Asking the public to choose between two extremes - reforming the existing public school system or finding an alternative - is a false dichotomy.
Should we improve schools or start from scratch?
According to Phi Delta Kappa International’s 50th annual PDK Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward The Public School, released this week, nearly eight in 10 Americans prefer the former -- to work with the education system they already have rather than toss it overboard for something completely new and different. According to PDK, that’s more than in any year since the question was first asked two decades ago.
On Twitter, several teachers union representatives greeted the news as decisively refuting school choice. They tweeted the identical message, a condensed version of an official statement from American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten: This is a poll that every policymaker must see. The defunding strategy of right-wing politicians and billionaires is completely dissonant from the attitudes of our communities. Americans want to strengthen schools.
However, rather than posterizing their opponents, this is the equivalent of Michael Jordan slam-dunking on an empty court. (more…)
Black, white, Hispanic; Republicans, Democrats. All support public-school choice, according to a new poll. Full results here.
Earlier this year, the Florida Legislature pursued an expansion of public school choice, but the effort fell apart in the waning days of the legislative session.
A new national survey suggests the public strongly supports such a concept.
Nearly two-thirds of parents surveyed by Phi Delta Kappan and Gallup said they support allowing people to choose the schools their children attend "regardless of where they live." Support crosses different political and racial lines, though blacks and Republicans are slightly more supportive than whites and Democrats.
Of course, polls like this should be read with caution. For one thing, it's a national survey, and lots of education policy is set at the state or local level. (more…)
There's no question plenty of families want private school choice, as programs around the country keep growing and some are forced to turn families away.
But the general public's views on school vouchers remain far more murky. The latest annual public-opinion survey on school reform, released this morning by Education Next, shows why the question can be tricky. It asked about vouchers four different ways, without ever using the word.
Questions that emphasized "wider choice" for students found broader support. Those that noted the use of "government funds" to pay private school tuition found stronger opposition. Opinions also varied if the questions asked about vouchers for "all families" or "low-income" students.
This helps explain why other surveys by Gallup and the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice can find starkly different results.
Four different questions on school vouchers in the latest Education Next survey found different levels of public support.
On a conference call discussing the poll, Paul Peterson, the editor of Education Next and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, said among the wide range of policy topics covered in the survey, vouchers are among the most sensitive to the wording of the question. (more…)
