeed, the percentage of those surveyed willing to give the nation’s schools an “A” or a “B” slipped by just four points, from 22 percent in 2007 to 18 percent in 2009. Meanwhile, the share of adults giving schools a “D” or an “F” hovered around 25 percent throughout the three-year period (see Figure 2).

What accounts for the differences between individual and aggregate public opinion? Undoubtedly, part of the explanation is measurement error. Some of those answering our survey questions may have simply misread or misunderstood the questions in one year or the other, so their opinion seems to have changed when in fact it did not. Ordinarily, that kind of error balances itself out, as mistakes by one individual offset opposite errors by another.

But it seems unlikely that a third of our respondents would make such mistakes, and a substantial body of research on political behavior suggests that something else is going on as well. One prominent theory emphasizes the influence of public discourse. When people answer a survey item, they often draw upon a recent media report they have heard or conversation they have had with friends, relatives, or co-workers. Individual responses, then, vary from week to week as people are exposed to different claims. Collective opinion, however, remains constant so long as the general discourse does. If that theory is correct, then opinion in the aggregate changes only when public discourse shifts—either by a major event or with the introduction of a new fact or a new political force.

On some education issues, public discourse has changed since 2007. For instance, support for the federal No Child Left Behind Act has eroded, as evidence accumulated that the federal law was not living up to the promise of its grossly overstated name and politicians in both major parties found it to be an easy target (see Figure 3). Between 2007 and 2008, the share of adults who thought the law should be renewed (with no more than minor changes) fell by 7 percentage points. Support for the law stabilized after 2008, however, and roughly half the population still supports its reenactment with no more than modest revisions. And as we saw in previous years, a randomly selected group of respondents who were asked about “federal accountability policy” rather than “No Child Left Behind” expressed even higher levels of support.

Similarly, as the current recession deepens, we see hints of growing taxpayer resistance to the rising cost of education. Support for increased spending on public education fell from 51 to 46 percent between 2007 and 2009. Confidence that spending more on schools would enhance school quality fell by a similar amount, from 59 to 53 percent. Still, these changes remain modest. Facing the most significant economic downturn since the Great Depression, most Americans continue to support increased spending on their local public schools.

What would it take, then, to move aggregate public thinking decisively in one direction or another? Might influential public figures, research findings, or factual knowledge lead at least some portions of the American public to update its thinking? To find out, we divided the more than 3,000 respondents to our 2009 survey into randomly chosen groups. The first group was simply asked its opinion about a policy question, while the second (and often a third or fourth) group was given some additional piece of information, such as the president’s position on the issue, a research finding, or a key fact. By comparing answers given by the different groups, which should be similar in composition, it is possible to gauge the impact of these additional sources of information on the public’s views. (For more methodological details, see sidebar.)

Professors or Politicians: Who Is More Influential?
We fielded our survey in March of 2009, when newly elected president Barack Obama enjoyed public approval ratings above 60 percent. The timing of the survey provided an ideal opportunity to estimate the impact an endorsement by a popular president can have on policy views.

To ascertain the president’s influence, we conducted some simple experiments. On three topics—merit pay, charter schools, and school vouchers—one group of survey respondents was asked its opinion without any special prompt. Another group was first told the president’s position on the issue before being asked for its own. A third group was instead told about evidence from research on the policy’s effects on student learning. We did not specify a specific study, as the point was not to estimate the influence of any particular piece of research but rather the potential impact such evidence might have.

Merit Pay: When asked for an opinion straight out, a slight plurality of Americans sampled—43 percent—supported the idea of “basing a teacher’s salary, in part, on his or her students’ academic progress on state tests.” Twenty-seven percent opposed the idea, with the remaining 30 percent undecided. As noted above, that pattern of opinion has hardly budged since 2007.

Such stability over time, however, masks a propensity of some Americans to alter their views in light of an appeal by a popular political leader. Those informed of President Obama’s support for merit pay favored the idea by 13 percentage points more than those not so informed (see Figure 4). Obama’s backing had a particularly dramatic impact on African Americans, whose support jumped by 23 percentage points. Even many teachers were persuaded. Initially, only 12 percent of those not informed of Obama’s opinion thought merit pay a good idea, but that number jumped to 31 percent among those told of the president’s position. Obama’s endorsement caused support among Democrats to rise from 41 to 56 percent. Among Republicans, too, backing for the idea rose, albeit by a lesser amount (from 48 to 59 percent).

By comparison, policy research on the topic had a modest impact on public thinking. Among those told that “a recent study presents evidence that students learn more when their teachers are paid, in part, according to their students’ academic progress on tests,” support for merit pay climbed by just 6 percentage points above the support given when that information was withheld. The one subgroup to register especially large changes was African Americans, among whom support skyrocketed by 28 percentage points. Democrats were somewhat more responsive to research evidence than other segments of the public, with their support for merit pay increasing by 10 percentage points.

School Vouchers: Public opinion on school vouchers varied somewhat, depending on the way in which the question was worded. To one group of respondents we presented the issue as follows: “A proposal has been made that would give low-income families with children in public schools a wider choice, by allowing them to enroll their children in private schools instead, with government helping to pay the tuition. Would you favor or oppose this proposal?” In this instance, 40 percent of the respondents gave a favorable reply and 34 percent a negative one, with 27 percent taking a middling position. But when we posed the question slightly differently—asking about a “proposal that would use government funds to help pay the tuition of low-income students whose families would like them to attend private schools”—just 35 percent supported the idea. In this instance, a small alteration in wording shifted public opinion by 5 percentage points.

We also find that public support for vouchers declined by 5 percentage points between 2008 and 2009, perhaps as a result of the opposition to vouchers expressed by most Democratic presidential candidates during that party’s extended primary-election campaign, which conceivably could have altered the balance of public discourse. That interpretation is reinforced by the impact that President Obama’s position can have on public opinion. Overall, the percentage favoring vouchers was 11 points lower among those informed of the president’s opposition than among those not so informed (35 percent to 24 percent, see Figure 4). We also observed large partisan differences in the president’s influence on this issue. Whereas just 30 percent of Democrats expressed opposition to vouchers when asked outright, 52 percent did so after hearing of Obama’s opposition. By comparison, opposition among Republicans increased only slightly, from 50 to 54 percent. African Americans expressed higher levels of support for vouchers than did the population as a whole (57 percent), but support also was 12 percentage points lower among those African Americans told of presidential opposition.

A study that “presents evidence that students learn no more in private school than in public schools” depressed support for vouchers by 10 percentage points overall, an impact almost as large as presidential position taking. The same research evidence reduced support among Democrats by 15 percentage points, as compared to 6 percentage points for Republicans.

Charter Schools: Most Americans have yet to make up their minds about charter schools. Though 39 percent expressed support and only 17 percent signaled opposition in 2009, 44 percent remained undecided. These responses look much as they did in both 2007 and 2008, an indication that public discourse on charters has not changed significantly in recent years.

Despite that stability of public opinion about charters, aggregate support increased by 11 percentage points when respondents were told that Obama backed them (see Figure 4). We again found evidence that Obama’s impact has a partisan tinge. Among his fellow Democrats, Obama’s support is an unmitigated asset for charter school advocates, lifting support from 35 to 47 percent. But among Republicans, the percentage favoring charters increased by only 5 points (from 47 to 52 percent) upon learning of Obama’s endorsement. That endorsement actually decreased the proportion of Republicans who “completely” supported charter schools, from 22 to 15 percent.

When it comes to charter schools, research findings appear every bit as influential as a popular president. Told that recent research showed “students learn more in charter schools than in public schools,” support for charter schools rose by 14 percentage points. Among African Americans, the percentage who “completely” supported charter schools climbed by fully 23 percentage points, from 14 to 37 percent. Hispanics, meanwhile, were least persuaded by the evidence; only 5 percent altered their opinions. As they did on the previous items, Democrats appear to be more impressed by research than Republicans. Among those given evidence that charter schools enhance student learning, Democratic support for charter schools shot upward by 18 percentage points to 53 percent (compared to 35 percent among those not so informed), while the percentage of Republicans favoring such schools shifted by just 12 percentage points.

When all three issues—merit pay, vouchers, and charters—are considered together, a case can be made that new policy research, if communicated widely, can have an impact rivaling that of an influential president at the peak of his popularity. Admittedly, evidence from the research community does not have the same consistent impact on opinion as Obama’s position taking, which at the time of our survey could move overall public opinion by anywhere from 11 percentage points (in the case of charters) to 13 percentage points (in the case of merit pay). But the impact of a study is of comparable magnitude, ranging from 6 percentage points (in the case of merit pay) to 10 percentage points (in the case of vouchers) to 14 percentage points (in the case of charters). Research appears particularly influential among Democrats and when the general public’s own views have yet to take shape. That half the public has yet to make up its mind about charter schools may provide researchers with an opportunity to shape the public conversation going forward.

Stubborn Facts

How about raw facts concerning the state of American education? What does the public actually know about the performance of the nation’s public schools and the resources devoted to them? And is the public willing to update its views when told the truth?

We conducted additional experiments to investigate these issues. In 2007, we asked respondents to estimate average per-pupil expenditures within their local school district and the average teacher salaries in their states. When we discovered that those surveyed, on average, underestimated per-pupil expenditures by more than half and teacher salaries by roughly 30 percent, we wondered whether people had equally poor information about the performance of American high schools (see “Educating the Public,” features, Summer 2009). So in 2009 we asked a random third of our sample to estimate high school graduation rates and another third to estimate the international standing of U.S. 15-year-olds in math. The remaining two-thirds of the sample was told the truth about one or the other of these matters, allowing us to see whether people’s assessments of their schools differed when given accurate information.

To our surprise, the public had a far more accurate understanding of student performance than they had of teacher salaries and per-pupil spending. When it comes to high school graduation rates nationwide, the best available estimates from the U.S. Department of Education suggest that roughly 75 percent of those who enter 9th grade graduate within four years, a far cry from the goal of universal high school completion to which the president of the United States and all 50 governors in 1989 committed themselves to reaching by the year 2000. When asked to give their own estimate, without any hint or help as to what the right answer might be, those surveyed came up with an even more pessimistic estimate of 66 percent, 9 percentage points below actual levels. Excluding those respondents who gave answers of less than 25 percent (on the grounds that they may have misunderstood the question or not taken it seriously) increases the average estimate only slightly to 69 percent. Either estimate is nonetheless a good deal closer to, and a good deal less optimistic about, the truth than the wildly inaccurate estimates that the public offered about teacher salaries and school expenditures.

The public was only slightly less accurate when it came to estimating how well 15-year-olds in the United States do in math, as compared to students in 29 of the leading industrialized countries. Here the correct answer, according to the latest tests administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Program on International Student Assessment (PISA), is 24th out of 29th. Both the average and median guess was 18th, a bit more optimistic than actual PISA results but not too far off the mark. Clearly, Americans have not been deceived into believing that our students are outperforming their counterparts abroad.

So what happens when the public is told the truth? Not much, it turns out, if people already have a pretty solid grasp of the relevant facts. When informed that 75 percent of students graduated from high school, the public took that as neutral to mildly good news, as the percentage giving schools an “A” or “B” increased by a trivial 2 points and the percentage getting a “D” or “F” dropped by 1 point (both statistically insignificant changes). Learning the truth about the international standing of American students had a bigger impact, reducing the share of respondents giving a grade of “A” or “B” from 18 to 13 percent and increasing the share of respondents giving a “D” or “F” by 10 percentage points (see Figure 5a).

In the case of spending, however, learning the truth shifted opinion by a larger margin (see Figure 5b). For the nation as a whole, overall support for higher spending levels dropped by 8 percentage points (from 46 to 38 percent) when respondents were informed of actual per-pupil expenditures in their own district. The impacts of this information varied widely across subgroups. Told the truth about per-pupil expenditures, the share of African Americans willing to support additional spending plummeted from 82 to 48 percent. Perhaps not surprisingly, teachers held firm in their commitment to higher spending.

Even larger impacts are observed on support for increased teacher salaries. When informed about actual average teacher salaries in their state, respondents’ support for higher salaries dropped by 16 percentage points (from 56 to 40 percent). In this instance, roughly comparable impacts are observed for all three ethnic groups. But as one might again expect, teachers’ support for high salaries was relatively undiminished, dropping just 6 percentage points (from 77 to 71 percent).

Why does the public have a generally accurate understanding of school performance but a gross misunderstanding of the amount that is spent on education? The answer may have to do with the availability of information on these issues. It is true that the U.S. Department of Education regularly releases information on all four topics in the same document, the Digest of Education Statistics. But student dropout rates and student performance on international tests receive much more extensive attention in the news media than information about per-pupil spending in individual school districts or teacher salaries in specific states. The cost of education is divided among federal, state, and local governments, and the total sums are difficult to assemble until that is done by the federal government several years after the fact.

It is unlikely that organizations outside of the media are likely to pick up the slack. With a large share of the population convinced that schools and teachers should be given more money, or at least be held harmless, few if any interest groups or politicians have an incentive to dramatize the fact that spending levels and teacher salaries are much higher than most people believe. So school reformers instead focus on low test scores and high dropout rates as justification for merit pay, school accountability initiatives, and other school choice reforms. The public may only learn about the true cost of education when a popular political figure stakes a political career on telling them. That, we suspect, is as likely as the Cubs winning the Super Bowl.

Surveys and Realities
Our experiments only hint at what could happen in the real world of school politics. It is one thing to inform a captive audience of survey respondents about the president’s position, the results from research, or a key fact about American education. Reaching the entire American public is a completely different matter. To change opinions, one must get the public’s attention. And that is no easy task, when jobs, family life, entertainment, and sports command a higher priority in most households. Only 38 percent of the respondents to our survey report paying “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of attention to education issues. And even the power of presidents is limited by the large number of issues to which they must attend. President Obama’s genuine thoughts on such matters as merit pay, charters, and vouchers, however deeply held, necessarily command far less of his time and energy than the multitude of foreign policy, economic, and other domestic problems to which he must devote his attention.

Still, our findings suggest that a well-publicized stance taken by a popular president on an education issue might shift the opinions of large segments of the American public. Similarly, scholarship appears to be a potent weapon for groups with policy agendas they wish to pursue, as the committed can broadcast research findings with great repetition. Indeed, any group that seeks to change public opinion without gathering research to back its positions is leaving a flank unprotected. Finally, advocates are well advised to search for facts the public does not understand, and then to communicate those facts as widely as they can. Just as nothing affects opinion about an ongoing war as quickly as communiqués from the front, so too a better understanding of the facts about the public schools could in the long run shape American education.

William G. Howell is Sydney Stein Professor of American Politics at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Paul E. Peterson is professor of government at Harvard University, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and editor-in-chief of Education Next. Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and executive editor of Education Next.

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Survey Methods

This survey, sponsored by Education Next and the Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at Harvard University, was conducted by the polling firm Knowledge Networks (KN) between February 25 and March 13 of 2009. KN maintains a nationally representative panel of adults, obtained via list-assisted random digit—dialing sampling techniques, who agree to participate in a limited number of online surveys. Because KN offers members of its panel free Internet access and a WebTV device that connects to a telephone and television, the sample is not limited to current computer owners or users with Internet access. When recruiting for the panel, KN sends out an advance mailing and follows up with at least 15 dial attempts. The panel, then, is updated quarterly. Detailed information about the maintenance of the KN panel, the protocols used to administer surveys, and the comparability of online and telephone surveys is available online (www.knowledgenetworks.com/quality/).

The main findings from the Education Next—PEPG survey reported in this essay are based on a nationally representative stratified sample of U.S. adults (age 18 years and older) and oversamples of Hispanics and non-Hispanic blacks, public school teachers, and residents of Florida (the last group for supplemental analyses not reported here). The combined sample of 3,251 respondents consists of 2,153 non-Hispanic whites, 434 non-Hispanic blacks, 481 Hispanics, and 183 members of other ethnic groups; 709 public school teachers and 948 residents of Florida; and 1,694 self-identified Democrats and 1,265 self-identified Republicans. We use post-stratification population weights to adjust for survey nonresponse as well as for the oversampling of teachers and Floridians. These weights ensure that the observed demographic characteristics of the analytic sample match the known characteristics of the national adult population.

On many items we conducted experiments to examine the effect of variations in the way questions are posed. The figures and tables present separately the results for the different experimental conditions. In these instances, respondents were randomly assigned to exactly one of at least two possible conditions. Reported effects in the figures and tables reflect differences observed across the baseline and experimental conditions.

In general, survey results 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 those attributed to subgroups. With 3,251 total respondents, the margin of error for responses given by the full sample in the Education Next—PEPG survey is 1.7 percentage points (for items on which opinion is evenly split). The results presented for subgroups within the sample have larger margins of error, depending on their actual size. However, any differences in opinions or changes in opinions over time reported in the text are statistically significant unless otherwise noted.

Of the 3,251 respondents surveyed in 2009, approximately 300 had also been interviewed in 2008. For this group, it was possible to identify the consistency of responses to identical questions asked in both years.

Percentage totals do not always add to 100 as a result of rounding to the nearest percentage point.

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Download Complete Results Here (PDF).