Chester Finn, president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a frequent Education Next contributor, likes to recount a story from his time working as a senior official at the U.S. Department of Education under education secretary William Bennett. In 1987, after telling a Chicago journalist that the city’s schools were the worst in the nation, Bennett summoned Finn to his office and asked if he was right. “Well, Chicago has some competition from Newark and St. Louis and Detroit,” Finn replied. “But you weren’t wrong.” Coming well before the advent of widespread statewide testing, much less state- and district-level participation in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, Bennett’s claim seems to have survived contemporaneous efforts at fact-checking.

I often reflected on that exchange during my time working for Senator Lamar Alexander, who was then ranking member of the Senate education committee. In speeches, Alexander had a habit of referring to U.S. history and civics as “our worst subject.”

“Is that right?” he’d occasionally ask when preparing his remarks. Well, I couldn’t say that it was wrong.

According to NAEP, only 14 percent of 8th graders nationwide scored proficient in U.S. history in 2022, while just 22 percent reached that benchmark in civics—both notably lower than the 27 percent and 31 percent who demonstrated proficiency in math and reading, respectively. One might fairly wonder whether the National Assessment Governing Board has set expectations too high in U.S. history and civics, but a glance at item-level results gives ample cause for concern. Just one in three students, for example, could correctly match each of our three branches of government to its core function—a task one in six would get right by answering at random. Whether or not these are our worst subjects, we clearly have a problem.

In this issue, Yale law professor Justin Driver proposes a new way to teach civics that he calls “student-centered civics education” (see “Building Better Citizens Begins in the Classroom,” features). The approach “foregrounds the major Supreme Court decisions that have shaped the everyday lives of students across the nation”—decisions concerning student speech, corporal punishment, religious expression, and more. Its adoption, he argues, would frame students as “active participants in shaping our constitutional order” while also providing a jumping-off point to explore “more-abstract concepts that undergird civic knowledge.”

Driver’s proposal may not appeal to all readers. Some may find it too centered on judicially defined rights, perhaps at the expense of the concomitant responsibilities inherent in citizenship. Others may find its emphasis on student activism too resonant of so-called “action civics,” an approach that often downplays the importance of basic knowledge of how our government operates.

Driver, for his part, would “welcome such disagreements . . . because their existence would indicate that civic education is being actively debated in venues where such debates remain all too rare.” So would I—and I hope his piece provokes ample conversation.

Still, improving civic education will take more than curricular reform. It will also require more and better data on the results produced by competing approaches.

Since Secretary Bennett opined on Chicago’s national standing, our ability to compare student achievement in math and reading across states and school districts has been transformed. Every two years, the NAEP program provides a new set of results for all 50 states and 26 urban school districts—a monitoring system that, though imperfect, enables us to broadly gauge their success (or lack thereof) in developing student literacy and numeracy skills.

In U.S. history and civics, by contrast, NAEP provides a single national data point about every four years. While the program will in 2030 permit states to test enough students in civics to produce state-level results, recent history suggests that fewer than a dozen will embrace that opportunity. Requiring all of them to do so would take Congressional action.

The first record I can find of Senator Alexander using the phrase “our worst subject” is in the title of a 2005 subcommittee hearing on a bill requiring states to participate separately in the NAEP U.S. history and civics tests. Nearly two decades later, we have little reason to believe that his judgment was incorrect. Now would be an apt time for Congress to give civics assessment another look.

— Martin R. West

This article appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

West, M.R. (2024). Tackling “Our Worst Subject” Requires New Approaches—and Better Data. Education Next, 24(3), 5.

American education reform in the 2010s centered largely on changing how teachers are evaluated and paid. Through Race to the Top and its state waiver program, the Obama administration successfully prodded 44 states to adopt new evaluation systems based, in part, on objective measures of student achievement. These states committed, at least on paper, to using teachers’ evaluation ratings for personnel decisions ranging from who receives tenure to who gets a bonus. In the meantime, a turbo-charged federal Teacher Incentive Fund program encouraged school districts to link educators’ compensation to their performance.

It is tempting to look back at that era and conclude that teacher-pay reform has failed—that we should move on to other strategies. Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress stagnated over the course of the decade, with gaps increasing between higher- and lower-performing students. A 2023 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper on the impact of state teacher-evaluation policies reports “precisely estimated null effects.” Policymakers, it seems, had already made the same estimation, for few are paying attention now to evaluation-and-pay reform.

Yet closer inspection uncovers a different story. Despite incorporating test-score evidence, the new state evaluation systems still failed at their most basic task of distinguishing the most- and least-effective educators. As Matt Kraft and Allison Gilmour report, the share of teachers rated ineffective in most settings barely budged—perhaps because the principals doing the rating knew they couldn’t fire low performers or even differentiate pay. Genuinely new approaches to evaluating teachers haven’t failed; they haven’t been widely tried.

Moreover, a growing body of evidence suggests that teacher evaluation-and-pay reform, when it is taken seriously and implemented well, produces gains. Education Next has previously reported on the consequences of the IMPACT evaluation-and-pay system implemented in Washington, D.C. under Michelle Rhee and her successor, Kaya Henderson (see “A Lasting Impact,” research, Fall 2017). In short, strong teachers improved their performance, ineffective teachers left the district, and student performance rose.

In this issue, Yale economist Barbara Biasi provides complementary evidence on the potential of performance-based pay based on Act 10, a 2011 Wisconsin law that limited the scope of collective bargaining to base pay (see “Wisconsin’s Act 10, Flexible Pay, and the Impact on Teacher Labor Markets,” features). As Biasi notes, this “allowed school districts to set pay more flexibly and without unions’ consent, in principle detaching compensation from seniority and credentials.” Act 10 also capped annual growth in base pay at the rate of inflation and required educators to pay more toward health care and pension costs. If you think that teachers should be paid both more and differently than they are now, Act 10 is not for you. But the law did give Wisconsin school districts unprecedented flexibility in setting teachers’ pay.

Not all districts took advantage. About half continued to use traditional step-and-lane salary schedules based on experience and graduate degrees. The other half, however, abandoned step-and-lane schedules and, in effect, allowed individual teachers to negotiate their pay. This natural experiment unfolded gradually across the state, due to differences in when pre-Act 10 collective-bargaining agreements expired, enabling Biasi to study the law’s effects.

She reports that, in districts adopting flexible-pay systems, teachers who were more effective in raising students’ test scores started to earn more than their peers—despite the fact that Wisconsin school districts at the time did not calculate value-added scores. (Apparently, administrators don’t need an algorithmic statewide teacher-evaluation system to identify their best performers.) These districts saw more weak teachers depart and experienced an influx of effective teachers, many of them poached from districts that stuck with seniority-based pay. Incumbent teachers in flexible-pay districts likewise improved their performance, and student achievement rose.

Act 10 did have unintended consequences. Districts serving poor students were less likely to adopt flexible pay systems. As a result, the personnel churn the law generated likely reduced these students’ access to effective teachers. A gender pay-gap emerged, as women proved less likely than male teachers to negotiate with male principals for higher salaries. The cap on growth in base pay may have kept districts from paying Wisconsin teachers more at a time when that would have been helpful.

Still, Biasi’s careful and creative research adds to the evidence that altering how teachers are evaluated and paid remains a powerful lever for improving student outcomes. It suggests that the Obama administration’s teacher-evaluation reform fell short at least in part because it wasn’t accompanied by a loosening of collective-bargaining restrictions. Act 10 reveals the value of first giving districts the flexibility needed to use what they already know about who their strongest performers are. States seeking to draw the right lessons from the past decade’s disappointments would do well to keep that in mind.

— Martin R. West

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

West, M.R. (2023). Think Reforming Teacher Pay Doesn’t Work? Think Again. Education Next, 23(3), 5.

When we asked Rachel Skerritt to reflect for Education Next on her tenure as head of Boston Latin School (see “What I Learned Leading America’s First Public School,” features), we didn’t know what to expect. Our managing editor, a Boston Latin parent and recipient of many an email penned by Skerritt, assured me that the piece would be well written. But we had little inkling of what lessons she would draw from steering the school through a global pandemic, a national reckoning on issues of race, and local attacks on Boston Latin’s exam-based admissions system.

What I did not expect was that Skerritt would assert that a “culture of urgency is essential” to effective school leadership. Urgency is out of fashion in education circles—derided along with perfectionism and objectivity as a defining characteristic of “white supremacy culture” in diversity training materials based on the work of author Tema Okun that are widely used in the sector. Yet here was a Black woman, who spent much of her tenure leading Boston Latin’s response to Black students’ concerns about the school’s racial climate, arguing that urgency is just what schools need.

The “urgency” issue surfaces in a different way in Robert Pondiscio’s article about the future of charter schools in New York (see “What Next for New York Charter Schools?” features). Pondiscio reports that at BES, a Boston-based leadership-development program known for launching many of the nation’s highest-performing charter schools, founder Linda Brown “routinely plastered the word ‘urgency’ in office windows and around the walls at Fellows’ training sessions.” That practice changed after Brown retired in 2018 and, as part of a broader rebrand, BES changed its name from “Building Excellent Schools” to “Build. Excel. Sustain.” BES’s long-time chief academic officer, Sue Walsh, told Pondiscio she left the organization after “we were given readings as a staff that ‘urgency’ was racist.”

I chair the BES board, and I tend to agree with Skerritt that urgency is a key ingredient in educational improvement; it’s certainly not inherently racist. Linking urgency to white supremacy strikes me as simplistic and counterproductive, at least if the goal is to shift people’s thinking. Absence of urgency can mean delaying change. That prolongs problems for those ill-served by the status quo.

But that doesn’t mean that there is nothing for organizations like BES to learn from aspects of Okun’s critique. When a sense of urgency “makes it difficult to take time to be inclusive [and] encourage democratic and/or thoughtful decision-making,” it can be oppressive, says Okun, who describes herself as white. When a sense of urgency produces “unrealistic expectations about how much can get done in any period of time,” it can become self-defeating, Okun argues. Skerritt herself is quick to emphasize that “Urgency does not mean to place so much pressure on teachers and staff that their longevity in the profession is unlikely.”

The task confronting education leaders is to convey and maintain a sense of urgency that’s shared and sustainable. It is to cultivate a sense of urgency within a community rather than to impose it from above.

That task is especially key as we emerge from the pandemic. Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress released in September confirmed that American 9-year-olds lost the equivalent of four months of learning in reading and more than five months in math since 2020. Making up that ground will surely require a multi-year effort. Yet our May 2022 Education Next survey (see “Parental Anxieties over Student Learning Dissipate as Schools Relax Anti-Covid Measures,” features) reveals that the parents of only 9 percent of students said they are not confident their child will “catch up” from Covid-related learning loss within a year or two; the parents of the rest either were confident the child will catch up (49 percent of students) or perceive no learning loss in the first place (43 percent of students).

The “urgency” issue, in other words, extends beyond school leaders and educators to parents and policymakers, some of whom may be operating with an unrealistically rosy sense of the pandemic’s effects on children’s education. Better informing education decisionmakers at all levels—from households to the White House—is a task to which we at Education Next bring our own sense of urgency.

Martin R. West

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

West, M.R. (2023). The “Urgency” Issue. Education Next, 23(1), 5.

Ever since my colleagues at the National Assessment Governing Board announced our plans to release the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress results on schedule this month, there’s been speculation about how those results could influence the upcoming midterm elections. The NAEP Long-term Trend results for 9-year-olds, released in September, confirmed that the math and reading skills of American students had dropped sharply over the course of the pandemic. The Main NAEP results provide results for students in both 4th and 8th grade. More importantly, they make it possible to see which states and large school districts fared best in the Covid era—and which lost the most ground. Could the results make a difference in competitive governors’ races in states like Kansas, Nevada, and Wisconsin? Could they become a partisan talking point in congressional races nationwide?

Well, those results are now out, and, at least at the state level, the patterns defy easy politicization. Scores fell nearly everywhere. Math scores were down from 2019 by a statistically significant amount in 41 states in 4th grade and 49 states in 8th grade. Reading scores were down in 30 states in 4th grade and 33 states in 8th grade. Scores also generally fell in those states where achievement levels were officially unchanged; the drops just were not large enough to reach statistical significance.

The amount of ground that students lost does vary across states, but that variation doesn’t fit simple narratives. For example, the figure below shows the relationship between the drop in eighth grade math test scores between 2019 and 2022 and one of the best available measures of the prevalence of remote instruction during the 2021-22 school year. I focus on 8th grade math because that was the grade level and subject area where scores fell by the largest amount, and because math achievement tends to be more influenced by what is happening within schools. (That said, the relationship is very similar if I instead use the average decline in scores across all four tests.) The measure of remote learning is based on the American Enterprise Institute’s Return to Learn Tracker, which provides weekly data on mode of instruction from August 2020 through June 2021 for virtually all U.S. school districts with three or more schools. Following Dan Goldhaber, Tom Kane, and their colleagues in a recent analysis of the effects of remote instruction, I aggregate the data to the state level to provide a rough measure of the average share of students who had access only to remote instruction over the course of the year. States that went for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election are represented by red markers, while states that went for Joe Biden are shown in blue. The dotted horizontal line shows the best linear relationship between remote instruction and test score changes.

That relationship is negative (and statistically significant), suggesting that students lost more ground on average where remote instruction was more prevalent—but the relationship’s strength is relatively weak. The correlation coefficient is -0.3, which means that this measure of remote instruction explains less than 10 percent of the overall variation in test score changes across the 50 states (plus DC). The clustering of red states at the left of the figure confirms that states that went for Trump were in fact more aggressive in reopening schools for in-person instruction, but that wasn’t enough on its own to generate large differences in aggregate state-level test-score changes. Red states lost 7.2 NAEP scale score points in 8th grade math, on average, while blue states lost 8.8 points.

Looking more closely at the results for three politically salient states, we see that the vocal efforts of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Texas Governor Greg Abbott to reopen schools early were not enough to keep students from losing roughly the national average decline of eight points in eighth grade math. Texas students did manage to avoid a significant decline in 4th and 8th grade reading, and Florida students held steady in 4th grade reading. We can expect to hear them and others trumpeting those results. But any efforts to claim credit for them will be complicated by the fact that California students lost only six points in 8th grade math—far less than would be expected given the slow return to in-person instruction seen under Governor Gavin Newsom—and also fared well on a relative basis in other grades and subject areas.

None of this is to claim any kind of success for our national experiment with remote instruction over the past two school years. The AEI data on remote instruction are far from perfect, not least because safety concerns led many parents to keep their children at home even when in-person options were available. NAEP data are not well suited to parsing out the relative effectiveness of different modes of learning. Other research using different data sources provides convincing evidence that students learned far less over the course of the pandemic when they weren’t in school buildings. But recall that essentially all schools nationwide were shuttered in Spring 2020—and that school closures were hardly the only way in which the pandemic could have slowed student progress. The end result is a pattern of results across states that can’t be reduced to a single factor.

And that is probably a good thing. NAEP data are always better at telling us what has happened with respect to our students’ achievement than why. The latest results confirm that scores are down virtually everywhere. Rather than using them to score political points, let’s focus on what it will take to help students make up lost ground.

Martin R. West is editor-in-chief of Education Next and a member of the National Assessment Governing Board. He is academic dean and Henry Lee Shattuck Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and deputy director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance.

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

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

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

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

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

Public Opinion During the Pandemic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Partisanship and Public Opinion over Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Student Enrollment by School Sector

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

“Declining enrollment clobbers California’s schools.”

“Enrollment Declines Haunt School Districts.”

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

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

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

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

Parent Satisfaction and Assessment of Learning Loss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parent Perceptions by School Sector

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

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

Bullying and Fighting in Schools

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

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

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

Instruction on Race

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

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

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

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

Parental Support for School Choice

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

It is hard to recall—or even to imagine—a stretch of time before the past three years when the news emanating from American public schools was more dispiriting. Day after day, it seems, researchers or government agencies release new test score data showing an unprecedented decline in students’ basic skills over the course of the pandemic. The surgeon general warns of a national crisis of youth mental health that predates Covid-19 and grew worse while schools were closed. School districts struggle to retain superintendents and to staff classrooms amid the “great resignation.” New and troubling details emerge about local law enforcement’s response to the May 24 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

These developments rightly command our attention but are not the entire story. As M. Danish Shakeel and Education Next senior editor Paul Peterson report in this issue’s cover story (see “A Half-Century of Student Progress Nationwide,” research), a different and more hopeful picture emerges when one looks at student performance over the very long haul. Shakeel and Peterson step back from the daily headlines to examine how students have fared on more than 7 million math and reading tests administered to nationally representative samples of U.S. students born between 1954 and 2007. These data represent the “recorded history” of American students’ achievement through 2017. The story they tell defies conventional narratives of an education system in decline.

On the contrary, Shakeel and Peterson find that the achievement of the average American student has climbed steadily since large-scale assessment began in the early 1970s. The gains have been largest in math and for students in elementary school, but they are noteworthy in both subjects and for students of all ages. What’s more, test scores have, over this half century, inched closer together across lines of race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.

These findings echo those of the late James Flynn, a New Zealand scholar who famously documented rapid growth in raw IQ test scores worldwide over the course of the 20th century. Indeed, Shakeel and Peterson posit that the progress they document is attributable in part to the same factors psychologists believe explain the Flynn Effect: improved nutrition and reduced exposure to contagious diseases and other environmental risks, particularly in the womb and in early childhood. This would help to explain why American students’ gains have been more pronounced in math, which depends more than reading achievement on the cognitive abilities most susceptible to environmental influence.

Yet schools and school reform have clearly played a role in propelling students forward. Schools are the primary site where most students develop core academic skills assessed by standardized tests. Indeed, when schools closed their doors in March 2020, test scores fell. We also have good evidence that reform measures such as school desegregation and test-based accountability helped achievement grow and move closer to racial and ethnic parity over the period Shakeel and Peterson study.

There is, alas, no guarantee that the upward trends Shakeel and Peterson document will continue. Performance on the National Assessment of Educa-tional Progress—one of the tests they examine—had been stagnant for nearly a decade even prior to the pandemic. Results due out later this summer will disclose just how large a setback Covid-19 caused (see “Nation’s Report Card to Shine Spotlight on Pandemic-Related Learning Loss,” editor’s letter, Winter 2022). And the challenges facing American students and schools as we haltingly emerge from the pandemic era are all too real.

It may be, though, that educators, knowing that progress is possible, will feel more encouraged as they respond to those urgent challenges. As Shakeel and Peterson put it, “While the seismic disruptions to young people’s development and education due to the Covid-19 pandemic have placed schools and communities in distress, the successes of the past may give educators confidence that today’s challenges can be overcome.” Let’s hope they are right.

—Martin R. West

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

West, M.R. (2022). Progress Is Possible. Education Next, 22(4), 5.

Applying for a federal grant to support the creation of new charter schools is about to get a lot harder. That’s the upshot of draft regulations for the Charter Schools Program that the Biden administration released for public comment in March. It is an unfortunate proposal at a time when new research confirms that charter schools are an asset not only to their students but also to the broader communities in which they operate (see “The Bigger Picture of Charter School Results,” features, this issue).

For nearly three decades, Congress has provided funds to assist charter schools with start-up expenses such as staffing, professional development, facility improvements, and community engagement events. The bulk of the money goes first to state education departments who, in turn, award grants of up to $500,000 to charter schools preparing to open, replicate, or expand. When Congress last renewed the program in 2015, it permitted successful charter management organizations to apply directly to the U.S. Department of Education for comparable support.

The program is modest by federal budget standards—Congress authorized $440 million for it this year—but over time it has been a major driver of the charter sector’s expansion. What’s more, the states, none of which wants to leave federal money on the table, often design and implement their charter school programs according to the criteria Congress uses to select grant applicants.

That’s one reason the administration’s recent proposal is so troubling. Among other new requirements, the regulation would force applicants to submit a detailed “community impact analysis” demonstrating that the number of schools they propose to open or expand “does not exceed the number of public schools needed to accommodate the demand in the community.” The language says nothing about the quality of available schools. It would effectively prevent charter schools from opening with federal support in the growing number of areas with flat or declining enrollment—often places where high-quality options are scarcest.

The regulation would also require applicants to collaborate with a traditional public school or district on “an activity that would be beneficial to all partners in the collaboration”—a nice-sounding concept that would effectively give districts veto power over charter expansion. Applicants would even need to provide “a letter from each partnering traditional public school or school district demonstrating commitment to participate in the proposed charter-traditional collaboration.” Charter entrepreneurs unable to find a willing partner would be out of luck.

The entire proposal seems to reflect the view, heavily promoted by teachers unions and their political allies, that charter schools are a drain on school districts’ resources to be tolerated, if at all, as pockets of innovation within expanding systems. That same perspective has informed key revisions to state charter-school laws in recent years, including California’s 2019 move to allow districts to reject charter school applications based not on the proposal’s quality but on its impact on their finances. The result was a dramatic slowing of charter growth nationally in the years leading up to the pandemic—just as charter opponents intended.

Yet the research case for the charter sector’s expansion continues to strengthen. In this issue, Doug Harris and Feng Chen of Tulane University offer the most comprehensive analysis to date of how charter schools affect the combined outcomes of both charter and traditional public-school students in the school districts in which they are located. Looking nationwide and comparing districts with a substantial charter presence to those without charter schools, they find substantial gains in both test scores and high-school graduation rates. A January 2022 study by David Griffith for the Fordham Institute, “Still Rising: Charter School Enrollment and Student Achievement at the Metropolitan Level,” similarly found greater charter enrollment associated with increased math achievement by Black, Hispanic, and low-income students.

If Biden administration rule makers are not swayed by these findings, the reality underlying them is persuasive to many of the families who have chosen to enroll their children at charter schools. Despite an oddly short window for public comment, more than 25,800 members of the public, many of them charter parents, weighed in on the proposed rule before the April 18 deadline. A group of 17 Republican governors wrote to education secretary Miguel Cardona to register their objections to the proposed changes. When a similarly tone-deaf draft rule on civics-education grants prompted an uproar last year, the administration backed down and replaced the rule with something more sensible. Here’s hoping that pattern prevails again.

— Martin R. West

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

West, M.R. (2022). New Biden Rules Would Slow Charter Growth: Parents, governors protest. Education Next, 22(3), 5.

As this issue of Education Next goes to press, the nationwide spike in Covid-19 cases caused mainly by the Omicron variant has begun to abate. In Massachusetts and other Northeast states, where Omicron first took hold in the United States, total cases and cases among students and staff at schools have both dropped precipitously. Yes, hospitalization rates remain high and, in many places, hospitals are dangerously close to capacity. This pandemic has defied expectations too often to permit confident assertions about its future. It seems possible, however, that we’re entering a new stage in the way school systems are responding to the pandemic—one that, with the 2022 midterm elections looming, will lead to a gradual loosening of restrictions even in the most vigilant of blue states.

Though we may have reached a turning point in the pandemic’s impact on education, the latest spike in the disease has already wrought another spate of disruption. As Omicron surged, the Chicago Teachers Union demonstrated once again who runs the public schools in the nation’s third-largest city by forcing a four-day closure over the objections of the city’s mayor and school superintendent. On the national front, the tracking service Burbio reported that, over the first three weeks of January, more than 5,700 K–12 schools closed or went virtual each week, on average. But these shutdowns differed from those that kept many schools fully remote throughout the 2020–21 school year. The 2022 closures were driven mostly by staff shortages rather than false hopes of containing the virus’s spread. A growing number of jurisdictions are now deemphasizing or discontinuing contact tracing in schools, noting the low number of positive cases such efforts identify and the burden they place on school staff.

Unlike many other viral diseases, Covid-19 spares most children from the worst of its physical harm. Yet our collective failure to adjust to this reality has forced children to endure serious damage to their learning. Mounting data on students’ educational progress make this clear. State test results from spring 2021 revealed a massive setback in the development of students’ literacy and numeracy. High school graduation rates, after climbing steadily for more than a decade, fell markedly in 2021 despite an easing of degree requirements. Students’ nonacademic development has also suffered. The American Academy of Pediatrics has gone so far as to declare a national emergency in children’s mental health.

As school systems struggled to respond to the pandemic over the past two years, some families took matters into their own hands. In this issue, Daniel Hamlin and Education Next senior editor Paul E. Peterson take stock of recent developments in the world of homeschooling (see “Homeschooling Skyrocketed During the Pandemic, but What Does the Future Hold?” features, this issue). Hamlin and Peterson note that “even cautious estimates indicate a doubling of the practice during the pandemic,” with as many as 6 percent of U.S. children learning at home without simultaneously being enrolled in a public or private school, as of June 2021. What it means for students to be homeschooled is also changing, the authors note, with more families assembling a blend of online experiences, participation in informal cooperatives, and perhaps a course or two at a formal school to round out their child’s education.

This growth in homeschooling has been accompanied—and in some cases aided—by an expansion of policies promoting parental choice. At least 18 states created or expanded private-school choice programs amid the pandemic in 2021 (see “School Choice Advances in the States,” features, Fall 2021). Republican leaders in other states now seek to increase this number. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has said that “this upcoming session . . . you’re going to see a stronger, swifter, more powerful movement advocating school choice than you’ve ever seen in the history of the state of Texas.” Glenn Youngkin, the newly elected governor of Virginia, has proposed expanding the number of charter schools in the commonwealth from fewer than 10 to about 200.

A pandemic that takes the lives of more than five million people worldwide, robs millions more of the joy of social interaction, and disrupts education for months on end does not have a silver lining. If, however, the response to Covid-19 leads policymakers to provide families with more options for meeting students’ needs, that change will be a part of its legacy for us all to make the most of as we seek to repair the pandemic’s harm to our nation’s children and truly build back better.

Martin R. West

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

West, M.R. (2022). In Omicron’s Wake. Education Next, 22(2), 5.

The full extent of Covid-19’s impact on student learning remains unknown, in part because the pandemic disrupted not just schooling but also the assessment systems used to monitor student progress. Annual tests were cancelled in all states in spring 2020. In school districts where diagnostic testing continued, large numbers of students did not participate. Of those who did, many took the tests from their homes, raising questions about comparability to prior years. Parents certainly do have a sense that progress has slowed; 57 percent of the parents in the Education Next survey of public opinion reported that students were learning less during the pandemic (see “Parent Poll Reveals Support for School Covid-Safety Measures Despite Vaccine Hesitancy, Partisan Polarization,” features).

In my role as a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the NAEP testing program, the challenges of gathering data on student learning at the very time when it is most needed became clear in our deliberations over the course of the pandemic. Was it prudent to send more than a thousand program staff on planes to schools across the country to administer NAEP tests? Would they find students in schools when they arrived? These considerations and others led us, reluctantly, to postpone the administration of the biannual NAEP tests scheduled for spring 2021.

Yet, as that opportunity to gauge the pandemic’s impact closed, we realized that another had opened. Just before the onset of Covid-19, in January 2020, the NAEP Long-Term Trend math and reading tests had been administered to nationally representative samples of 9- and 13-year-olds. The testing of 17-year-olds, however, slated to launch in March, was abruptly postponed. Our board initially planned to test those older students in early 2022, but over time, we began to question how useful their results would be. Since the Long-Term Trend test had not been administered for nearly a decade, it would have limited ability to speak to changes over the past two years.

In our August 2021 board meeting, my colleagues unanimously approved a motion I authored to revise the assessment schedule to test 9-year-olds rather than 17-year-olds in January 2022. In other words, we will test the same population of students we tested on the eve of the pandemic exactly two years later. Because that population is defined based on students’ age rather than their grade level, the results will not be blurred by any increases in the share of students repeating a grade due to the disruption of their schooling.

The picture that emerges from this unconventional NAEP assessment will necessarily be incomplete. It will be limited to students aged 9. (Budget limitations precluded also testing 13-year-olds.) It will speak only to math and reading skills. It will provide data for the nation as a whole but not for specific states or school districts. Over time, other NAEP tests will help to address some of these gaps. In the meantime, we are pleased that the Nation’s Report Card will provide the first high-quality, nationally representative evidence on just how much additional work needs to be done to help students catch up.

Martin West

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

West, M.R. (2022). Nation’s Report Card to Shine Spotlight on Pandemic-Related Learning Loss: Governing Board responds to testing schedule disruptions with a plan. Education Next, 22(1), 5.