Over at the Education Next blog, Rick Hess has an interview with Liz Fagen, the superintendent of Douglas County schools in Colorado. We've written about Douglas County before because it's the district where, amazingly enough, the school board voted in a voucher program last year (though it's now tied up in court). The Hess interview is worth a read not only because it points out other ways Douglas County is pushing the envelope, but because of the contrast Fagen offers to other suburban superintendents.

Douglas isn't too different from, say, Seminole County in Florida. Douglas is a well-to-do district on the outskirts of Denver. Seminole is an affluent district outside Orlando. Both have about 60,000 students. Both have good reputations. Both have plenty of satisfied parents.

But when it comes to attitudes about school choice, the districts are night and day. (more…)

Phi Delta Kappan today released its annual poll on public school attitudes, and it found mixed results for the support of school choice. The poll found increased support for charter schools and choice generally, but Kappan found that only one in three Americans likes vouchers.

That's little surprise, given the way the voucher question was asked:

Do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense?

Earlier this month, Education Next and the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University released the results from a similar poll and found record levels of support for vouchers. That disparity might be attributed to the way Education Next-PEPG addressed the issue.

When it came to private options, the poll sought answers through several different questions. It first randomly assigned respondents a "voucher-friendly" question:

A proposal has been made that would give families with children in public schools a wider choice, by allowing them to enroll their children in private schools instead, with government helping to pay the tuition. Would you favor or oppose this proposal?

It then randomly assigned a "voucher-unfriendly" question:

A proposal has been made that would use government funds to help pay the tuition of low-income students whose families would like them to attend private schools. Would you favor or oppose this proposal?

Not surprisingly, more people say they like vouchers if asked the friendly question (47 percent) than if they were asked the unfriendly question (39 percent). Support also increases across the board if the private option takes the form of a tax credit scholarship. Additionally, Education Next breaks down support by race and shows that black and Hispanic groups overwhelmingly support private options compared with affluent respondents or with teachers. 

This is not meant to discount the sweep and significance of the Kappan poll. I flirt with these comparisons only with the hope that headline writers heed these subtleties before we read that "Charters are in, vouchers are out."

The authors of the latest Education Next-PEPG Survey highlight the growing disconnect between the general public, the affluent and teachers when it comes to sweeping public policies in education. But, just as notably, the results show a wide range of attitudes between the affluent, Hispanics and African Americans when it comes to school choice.

Vouchers have gained more support nationally since the 2010 survey, but support slips when the results are broken down by the affluent and by teachers. In some cases, the difference is stark among minority groups and the affluent, but those differences disappear when the policies (and the questions) change.

Depending on how the question was asked, as much as 60 percent of Hispanic respondents and 53 percent of African Americans supported vouchers compared to 47 percent of affluent respondents.

However, when it comes to individual or corporate tax credit scholarships, support among the affluent increases to 57 percent, which is the same result among African Americans and closer to that of Hispanics, a group that showed no difference in support among tax credits or vouchers.

Adam Schaeffer at the Cato Institute has more on the differences in support of vouchers and tax credits here.