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2021 Education Next Survey Reveals Parental Support for School Covid-Safety Measures Despite Vaccination Hesitancy
Plus, support for policy reforms wanes as public craves return to normalcy

August 31, 2021 (CAMBRIDGE, Mass.)—While a large percentage of parents support Covid-safety measures for students, many are reluctant to vaccinate their children, the 15th annual Education Next survey of American public opinion on education policy finds.

Support for policy reforms, such as school choice or free college, is falling among both Republicans and Democrats, suggesting a sweeping desire for a return to normalcy. Despite an apparent decline in district enrollment last fall, the size of each of the four school sectors—district, private, charter, and homeschooled—has largely returned to spring 2020 levels.

Read the 2021 Education Next survey articles and explore the interactive graphics.

Among the key findings:

• Vaccine hesitancy and safety measures. A bare majority of parents say they “probably” or “definitely” would vaccinate their child, while another third of parents say they “probably” or “definitely” would not. Vaccine hesitancy, however, is not clearly driven by dismissal of the threat posed by Covid-19—many parents support measures to protect their children from infection at school. Nearly half of parents favor mask requirements when schools open in the fall, and about a third oppose the practice. A mask requirement is more popular in the minority community than among white adults. Nearly two thirds of parents say high school students should have the option of learning fully online, and nearly half say the same for elementary school students. However, fewer than a third of parents support social distancing requirements at school.
• Return to normalcy and school reform. Enthusiasm for most policy reforms has waned regardless of partisan support. When compared to 2019 responses, support in 2021 declined significantly for increasing district expenditures, raising teacher salaries, similar standards across states, charter schools, universal and low-income vouchers, and more. Support for free attendance to four-year, public colleges saw the biggest decline since 2019 (from 60% in favor to 43%).
• Public institutions. Though evaluations of local schools have been improving substantially since 2008, when respondents are asked to grade public institutions, schools receive lower evaluations than do either the police force or the post office, both when respondents are asked for an assessment of operations in their local community and across the country. In general, Black Americans are more critical of the nation’s police than others, and white Americans are more skeptical of the nation’s schools than others.
• Partisan differences. Partisan differences in education opinion have expanded since the start of the pandemic but vary by issue. On topics such as school spending, teacher salary levels, merit pay, Common Core, and schooling for undocumented immigrants, partisanship reigns. But on student testing for school accountability and school choice, partisanship is less among members of the two political parties than among many representatives active in state legislatures and in Congress. Republicans are more ready to embrace merit pay for teachers, charter schools, and universal vouchers programs; while Democrats are more inclined toward boosting school expenditure levels, lifting teacher salaries, and offering free preschool and college.
• Sector differences. Differences in students’ experiences between private, district, and charter school sectors persist. Students attending private schools returned to school more rapidly than either students at district or charter schools, as reported by parents in November, a difference that continues until spring. Students at charters were more likely to learn remotely than children at district schools in both November and June. Parents of private-school students are less likely to report learning loss, negative impacts from Covid safety measures, or a decline in their child’s emotional well-being. Still, parents across all sectors registered a high level of satisfaction with their child’s school during the pandemic year: more than three-quarters of district-school children had an experience that the parent rated satisfactorily, a percentage that rose to 92% and 81% for children attending private and charter schools, respectively.
• The Biden effect. The Biden Administration has taken a strong position on two large contemporary issues: government funding for universal preschool and free tuition at public two-year colleges. Yet the impact of Biden’s endorsements is more muted that that of the two prior presidents. Among Democrats, support for government funding for preschool and community college is robust, and support does not differ significantly between those informed of Biden’s views and those left uninformed. Neither do the views of Republicans, who are generally opposed to both policy proposals, change once informed of President Biden’s position.

Methodology. The total sample for the survey (3,156 respondents) includes two overlapping samples: a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults (1,410 respondents); a nationally representative sample of American parents, stepparents, or foster parents of at least one child living in the respondent’s household who is in a grade from kindergarten through 12th grade (2,155 respondents). The parent sample includes oversamples of parents with at least one child in a charter school, parents with at least one child in a private school, Black parents, and Hispanic parents. The survey was conducted in May and June 2021.

About the Authors: Michael B. Henderson is assistant professor at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication and director of its Public Policy Research Lab. David M. Houston is assistant professor at the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University. Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University, Director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, and Senior Editor of Education Next. Martin R. West is academic dean and Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Editor-in-chief of Education Next.

About Education Next: Education Next is a scholarly journal committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform, published by the Education Next Institute and the Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School. For more information, please visit educationnext.org.

Thursday, July 30—Recession-induced cuts to state education spending are associated with declines in test scores and college-going, C. Kirabo Jackson, Cora Wigger, and Heyu Xiong report in a new research article for Education Next. With the nation in the midst of another recession, the study provides evidence on how spending cuts during the Great Recession affected student achievement.

The results can inform the policy choices currently facing state, local, and federal decisionmakers.

“States facing a series of difficult financial decisions may wish to priori­tize restoring education budgets as soon as possible after the recovery. Though the impact of tough economic times on public schools may be felt for years to come, the severity of the consequences for students can be minimized by maintaining support for instruction as much as possible,” Jackson, Wigger, and Xiong write.

The authors looked at each state’s test scores and number of college freshmen from 2002 to 2017 to compare those outcomes before and after funding cuts prompted by the Great Recession. They took advantage of the fact that the recession did not affect education spending in all states equally—though state funding accounts for nearly half of public K-12 school spending throughout the U.S., the size of the state share varies widely.

Among the key findings:

• Test scores and college enrollment track spending. Soon after per-pupil spending nationwide fell in the aftermath of the Great Recession, average math and reading performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress declined, and fewer students enrolled in college. A $1,000 reduction in per-pupil spending due to the recession reduced student test scores by about 1.6 percentile points and the number of college freshmen by 2.6 percent.
• States where schools depend more on state funding saw the largest declines. States where state revenues account for more than 48 percent of spending on K-12 public education experienced larger declines in per-pupil spending after the Great Recession than states where schools rely less on state funding. These states also saw larger declines in reading and math test scores and in rates of first-time college enrollment.
• Spending declines widen the achievement gap. Reduced per-pupil spending due to the recession grew the test-score gap for both low-income students and students of color. Black students were hit the hardest— a $1,000 spending cut increased the gap in average test scores between black and white students by about 6 percent.

Because states with the steepest spending declines were no more likely to experience high unemployment or poverty rates during the recession, the authors were able to separate the effects of recession-induced cuts in school spending from the broader effects of the recession itself.

To receive an embargoed copy of “The Costs of Cutting School Spending: Lessons from the Great Recession” or to speak with the authors, please contact Jackie Kerstetter at jackie.kerstetter@educationnext.org. The article will be available Tuesday, August 4 on educationnext.org and will appear in the Fall 2020 issue of Education Next, available in print on August 31.

About the Authors: C. Kirabo Jackson is professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University, where Cora Wigger is a PhD candidate. Heyu Xiong is assis­tant professor at Case Western Reserve University.

About Education Next: Education Next is a scholarly journal committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform, published by the Education Next Institute and the Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School. For more information, please visit educationnext.org.

 

Advanced vocational classes increase students’ early-career earnings
Growing academic course requirements may crowd out advantageous career and technical studies

July 25, 2019—Students earn about 2 percent more annually for each advanced or upper-level voca­tional class they take in high school, according to an analysis of the schooling and workforce outcomes of over 4,000 early-career adults. In a new article for Education Next, authors Daniel Kreisman (Georgia State University) and Kevin Stange (University of Michigan) further report that, rather than deterring capable students from academic pursuits, vocational courses enable students to make better post-secondary enrollment decisions.

The authors use data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics from 1998 to 2015, to examine how students’ choices to enroll in vocational courses in high school affect their subsequent college going, college completion, and labor-market participation. They look separately at the effects of taking low-level vocational courses, defined as courses that are the first in a sequence, and advanced vocational courses. This enables them to examine the effects of breadth (taking many courses in different fields) and of depth (specializing in particular field) for students pursuing vocational studies.

Among the key findings:

Vocational courses compete for time, money. Between 1990 and 2009, as the average number of academic credits that high-school students earned increased, the number of vocational credits dropped by 14 percent. This drop coincides with a 32-percent drop since 1985 in federal funding for such programs.

Advanced vocational classes benefit future earnings regardless of college attendance. Though low-level vocational courses are unrelated to wages, students who complete advanced vocational credits in high school earn higher wages as adults, with an increase of 2 percent for every high-level class taken. Unlike the wage premium associated with advanced academic course credits, the positive wage gains associated with upper-level vocational courses do not depend on whether a student attends college or not.

Vocational-course enrollment may inform college-going decisions. Taking more advanced vocational coursework is associated with lower four-year college-enrollment rates but no reduction in college completion, sug­gesting that students nudged away from four-year colleges by their exposure to a vocational secondary curriculum were unlikely to earn a degree had they enrolled.

Vocational study attracts most students. The majority of American students take at least one vocational course during high school and roughly 50 percent of students take the equivalent of one full course each year. This challenges the conception of vocational study as an alternative to academic classes.

Older students take more vocational classes. Enrollment in vocational classes grows substantially in 11th and 12th grades, when students are more likely to have completed other academic requirements and have more control over their schedules.

“[S]tudents most likely to benefit from vocational coursework seem to be self-selecting into those courses, implying that policies that limit their ability to do so, such as increased course requirements in academic subjects, may not be in all students’ best interests,” say Kreisman and Stange. They add that recent trends toward specialized vocational concentrations are smart policy.

To receive an embargoed copy of “Depth over Breadth: The Value of Vocational Education in U.S. High Schools” or to speak with the authors, please contact Jackie Kerstetter at jackie.kerstetter@educationnext.org. The article will be available Tuesday, July 30 on www.educationnext.org and will appear in the Fall 2018 issue of Education Next, available in print on August 28, 2019.

About the Authors: Daniel Kreisman is assistant professor of economics at Georgia State University and director of CTEx. Kevin Stange is associate professor of public policy at the University of Michigan.

About Education Next: Education Next is a scholarly journal committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform, published by the Education Next Institute and the Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School. For more information, please visit www.educationnext.org.

 

Charter school growth has modest impact on segregation
First national analysis reveals increase within districts, decrease across metro areas

July 16, 2019—Charters increase segregation within school districts, but tend to decrease segregation between districts in the same metropolitan area according to the first large-scale study of the effects of charters on school segregation in the United States. Study authors Tomas Monarrez (Urban Institute), Brian Kisida (University of Missouri), and Matthew Chingos (Urban Institute) report their findings in a new article for Education Next.

“Simply comparing the share of charter and traditional public schools that are racially isolated is insufficient, as charter schools are not spread evenly across the educational landscape,” say Monarrez, Kisida, and Chingos. Instead, they examine how the amount of segregation across all schools within a geographic area changes as charters enroll a greater share of students. To measure segregation, they use an indicator called the variance-ratio index that compares how segregated a system is relative to how segregated it could be, given the demographic mix of students in the area. Using the National Center for Educations’ Statistics Common Core of Data, they examine school enrollment by grade level, race and ethnicity, school type, and location from 1998 to 2015.

Among the key findings:

Charter enrollment is largely a reflection of location. Charter schools, on average, enroll higher proportions of black students than white students in elementary and middle schools, and tend to enroll higher proportions of Hispanic students in middle and high schools. These enrollment characteristics largely reflect their locations; charter elementary and middle schools are more likely to be located in census tracts with higher proportions of black residents, while charter middle and high schools are found in areas with higher proportions of Hispanic residents compared to white residents.

The average segregation of black and Hispanic students has remained stable over time. Relative measures of segregation reveal that the segregation of black and Hispanic students within school districts, cities, and counties has been stable over the past 15 years. The level of segregation across entire metropolitan areas has declined modestly since 2000.

Charter growth increases segregation of black and Hispanic students within school districts. The growth of charter schools has caused small increases in segregation for black and Hispanic students within school districts, cities, and counties. On average, charter growth accounts for roughly 5 percent of total segregation nationwide.

Across metropolitan areas, however, charter growth has not had a statistically significant effect on segregation. The effect of charter growth on the segregation of black and Hispanic students within school districts is offset by a decrease in segregation between school districts in the same metropolitan area, leaving total segregation across metropolitan areas largely unaffected.

Charter growth effects vary widely by state. Charter growth has notably increased the segregation of black and Hispanic students within school districts in states such as Louisiana, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island. However, in states such as Arizona, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, and Oregon, charters have had little or no effect on segregation.

Consistent results across methodologies. The researchers obtained similar results through a parallel analy­sis that employed the dissimilar­ity index, which measures the proportion of a group’s population who would have to change schools to reach an even distribu­tion across each school in the system. They also find similar results when examining the segregation of black students and Hispanic students separately.

“Our study shows that critics are incorrect when they say that charters are driving the resegregation of American schools,” say Monarrez, Kisida, and Chingos. “But it also shows that charter proponents are incorrect to assume that freeing public schools from neighborhood boundaries will necessarily enhance racial integration.”

To receive an embargoed copy of “Do Charter Schools Increase Segregation? First national analysis reveals a modest impact, depending on where you look” or to speak with the authors, please contact Jackie Kerstetter at jackie.kerstetter@educationnext.org. The article will be available Wednesday, July 24 on www.educationnext.org and will appear in the Fall 2019 issue of Education Next, available in print on August 28, 2019.

About the Authors: Tomas Monarrez is a research associate in the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute; Brian Kisida is assistant professor in the Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri; and Matthew Chingos is vice president for education data and policy at the Urban Institute.

About Education Next: Education Next is a scholarly journal committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform, published by the Education Next Institute and the Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School. For more information, please visit www.educationnext.org.

New York Education Law Rooted in Anti-Catholic Animus
Journal unearths origin of legislation at center of fight over Jewish schools

July 11, 2019—A New York law requiring non-public schools to offer an education that is “substantially equivalent” to public schools was enacted in 1894 amid a surge of anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment, Education Next reports in a new article.

The law is at the center of an ongoing, four-year-long fight over the proper role of city and state government in regulating New York’s Jewish religious schools, which educate more children than the Philadelphia or San Diego public school districts. That fight has been the subject of at least two court cases and extensive local and national press coverage. But until now, the legislative history and historical context of the law had been unexplored.

“The whole fight hinges on language in New York’s state education law requiring that non-public schools offer an education that is ‘substantially equivalent’ to that of the public schools,” Menachem Wecker writes in his Education Next article. “The origins of that language help uncover the issues at stake.”

Wecker and Education Next editors investigated the origin of the law over six months, tapping the resources of five libraries and archives situated in two states and the District of Columbia.

Among the article’s findings:

Rising xenophobia. The president of the 1894 New York Constitutional Convention that outlawed government funding of religious schools was Joseph Choate, who in 1893 had proposed “Ireland for Irishmen and America for Americans,” and had in March 1894 declared at a Republican mass meeting, “we are tired of being submitted to the despotic control of a handful of foreigners who have no stake in the soil.” Delegates to the convention were mailed cartoons depicting the Catholic Church as a monstrous snake.

Initial defeat. At the same time as the convention, the state added the “substantially equivalent” provision. One newspaper at the time reported that the measure had been defeated in earlier years “owing to the fears of Roman Catholics that a compulsory education law would interfere with their parochial schools.”

Wecker also reports on his visits to two Jewish schools in Brooklyn, including one that was on a list of schools that an advocacy group said should be investigated for failing the “substantially equivalent” test.

To receive an embargoed copy of “New York State Cracks Down on Jewish Schools: Senator Simcha Felder and Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel Meet the Long Shadow of Joseph Hodges Choate” or to speak with the author, please contact. The article will be available Tuesday, July 16 on www.educationnext.org and will appear in the Fall 2019 issue of Education Next, available in print on August 28, 2019.

About the Authors: Menachem Wecker is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C.

About Education Next: Education Next is a scholarly journal committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform, published by the Education Next Institute and the Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School. For more information, please visit www.educationnext.org.

Contact | Jackie Kerstetter: jackie.kerstetter@educationnext.org, Education Next

Is summer learning loss real?
Recent tests do not show widening achievement gaps during summer vacation

Thursday, May 30, 2019—It’s that time of year again—we’ll soon hear warnings about summer learning loss, which disproportionately affects low-income students and is responsible for an astounding two-thirds of the achievement gap by the end of eighth grade. These stories are remarkable. But the most remarkable thing about them is that they may not be true.

In a new article for Education Next, Paul von Hippel of the University of Texas, Austin, reexamines the evidence around summer learning loss. He finds that the study most widely used to support claims of summer learning loss, at more than thirty years old, is based on outdated test-scoring methods. More recent and better-scored tests indicate that achievement gaps are unlikely to widen during students’ summer vacations.

Summer learning loss as we understand it was most famously identified in the Beginning School Study, which tracked the achievement of 838 students in the Baltimore City Public Schools from 1982 until 1990. The data showed that the reading achievement gap between students in high- and low-poverty schools more than tripled between kindergarten and 8th grade, with all of the growth seeming to occur during the summer. According to von Hippel, however, those results don’t stand the test of time.

“I’m no longer sure that the average child loses months of skills each year, and I doubt that summer learning loss contributes much to the achievement gap,” says von Hippel. “My colleagues and I tried to replicate…the classic results in the summer learning literature—and we failed.”

Among the key findings:

Classic summer learning loss finding was based on outdated test-scoring methods. The Beginning Schools Study relied on a version of the California Achievement Test developed prior to the advent of modern scoring methods based on item response theory. When the test switched to this new scoring method in 1985, it found that achievement gaps do not expand across grade levels—in fact, as students got older, gaps shrank.

More recent national data show persistent, rather than widening, gaps. The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study found that for a nationally representative sample of students entering school in 2010, the reading achievement gap between high- and low-poverty schools remained constant between kindergarten and the end of second grade with no sign of the gap widening during summer.

Other new tests show slow gap widening, but not in summer. Data from the Measures of Academic Progress tests, which are given in more than 7,800 schools and districts across the United States, show some growth in reading achievement gaps between first and eighth grade, but no evidence of greater skill loss over the summer among students at less affluent schools.

But even newer tests disagree. According to the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study tests, children lose, on average, just two weeks of reading and math skills their first summer vacation. During their second summer vacation, they lose two weeks of reading again, and they actually gain a little in math. According to the Measures of Academic Progress tests, though, summer learning loss is much more serious. On average, children lose about a month of reading and math skills during their first summer vacation. And during their second summer vacation, they lose three full months of skills in reading and math.

One result, however, does replicate across studies. “Nearly all children, no matter how advantaged, learn much more slowly during summer vacations than they do during the school years,” says Von Hippel. “That means that every summer offers children who are behind a chance to catch up. In other words, even if gaps don’t grow much during summer vaca­tions, summer vacations still offer a chance to shrink them.”

To receive an embargoed copy of “Is Summer Learning Loss Real? How I lost faith in one of education research’s classic results” or to speak with the author, please contact Jackie Kerstetter at jackie.kerstetter@educationnext.org. The article will be available Tuesday, June 4 on www.educationnext.org and will appear in the Fall 2019 issue of Education Next, available in print on August 28, 2019.

About the Author: Paul von Hippel is an Associate Professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin.

About Education Next: Education Next is a scholarly journal committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform, published by the Education Next Institute and the Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School. For more information, please visit www.educationnext.org.