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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teacher Rights and Policies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

School Choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grading Public Schools

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

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

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

Spending on Public Schools

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

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

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

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

Digital Learning

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

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

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

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

School and Student Accountability

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

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

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

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

Conflicts with Teachers Likely to Persist

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

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

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

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

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

Complete survey results available here.

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

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

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

Grading the Nation’s Schools

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

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

School Spending and Teacher Salaries

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

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

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

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

Support for Reform

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

School Choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teacher Policy and Teachers Unions

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

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

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

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

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

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

Student and School Accountability

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bipartisan Agenda?

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

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

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

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

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

President as Opinion Maker

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

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

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

Not surprisingly, school board members agree that one of their most important goals is to help students learn. According to a 2002 national survey, student achievement ranks second only to financial concerns as school board members’ highest priority. We wondered, though, do voters hold school board members accountable for the academic performance of the schools they oversee? Do they support sitting board members when published student test scores rise? Do they vote against members when schools and students struggle under their watch?

Existing accountability policies assume that they do: states shine light on school performance by providing the public with achievement data. Voters and parents are expected to make use of these data in choosing school districts or schools, and to hold administrators and school board members accountable for the schools’ performance at each election. The idea is that voters will replace incumbents with new members when performance is poor and support incumbents over challengers when performance is strong. Indeed, there are very few other ways in which district officials can be held accountable for school performance. Neither the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) nor the states impose direct sanctions on members of school boards that oversee large numbers of underperforming schools.

Our questions led us to undertake the first large-scale study of how voters and candidates respond to student learning trends in school board elections. We analyzed test-score data and election results from 499 races over three election cycles in South Carolina to study whether voters punish and reward incumbent school board members on the basis of changes in student learning, as measured by standardized tests, in district schools. In addition, we assessed the impact of school performance on incumbents’ decisions to seek reelection and potential challengers’ decisions to join the race.

We found that in the 2000 elections, South Carolina voters did appear to evaluate school board members on the basis of student learning. Yet in the 2002 and 2004 elections, published test scores did not influence incumbents’ electoral fortunes. As we’ll see, the possible reasons our results differed so dramatically from one time period to the next hold important implications for the design of school accountability policies. But let’s first take a closer look at our methods and findings.

South Carolina

Once we set out to study local school board races, we encountered tall hurdles to obtaining election results. Only one state, South Carolina, centrally collects precinct-level election data for school board races. In all other states, obtaining precinct-level election results requires gathering and organizing election returns from hundreds of individual counties and election districts.

So we took a close look at South Carolina. In most respects, South Carolina elections and school boards are similar to those across the rest of the country. All but 4 of the state’s 46 counties hold nonpartisan school board elections. Approximately 80 percent of school board members receive some compensation, either a salary, per diem payments, or reimbursement for their expenses. Over 90 percent of South Carolina’s 85 school boards have between 5 and 9 members, while the largest board has 11. And, as is common practice in other states, nearly 9 out of 10 South Carolina school districts hold board elections during the general election in November.

Perhaps the most important difference between South Carolina and most other states when it comes to local school politics is the role played by the state’s teachers unions, which are among the weakest in the country. In other states strong teachers unions may mobilize high turnout among members, their families, and friends, and punish and reward board members for their treatment of teachers rather than hold them accountable for student test scores. South Carolina school boards are unlikely to be beholden to the unions, which should make the boards more responsive to the broader public.

Roughly half of the state’s 85 districts hold school board elections in any two-year election cycle. We collected precinct-level election returns for all school board races in three election cycles, 2000, 2002, and 2004. We also obtained school-level student achievement data from the South Carolina Department of Education. We began our analysis with 2000 because it was the first cycle of elections after South Carolina started administering the Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test (PACT) to students in grades 3 to 8 in 1999. These tests, based on the South Carolina Curriculum and Standards, are given in both reading and math. We averaged the reading and math percentile scores to produce a composite score for each school. Because we wanted to examine whether voters are more concerned with student performance districtwide or in their local neighborhood, we computed two measures of average school performance to include in our analysis. The first is the average test score for each district. The second is the average test score for the public school that is located closest to an election precinct.

Searching for Accountability

We began our analysis by comparing the vote shares of incumbent school board members who ran and faced an opponent with the test-score performance of the schools and districts they represented. We were careful to separate the effect of school performance from the effects of other factors that could reasonably influence an incumbent school board member’s vote share. For example, we considered whether voters evaluate student outcomes relative to spending by measuring the effect of changes in the district’s property tax rate. We also took into account features of the election, including whether it was held as part of the November general election or on another date, when turnout is likely to be lower. Additionally, we accounted for the partisanship of the electorate, measured by the Democratic candidate’s share of the presidential vote, and demographic characteristics, such as race, age, and gender. We also adjusted for potential differences in how voters from precincts with higher and lower average test scores respond to changes in test scores. For example, voters from precincts with lower test scores might respond more strongly when test scores improve than do voters from precincts with test scores that already were very high.

In 2000, 67 incumbents from 37 school boards ran for reelection in contested races in South Carolina. Of these 67 incumbents, 50 were reelected, and the median vote share for all incumbents in competitive races was 58 percent.

We found that incumbent school board members won a larger share of the total vote in a precinct when test scores in that precinct improved. We estimate that improvement from the 25th to the 75th percentile of test-score change—that is, moving from a loss of 4 percentile points to a gain of 3.8 percentile points between 1999 and 2000—produced on average an increase of 3 percentage points in an incumbent’s vote share. If precinct test scores dropped from the 75th to the 25th percentile of test-score change, the associated 3-percentage-point decrease in an incumbent’s vote share could substantially erode an incumbent’s margin of victory. In districts where percentile scores had increased in the year preceding the election, incumbents won 81 percent of the time in competitive elections; in districts where scores had declined, incumbents won only 69 percent of the time.

Citizens therefore did seem to base their assessment of incumbents on changes in test-score performance during a board member’s tenure, exactly the type of accountability many supporters of NCLB had hoped for.

We were interested to find that the average school test score for the precinct, rather than the district, had a significant effect on an incumbent’s vote share. The significant relationship with precinct test scores and the absence of a relationship with district scores suggests that voters were more concerned with school performance within their immediate neighborhood than across the district.

The Later Elections

With the evidence from 2000 in hand, we were initially surprised that all indications of a relationship between school performance and an incumbent school board member’s vote share vanished after the passage of NCLB in 2002.

We reanalyzed the data in a number of different ways, but were unable to find any indication that voters cast their ballots based on changes in test scores. We included administrative data from teacher, parent, and student ratings of local schools; we considered the potential relationship between vote share and test-score changes over the previous two or three years; we examined the deviation of precinct test scores from district means; we looked at changes in the percentage of students who received failing scores on the PACT; we evaluated the relationship between vote share and the percentage change in the percentile scores rather than the raw percentile point changes; and we turned to alternative measures of student achievement, such as SAT scores, exit exams, and graduation rates. None of these approaches yielded clear evidence of a link between school performance and voter behavior in school board elections.

Even when we estimated the probability that an incumbent won a majority of the votes in each precinct, or accounted for test-score changes and levels as a function of dollars spent on students, or measured the relationship between an incumbent’s vote share in one election and the previous election, the overwhelming weight of the evidence indicated that school board members were not being judged on improvement or weakening in school test scores.

Strategic Politicians

So far, we’ve discussed the experience of incumbents who ran against an opponent. Many incumbents, however, either did not run for reelection or ran unopposed. For example, in 2000, 42 of the 157 sitting board members in 39 school districts who were up for reelection did not run for office. Among the remaining 112 who sought to retain their seats, more than one-third, 45, did not face a challenger. The 67 incumbents who ran opposed in 2000 represented less than half of the sitting board members whose seats were in play that election.

School performance as measured by test scores may have helped determine which candidates sought reelection and which faced a challenger. If board members and potential challengers anticipate that voters will punish incumbents for poor school performance, declining test scores may lead board members to retire rather than endure defeat. A drop in test scores may also encourage opponents to run for office, either because they believe that incumbents are now vulnerable to defeat or because disgruntled citizens feel compelled to run for office when schools perform poorly.

Although exact election filing dates vary by school district, most candidates for seats on South Carolina’s school boards must decide whether to run by mid-September for a November election. PACT scores, however, are typically released to the public in late September or early October. Incumbents and potential challengers may not know the exact size of precinct or district test-score changes, but they could very well have impressions of the direction and rate of student learning trends. School board members and some challengers have observed the schools firsthand and have listened to accounts from principals and teachers. By monitoring the coverage of education issues on local television and in the print media, candidates may also have a sense of the extent to which voters are likely to use student test-score performance to evaluate candidates. And although we do not know this with any certainty, it is possible that school board members have access to test-score results before they are released to the public.

We decided to assess the relationship between test-score trends and incumbents’ decisions to run for reelection, and then to estimate the effect of test-score trends on the probability that an incumbent who runs faces an opponent. Our basic approach in this analysis was to compare the probability of running (or running and facing a challenger) between incumbents who oversaw districts with stronger and weaker year-over-year test scores. Because candidates either run for election in every precinct or do not run at all, we focused only on district test scores. As with our analysis of the relationship between test scores and vote share, we accounted for a number of factors that could reasonably influence a candidate’s decision to run for office. These included the incumbent’s vote share in the previous election, which might serve as a signal of the likelihood of victory to both the incumbent and potential challengers, and whether board members received compensation for their service, under the assumption that paid positions would be more attractive.

Our results indicate that incumbents may bow out in anticipation of being held accountable for poor test-score performance by schools in their district. During the 2000 election, incumbents were less likely to seek reelection when their district’s test scores declined over the preceding school year. If a district experienced a drop from the 75th to the 25th percentile of test-score change, our results lead us to expect that incumbents will be 13 percentage points less likely to run for reelection. In fact, 76 percent of incumbents sought reelection in districts with improving test scores; in districts with falling scores, only 66 percent did. The results did not hold for the later elections. Just as we found no evidence in the 2002 and 2004 elections that a large block of voters held incumbents accountable for poor test scores, we failed to find any indication that incumbents in 2002 and 2004 based their decisions about running for reelection on student learning trends.

When we looked at the behavior of the challengers, we once again saw evidence of their responding to test scores during the 2000 election, but no indication in 2002 or 2004 (see Figure 1). In 2000, a drop in test scores within the district significantly increased the likelihood an incumbent would face a challenger. If a district’s test-score change fell in the 25th rather than the 75th percentile, we estimate that an incumbent experienced an 18-percentage-point increase in the probability of facing a challenger. On the ground, the data show that 74 percent of incumbents who ran for reelection in districts with declining scores faced a challenger; in districts with improving scores, only 49 percent of incumbents faced a challenger.

What Happened in 2000?

Why did voters, incumbents, and potential challengers care about test scores in 2000 but not in 2002, or in 2004? The most likely explanation involves changes in media coverage of education issues. The amount and content of media coverage of student test scores differed substantially between 2000 and the latter two election years.

The 2000 elections were the first to follow the passage of the state’s accountability system. Journalists devoted ample space to issues that either directly or indirectly concerned student learning trends. Charleston’s Post and Courier, the Herald in Rock Hill, Columbia’s The State, and the Associated Press State & Local Wire, which serves numerous other South Carolina papers, regularly carried stories about the state of South Carolina’s schools. Both incumbents and challengers frequently identified student achievement generally, and test scores in particular, as the single most important issue in the 2000 school board election. Newspaper editorials that endorsed candidates in the 2000 election regularly underscored ways in which individual incumbents and challengers did, or said they would, improve student achievement. And 45 percent of the newspaper articles about school board races in the two months prior to the election mentioned student test scores.

In the 2002 and 2004 elections, however, media coverage shifted to other issues, such as the closing of schools, the racial composition of schools and boards, disciplinary problems, and sports programs. In these years, only 30 and 34 percent of articles, respectively, touched on test scores. The decline in media attention leads us to suspect that concerns about student learning trends probably did not stand at the forefront of voters’ or candidates’ thinking in the 2002 and 2004 elections.

The tone of articles about the state’s accountability system also shifted drastically during the 2002 and 2004 election cycles. From 1998 to 2000, most stories adopted a fairly neutral tone, introducing the public to the new accountability system and offering tepid praise and criticism of the testing regimen. After the 2000 election, journalists portrayed considerably more skepticism in their coverage of student achievement trends. Reporters devoted stories to errors in PACT’s scoring, security breaches in school testing, flaws in the science and social studies portions of PACT, district efforts to get ahead by changing their test dates, confusion regarding the comparability of test scores over time, missing PACT scores, and conflicts between school evaluations under the state and national accountability systems.

At the same time that administrative irregularities and mishaps attracted public scrutiny, teachers, district officials, and various other interest groups began to challenge the value of standardized tests more generally. One 3rd-grade teacher was quoted as saying, “These tests cannot and never will truly measure what a child actually knows, how a child sees the world, what a child genuinely understands and grasps, and what kind of life that child lives outside the school walls.” A school district associate superintendent claimed, “The problem with PACT is it doesn’t tell you what your child knows and doesn’t know.” The Palmetto State Teachers Association questioned the value of the state’s testing regimen, noting on its web site, “The current statewide tests do not provide immediate diagnostic information needed to improve student achievement or provide information to help teachers plan to meet the needs of each student. The testing process is time consuming, and spending weeks on high-stake testing is NOT in the best interest of children.” And as Andrew HaLevi, the Charlestown County School District 2000 Teacher of the Year, wrote in a 2001 op-ed for the Post and Courier, “The PACT needs to be seen for what it is: a vehicle for politicians to say that they are tough on education (and educators). This may make for good politics, but it makes for bad educational policy.” Reacting to the rising criticisms directed toward PACT, voters may have grown disenchanted with the state’s accountability system and removed test-score performance from among the criteria on which they evaluated school board candidates.

There are, of course, several other plausible explanations for why South Carolinians voted based on test score performance in 2000 but not in 2002 and 2004. The timing of the public release of the test scores is one. The 2000 scores were released in late October, whereas scores in 2002 and 2004 were released in early October and early September, respectively. In 2000, the release of scores so close to the election date and the media coverage that followed may have primed voters to evaluate candidates on student test scores. In the other two election years, the gap of a month or two between the release of scores and election day may have allowed the issue of test scores to fade from voters’ minds.

Another possibility is a major change in the reporting of test information. NCLB requires schools to notify parents directly about the performance of their schools. In 1999 and 2000, the first two years of PACT testing, scores were reported in their raw form in the materials that parents received. Beginning in 2001, official PACT reports to parents used a simpler rating scale that classified each school into one of five performance categories ranging from unsatisfactory to excellent. Under this scheme, almost every school received a rating of at least average. Indeed, a Department of Education news release in 2002 ran with the headline, “Schools receive higher Absolute ratings on report cards; 80% average or better.” Although the raw scores were contained deeper in the reports, if most schools appeared to be average or better, parents may not have been prompted to hold incumbents accountable for poor school performance. Incumbents and potential challengers may also have become less responsive to scores when the testing regimen began to give nearly every school a passing mark.

Implications for Policy

The evidence from South Carolina shows that voters do at least sometimes evaluate school board members on the basis of student learning trends as measured by average school test scores. Changes in average school test scores from year to year can affect the number of votes incumbents receive, the probabilities that they run for reelection, and the likelihood that they face competition when they do.

But the absence of a relationship between average school test scores and incumbents’ electoral fortunes in the 2002 and 2004 school board elections raises important questions about the assumptions underlying accountability systems. School board elections give the public the leverage to improve their schools. If voters do not cast out incumbents when local school performance is poor, they forfeit that opportunity. As debate continues over components of NCLB, policymakers should consider whether it is realistic to assume voters will in fact use the polls to drive school improvement.

Christopher R. Berry is assistant professor at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago, where William G. Howell is associate professor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fact is, the line between public and private in American education has always been blurred, and it is only growing more so.  But when reforms are contemplated that would transfer responsibilities across the public-private divide, the ensuing debate almost invariably pits one group sounding the wonders of choice and competition against another insisting that we recommit ourselves to a system of education that is essentially public in nature.

None of this is especially useful.  And the arguments that are offered are almost never new.  Like our health care system, our education system, through and through, contains a mix of public and private operators offering a range of services, often within the same building, to America’s children.  The real question is not whether our system of education will be public or private, but what kinds of regulations the state will impose on America’s schools, and what aspects of education will be subject to collective bargaining arrangements.

Unfortunately, the public debate rarely gets around to these important details. And so they are left to elected officials and teacher unions to haggle over in the quiet solitudes of back boardrooms—like Superintendent Ramon Cortines is doing now in Los Angeles.

With the hopes of shifting the public debate onto more productive ground, I’d like to suggest the following: those who traditionally argue on behalf privatization should come forward and suggest an area of private schools that the state should regulate; and those who put their stock entirely with traditional public schools should recognize an aspect of education that decidedly should not be regulated by the state.

At the end of this exchange, it may turn out that proponents of privatization only offer anti-discrimination clauses on the basis of race and religion, and stalwarts of traditional public schools insist that every protection of teachers remain in force. But I suspect, and I suppose hope, that some among the two sides will find areas of agreement that their public rhetoric entirely belies—and that this might serve as a basis for a more fruitful exchange, which, heaven forbid, might productively inform the important decisions that Cortines is making about which schools will be operated by which private operators under what kinds of contracts and with what system of oversight.

Local public schools receive lower marks than they did a year ago. More significantly, perhaps, survey respondents claim that their local post offices and police forces outperform their local schools. Meanwhile, support for the most far-reaching federal effort to reform public schools—the No Child Left Behind Act—has slipped. A considerable portion of the public remains undecided about charter schools. And the poll found no enthusiasm for the use of income rather than race as a basis for assigning students to schools.

This does not mean that Americans are unwilling to explore alternate ways of educating young people. A large majority of Americans would let their child take some high school courses for credit over the Internet. An equally large majority favor the education of students with emotional and behavioral disabilities in separate classrooms rather than “mainstreaming” them, as is common practice. A plurality support giving parents the option of sending their child to an all-boys or all-girls public school. And a rising number of Americans know someone who is home schooling a child.

These and other findings appear in the 2008 Education Next –PEPG survey, which once again examines the views of U.S. adults taken as a whole, as well as those of white, African American, and Hispanic subgroups. In addition to the opinions of respondents from different ethnic backgrounds, we take a special look at those of public school teachers. Responses for the public as a whole and for the subgroups are reported in the tables that follow. We have also posted responses to additional questions not discussed in this essay.

Before turning to the main findings, we note an innovation in this year’s survey: the increased use of survey experiments, which are rarely employed in national education surveys. By randomly asking respondents slightly different questions about the same issue, we were able to investigate whether adjustments to policies such as national standards, affirmative action, school vouchers, and tax credits could attract broader support. In most cases, the types of policy distinctions that loom large among policy experts have little impact on public opinion. But in one or two instances, most notably the purposes for which online courses might be used, policy changes elicited quite different levels of public support.

Satisfaction with Public Schools

When asked to grade the nation’s public schools as a whole, Americans offer decidedly mixed assessments. Most notably, more of them give the schools a D or an F than assign an A or a B. Only 20 percent of survey respondents give the schools in the nation as a whole one of the two top grades, over 50 percent give them a C, and no less than 25 percent grade them with a D or an F. African Americans and Hispanics are even more likely than whites to give the nation’s schools low marks. But teachers offer the schools systematically higher grades than the rest of the public. Thirty-four percent give the schools an A or a B, while only 14 percent give them one of the two lowest grades (Q.1).

On the whole, survey respondents offered slightly lower evaluations of the nation’s schools in 2008 than they did in 2007, and some groups posted sharp declines. Twenty-seven percent of African Americans gave the public schools an A or a B in 2007, but in 2008, that figure fell to 20 percent. Meanwhile, the share of African Americans giving schools a D or an F rose from 20 percent to 31 percent. The share of Hispanics awarding schools a similarly poor grade doubled during the period, from 16 to 32 percent. For results from the 2007 poll, see “What Americans Think about Their Schools,” features , Fall 2007.

As other surveys have shown, the public’s evaluations become somewhat more favorable when the subject turns to the public schools in their own communities (see Figure 1).Forty percent of the public give the public schools in their community an A or a B, while a quarter give them a D or an F. African Americans assign lower marks: only a quarter give their local public schools an A or a B, while a third give them a D or an F. Public school teachers, meanwhile, offer the highest assessments of their local public schools: fully 61 percent give local schools an A or a B, while only 16 percent assign them a D or an F (Q.2).

Comparing Public Schools to Other Local Services

Ratings of local public schools stand in stark contrast to assessments of post offices and police forces. Over 60 percent of respondents give the post offices and police force in their local community an A or a B, and only 10 percent give them a D or an F. Even teachers assign the local post office and police force higher marks than local public schools (see Figure 2). In fact, teachers are twice as likely to give the local post office an A and 50 percent more likely to give the police force an A than they are to similarly grade the local public schools. Teachers are more than twice as likely to assign their public schools a D or an F as they are to give this rating to the post offices or police in their communities (Q. 3, 4).

A slight majority of those surveyed, nonetheless, think that the public schools in their community are improving. Fifty-six percent of the public say that the local public schools are heading in the right direction, compared to 44 percent who believe they are on the wrong track. In this respect, Americans’ views of the nation’s education system appear to be considerably more optimistic than their views about the affairs of the nation more generally. When Gallup, NBC and the Wall Street Journal , and the Associated Press used the same language to ask Americans about the direction of the nation as a whole while our survey was in the field, less than one-quarter reported that it is on the right track (Q. 5).

No Child Left Behind and School Accountability

With the presidential election in high gear, and Democrats fixing their attention on President Bush’s signature education achievement, public support for the No Child Left Behind Act appears to be waning. Whereas 57 percent of the public in 2007 suggested that Congress renew the act as is or with minimal changes, only 50 percent of the public do so in 2008. Comparable declines in support are registered among whites, African Americans, and Hispanics.

Public school teachers are especially critical of the No Child Left Behind Act. Only 26 percent of teachers suggest that Congress renew the act as is or with minimal changes. By contrast, 33 percent suggest that Congress completely overhaul the act, and another 42 percent recommend that Congress not renew the act at all.

Last year, we presented evidence from an experiment suggesting that the very words “No Child Left Behind” were politically charged. This year we repeated the experiment, which randomly assigned individuals to one of two conditions: the first referred to the act by name, and the second simply identified “federal legislation.” The main findings reappear, though the differences are not as large (see Figure 3). Whereas in 2007 the mere reference to “No Child Left Behind” led to a 14-point decline in public support (from 71 to 57 percent), in 2008 support dropped by only 7 points (from 57 to 50 percent) (Q.6).

Setting National Standards

Though support for No Child Left Behind is dwindling, Americans continue to believe that schools should be held accountable through national standards and tests. No less than 69 percent of the public think the federal government should set standards for the country and administer tests in math, science, and reading.

But who should set these standards? Washington politicos continue to debate whether the federal government alone or the states together should write these national standards. Other Americans, perhaps to their credit, seem unable to tell the difference. We discovered this by randomly dividing our respondents into two groups, asking one group whether the federal government should set national standards and tests, while asking the other group whether the states jointly should set those standards and tests. Either way, the same high level of support is observed (see Figure 4): exactly 69 percent favor national standards and testing (Q. 7).

Online Education

One of the latest education innovations to go mainstream is online education, wherein students receive credit for courses taken over the Internet. According to the North American Council for Online Learning, enrollment in online courses in 2000 totaled 45,000. By 2007 enrollments had reached 1 million, about 70 percent of which were for high school courses.

Online education, however, is not immune from political controversy. In December 2007, a Wisconsin state court ruled that virtual charter schools, in which students take Internet-based courses under the supervision of their parents, violated the state’s legal requirement that all public school teachers be properly licensed. Subsequently, the Wisconsin state legislature allowed existing virtual schools to continue operating, but imposed restrictions on their expansion.

Our respondents, meanwhile, seem quite receptive to the idea of online education for their own children. Fully 69 percent of the public, and a solid majority of every subgroup, say that they “would be willing to have a child [of theirs] go through high school taking some academic courses over the Internet” (Q. 8).

As a matter of public policy, however, the public’s willingness to endorse online education very much depends on the justification given for it (see Figure 5).To explore the issue of public funding, we randomly assigned respondents to one of four questions that identified different targets of online education: rural residents, advanced students, students who dropped out of school, and home-schooled children (Q. 9).

When considering online education for either students in rural communities who have “access to only a limited number of course offerings in their public schools” or advanced students interested in taking courses for college credit, the public expresses considerable support. In these two instances, over 60 percent of respondents support public funding for online education. Across the various subgroups, a majority always express support, and no more than 21 percent of any subgroup ever express opposition.

Support for online education declines precipitously, however, when the subject turns to “children who drop out of high school.” For those students, just 40 percent of respondents support public funding for courses taken over the Internet. Another 30 percent neither support nor oppose public funding for online education for students who drop out of high school, and 31 percent oppose funding.

When told that “some parents prefer to educate their high school children at home” rather than to “send them to a school,” support falls even further. Only 26 percent of the public support public funding for courses taken for credit over the Internet by home-schooled youngsters, another 30 percent neither favor nor oppose public funding, and 44 percent oppose. With the exception of African Americans, a plurality of every subgroup, and sometimes a majority, oppose public funding for online education directed at home-schooled children.

Home Schooling

The advent of online education may be among the factors contributing to the extraordinary growth of home schooling in the United States. The most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics indicate that, as of 2003, 1.1 million American students were being educated at home, up from 850,000 in 1999. Some home-school advocacy organizations place the current totals at more than 2 million.

The ongoing expansion of home schooling is evident in our survey (see Figure 6). Forty-five percent of our respondents report that they know a family that home schools a child, up from40 percent in 2007.African Americans are least likely to know a home-schooling family, with only 25 percent responding affirmatively. In contrast, 64 percent of public school teachers report knowing a home-schooling family (Q. 10). These numbers are all far higher than the 12 percent of Americans who report knowing students who have taken a course for middle or high school credit over the Internet.

Charter Schools and Vouchers

As they did in 2007, a plurality of the overall public and every subgroup continue to support charter schools. Indeed, supporters of charter schools outnumber opponents more than two to one. The modal response, however, continues to be “neither support nor oppose.” Roughly 40 percent of the American public remain undecided about the merits of these schools, even as enrollment in charter schools has expanded to more than 1.2 million students nationwide (Q. 11).

Though Americans have yet to render a verdict on charter schools, they appear evenly divided on vouchers (see Figure 7). For the public as a whole, the number of supporters equals the number of opponents, with only one-fifth of the population refusing to stake out a position one way or the other. As we observed last year, support for vouchers is highest among African Americans and Hispanics. Within these two groups, supporters outnumber opponents by as much as five to one. By contrast, a majority of public school teachers oppose vouchers (Q. 12).

School choice advocates often debate on the relative benefits of directing vouchers toward all children or just to those of low-income families. Some argue that vouchers targeted to low-income families more clearly serve the goal of enhancing equal opportunity and will win broader political support for that reason. Others insist that universal vouchers, available to all families, will have stronger political backing and are the only way to generate the competition between the public and the private sectors that is needed to stimulate broad improvements in school quality.

To gauge the public’s views about such matters, we conducted another experiment. First, we randomly assigned respondents to one of four groups. One group was asked their opinion about the provision of school vouchers to low-income families so their children could attend private schools. Another group was asked the same question but was also told that some people say such a program would create greater equality of opportunity. A third group was asked their opinion about vouchers for any family that desired to send their child to private schools, regardless of the family income. A fourth group was asked the same question but was told that some people say such a program would create more competition for public schools. For the most part, both the public as a whole and the various groups appear equally likely to support proposals that would use government funds to help pay the private school tuitions of either “low income students” or “all students.” African Americans and Hispanics slightly prefer targeted voucher programs, while whites prefer universal programs.

Nor do appeals to competition and equal opportunity hold much sway over the American public (see Figure 8).When told that some people say that a universal program “would introduce much needed competition to the public school system,” overall support for vouchers increases by just a few percentage points. Among African Americans, the percentage who “completely favor” the program actually drops by 22 points. And when told that some people say that a universal program “would improve the educational opportunities available to the poor,” overall support for vouchers does not change at all (Q. 12b-d).

Tax Credits

School Integration

In June 2007, a bitterly divided Supreme Court ruled that public school districts may not foster integration through enrollment programs that take explicit account of students’ race. The justices’ landmark decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 struck down voluntarily adopted integration programs in Seattle and Jefferson County, Kentucky, and called into question similar race-based systems that operate in hundreds of other districts.

Now that districts may not consider the race of students when assigning them to schools, some policy experts argue that family income might be employed as a substitute criterion. Since minority students tend to come from lower income families, racial integration might be achieved indirectly by giving low-income families their choice of school, whenever that would facilitate integration across socioeconomic lines. The Wake County school district in North Carolina, among others, has won favorable media coverage by introducing such a policy.

To investigate the public’s views about race- and income-based enrollment programs, we asked Americans one of two variations of the following question: “In order to promote diversity, should public school districts be allowed to take the racial background [family income] of students into account when assigning students to schools?”

To the version of the question asking about “racial background,” the public reacts very negatively. Only 16 percent of the public respond that districts “definitely” or “probably” should be allowed to take students’ racial background into account when assigning them to schools. Another 21 percent of the public are unsure, while fully 63 percent of the public say that school districts should not take into account students’ racial background. African Americans are much more likely to support the idea, but still only 30 percent of them think districts should be allowed to take race into account (Q. 14a). Though the Supreme Court was closely divided in the Seattle case, the majority decision has broad public support.

But what if the policy is adjusted to use family income as the basis for assigning students to schools? Does public support then increase? Not at all. In fact, public support for the idea dips slightly (see Figure 10). Just 13 percent of respondents report that they support using family income as a basis for assigning students to a school, while 62 percent say that they are opposed, with the balance uncertain (Q. 14b). Legal experts who wish to circumvent the recent Supreme Court decision by shifting from race to family income clearly have yet to make much headway in the court of public opinion.

Mainstreaming the Disabled

Approximately 15 percent of the country’s elementary and secondary school population have been classified as needing special education, which is partially supported by federal funding under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).Diagnoses can range from minor learning problems to autism and severe mental retardation to a range of emotional and behavioral disabilities. Whatever the disability, the law mandates that a disabled student be educated in the “least restrictive environment,” a phrase that implies differential treatment depending on the disability, but increasingly has come to mean the “mainstreaming” in standard classrooms of all but those with the most severe disabilities. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the share of disabled students considered to be “fully mainstreamed” has risen from a little more than 30 percent in 1989 to over 55 percent in 2005. Between 1995 and 2005, the share of “emotionally disturbed children” who spend more than 80 percent of their time in a regular classroom jumped from 17 to 35 percent.

Neither teachers nor the public as a whole express much support for the practice of mainstreaming emotionally or behaviorally disabled children. When asked whether students “who have been diagnosed with emotional and behavioral disabilities should be taught in regular classrooms with other students,” only 25 percent of teachers, and 28 percent of the public, favor the idea. The rest say they should be “taught in separate settings instead” (Q. 15).

Single-Sex Public Schools

Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in single-sex public schools. Once derided as harmful and anachronistic, the notion of educating boys and girls separately received a major boost in 2006 with the publication of new federal regulations clarifying the legal status of single-sex schools and classrooms. The National Association for Single Sex Public Education projects that, in fall 2008, roughly 400 public schools will offer students at least some opportunity for single-sex education, and a quarter of these schools will enroll only boys or girls.

The American public seems moderately sympathetic to this development (see Figure 11). Thirty-seven percent of respondents support the idea of public school districts offering parents the option of sending their child to a single-sex school, 25 percent oppose the idea, and the remainder are undecided. Support for providing the option of single-sex education is stronger among public school teachers, 47 percent of whom support the idea (Q. 16). Interestingly, women respondents are modestly more likely than men to support single-sex alternatives (39 versus 35 percent).

We also asked parents of school-age children whether they would consider enrolling their own child in a single-sex school. Here responses are more mixed, with more parents reporting that they probably or definitely would not consider doing so than report that they would. Still, 42 percent of all parents, 48 percent of public school teachers, and fully 53 percent of African Americans say that they would consider sending their child to a single-sex school (Q. 17).

The 2008 Presidential Election

Conclusions

With the election season in full swing, this survey offers certain lessons for the two contenders for the U.S. presidency. If Barack Obama and John McCain want to walk in step with the American public, they should acknowledge the flagging performance of schools, for while Americans retain an abiding commitment to public education, the grades that they assign the nation’s schools are increasingly mediocre. Additionally, the candidates should convey support for the principle of accountability, while recognizing the faults of the particular accountability system mandated by No Child Left Behind. Finally, the candidates should remain open to new models of education provision. Though Americans continue to reflect upon the merits of charters, vouchers, online education, and home schooling, an overwhelming majority profess support for at least one of these alternatives to traditional public schools.

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

In the contentious world of education politics, the need to spend more on public schools stands out as a rare point of agreement. Our recent national survey of American adults (“What Americans Think about Their Schools,” features, Fall 2007) found that those who support increased spending on public schools in their district outnumber those who want spending to decrease by a five-to-one margin. What’s more, a solid majority (59 percent) of Americans express confidence that spending more on the public schools in their district will increase student learning.

Our findings paralleled those of other surveys, which routinely show that Americans rank inadequate funding among the most important problems facing the nation’s schools. According to the 2007 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll, for example, 22 percent of U.S. adults identified a lack of financial support as the biggest problem facing the schools in their community. The second-ranked problem, a lack of discipline, was mentioned by only one in ten respondents. It is no surprise, then, that every Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2008 has called for increased federal spending on education, and that no Republican candidate (with the exception of libertarian Ron Paul) has proposed a spending cut.

Yet while the public’s views about spending on education are well known, the same cannot be said about the information on which those views are based. Do Americans have an accurate grasp of how much is currently being spent on public education?

The 2007 Education Next–PEPG Survey directly addressed this question. In addition to asking Americans whether school spending should be increased, we asked them to estimate both per-pupil expenditures in their districts and teacher salaries in their states. We then used data on actual spending and salaries, matched geographically to each respondent’s school district or state, to compare the public’s perceptions with reality.

The results are striking: Americans dramatically underestimate the amount spent on the public schools in their district, even when prompted to consider the full range of uses to which school spending is devoted. They also think that teachers earn, on average, far less than is actually the case. The public’s strong preference that more be spent on public schools is based, at least in part, on faulty information.

Measuring Knowledge about Spending

In February and March of 2007, we surveyed a nationally representative sample of 2,000 American adults about a wide range of education issues. (For overall results, see “What Americans Think about Their Schools”) Within an extensive battery of questions, we included the following: “Based on your best guess, what is the average amount of money spent each year for a child in public schools in your school district?”

Half of the sample, randomly chosen, was also offered a prompt to encourage them to consider the full range of costs associated with educating a child. These respondents were told that “Individual student costs go toward teacher and administrator salaries, building construction and maintenance, extracurricular activities, transportation, etc.” With this prompt, we anticipated, respondents would have an easier time answering the question.

We also asked people to estimate the average annual salary of a public school teacher in their state. We asked about teacher salaries at the level of the state, rather than the specific district, because that is the lowest level of aggregation for which information on actual salaries is readily available nationwide. With information about where survey respondents lived, we then compared their answers to actual per-pupil expenditures in their districts and to teacher salaries in their states in 2004–05, the most recent year for which this information is available (see methodology sidebar, below).

Not Even Close

The amount of money actually spent annually on children in school districts across the United States varies widely. For the districts in which our sample members live, per-pupil spending in 2004–05 ranged from $5,644 to $24,939,with an average of $10,377. This last figure is slightly higher than the true national average of $9,435.

How well informed is the public about these financial commitments? Not very. Among those asked without the prompt listing possible expenses, the median response was $2,000, or less than 20 percent of the true amount being spent in their districts. Over 90 percent of the public offered an amount less than the amount actually spent in their district, and more than 40 percent of the sample claimed that annual spending was $1,000 per pupil or less. The average estimate of $4,231 reflects the influence of a small percentage of individuals who offered extremely high figures. Even so, the average respondent’s estimate was just 42 percent of actual spending levels in their district (see Figure 1).

Closer to the Truth?

Are some citizens better informed about education spending than others? To explore this question, we looked at whether the accuracy of Americans’ beliefs about spending and salaries varied among different groups within the overall sample.

Some interesting differences emerged. For instance, the responses of men to both items were significantly higher—and therefore closer to the truth—than were those of women. On average, men thought that per-pupil spending was $1,483 higher and teacher salaries were $2,065 higher than did women. The magnitude of these differences, as well as those reported below, attenuate somewhat when accounting for respondents’ demographic backgrounds. It bears mentioning, though, that the more accurate responses offered by men do not appear to stem from the fact that they are more likely to be in the workplace; the same pattern emerged when we restricted the comparison to men and women working full time.

All else equal, parents of school-age children also gave more accurate responses about teacher salaries, perhaps because they are in regular contact with working teachers. But they were no better informed than nonparents about per-pupil spending levels.

Homeowners, who pay the property taxes that typically account for local spending on education, have a clear incentive to stay informed about spending levels. On average, the estimates of per-pupil spending offered by homeowners were $427 higher than those of non-homeowners, a difference that is not statistically significant. But homeowners do appear to be much more responsive than other Americans to higher spending levels in their districts. In districts spending more than $10,000 per pupil, for example, the responses of homeowners were more than $1,100 higher—and therefore closer to actual spending levels—than those of individuals who rented or lived with other families.

Homeowners were also much better informed about teacher salaries, offering responses that were $7,502 higher than non-homeowners’ responses.

Again, these differences were even more pronounced in states that had especially high teacher salaries, indicating that homeowners’ information may be more responsive to marginal changes in spending than the rest of the general public.

It is important to keep in mind, however, that the differences observed between all of these groups are dwarfed by the overall gap between the public’s understanding of school expenditures and teacher salaries, and the truth. Even homeowners, for example, were off by more than $5,000 on average for per-pupil spending and by more than $11,000 for teacher salaries.

Knowledge and Views on School Spending

Does ignorance about these factual matters bear on public attitudes toward school spending? As noted above, the public as a whole expresses strong support for increasing or at least maintaining current spending levels on public education. More than half of Americans say that spending on the public schools in their community should increase, compared with 38 percent who say it should stay the same and only 10 percent who say it should decrease.

It is quite possible that information plays an important role in explaining overall levels of support for school spending. On average, those who support increasing spending on their local schools underestimated per-pupil spending by nearly $6,000 (see Figure 2). In contrast, those who said that spending should decrease underestimated spending by only $4,267.The estimates of those who felt that spending should remain the same fell in between these two extremes, at $5,602. In short, while even supporters of decreased spending substantially underestimated true spending levels, their estimates were considerably closer to reality than those of supporters of increased spending.

Similar patterns emerge when looking at the difference between estimated and actual teacher salaries, though the differences are slightly less pronounced. Respondents who support increased school spending underestimated teacher salaries in their state by almost $15,000, while those who wanted to see school spending remain the same offered estimates that were $14,230 below the truth. Those who support decreased spending offered modestly higher figures, underestimating teacher salaries by only $11,896, on average.

Americans with more accurate knowledge of school spending also tend to be less confident that increased spending will improve student learning. Among those who offered a figure for per-pupil expenditures within $5,000 of the truth, 20 percent were “not confident at all” that more spending would lead to higher achievement. People who either grossly underestimated or overestimated actual spending, by contrast, report lower levels of skepticism about the rewards of higher spending.

Note, however, that these findings do not necessarily support the contention that misunderstandings about school finance cause people to support spending increases. It is quite possible, after all, that the public’s assessment of how much is being spent may derive from, rather than contribute to, their policy views. Based on direct observations of conditions in local schools, for instance, some portions of the public may decide that whatever is being spent is not enough. When they are asked to hazard a guess, these concerns may lead them to underestimate actual spending.

In point of fact, we do find that Democrats offer significantly lower estimates of teacher salaries than do Republicans. (Differences between Democrats and Republicans on per-pupil expenditures disappear when accounting for respondents’ demographic backgrounds.) It is difficult to explain such a finding by reference to the two groups’ prior knowledge about school finance. Rather, we suspect that Democrats are especially likely to believe that the government does not give teachers either the professional respect or support that they deserve, and that such underlying convictions lead Democrats to offer lower estimates of teacher salaries. Indeed, the Democrats in our sample are 25 percentage points more likely than Republicans to say that they are either “very confident” or “somewhat confident” that additional spending on schools would improve student learning.

Conclusion

In sum, Americans think that far less is being spent on the nation’s public schools than is actually the case. The vast majority of the public thinks we spend amounts that can only be described as minuscule, and almost 96 percent of the public underestimate either per-pupil spending in their districts or teacher salaries in their states.

Important questions about the public’s understanding of school spending remain. Why are their estimates so low? Is this phenomenon unique to education, or would we find the same thing if people were asked about the salaries of other public servants, say, postal workers or police officers? And crucially, does the public’s understanding of school finance shape their policy preferences, or do the public’s policy preferences shape their understanding of school finance?

At this point, though, one matter seems certain: whatever motivates people’s concerns about school finance, it is not sound information about what is actually being spent.

William G. Howell is associate professor in the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Martin R.West is assistant professor of education at Brown University and an executive editor of Education Next.

The public, however, also appears selective in its desire for change. Americans balk at some market-based reforms, such as paying more for teachers who work in fields like math and science, where quality teachers are in scarce supply. And substantial percentages remain undecided about charter schools and other reform initiatives, suggesting that the current national debate over school policy has the potential to sway public opinion in one direction or another.

All this—and more—is indicated by a new national survey of U.S. adults conducted under the auspices of Education Next and the Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at Harvard University. (For survey methodology, see sidebar) Here we report the opinions of both the public at large and three ethnic subgroups (whites, African Americans, and Hispanics). We also distinguish the views of those who have worked for the public schools from those who have not. Except for opinions on school choice issues, differences across ethnic groups are generally smaller than those between public school employees and those who have never been employed by the schools. Responses to survey questions are provided at the bottom of the ensuing pages.

Accountability

Perhaps the most popular school reforms are those that hold students and schools to account for their performance. Accountability policies take many forms, but the public generally supports the concept in all its guises, including the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

No Child Left Behind

On the most high-profile issue of the day—the debate over extending the life of NCLB—a majority of those polled indicate that they support the law’s reauthorization with no more than minor changes (see Figure 1). NCLB requires states to establish performance standards in math and reading; to test students against those standards annually in grades 3 to 8 and again when students are in high school; and to intervene in schools that fail to make adequate annual progress toward the goal of near-universal student proficiency by 2014. The 2002 law is scheduled for reauthorization this year.

Despite NCLB’s bipartisan origins, controversy has beset the statute ever since its passage. The law places unprecedented demands on the states, several of which have passed resolutions critical of it. Reporting on recent grass-roots efforts to overturn the law, Time magazine noted that “more than 30,000 educators and concerned citizens have signed an online petition calling for the repeal of the 1,100 page statute.”

It is perhaps surprising, then, that the American public holds NCLB in reasonably high regard. When asked for their view on the matter, 57 percent of respondents prefer that Congress renew the act either as is or with minimal changes. Still, the intense debate over NCLB appears to be eroding public support for the law as a symbol. When NCLB is described as “federal legislation” rather than mentioned by name, as was the case for a randomly selected half of our survey respondents, support for extending its accountability provisions rises to 71 percent (Q. 1a, 1b).

Similar levels of support are observed across ethnic lines, with never less than one-half of African Americans, Hispanics, or whites recommending that Congress renew the act as is or with minor changes, regardless of how the question is asked. Current and former public school employees, however, consistently register lower levels of support for NCLB.

National Standards

Just because the public favors reauthorization of NCLB does not mean that it opposes efforts to amend the act by establishing a single national standard. Currently, NCLB asks each state to set its own standards, design and administer its own tests, and establish its own definition of student proficiency. A number of prominent Washington think tanks, including the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and the Center for American Progress, have argued that proficiency standards vary so widely that they should be replaced by a single national definition. But other groups, on both the right and the left of the political spectrum, oppose any single standard as unnecessary federal intrusion into local matters. Given the controversy surrounding all proposals to establish a uniform national standard, it is noteworthy that nearly three-quarters of the American public support the concept (Q. 2).

Student Accountability

Separate and apart from NCLB, which focuses on the performance of schools and districts, the public strongly supports reforms designed to hold individual students accountable for their performance on state tests. Currently, only a few states (e.g., Florida) and cities (e.g., Chicago and New York) require students to pass a test in order to move from one grade to the next, thereby modifying the practice of “social promotion,” which keeps youngsters with their peers by passing them to the next grade regardless of academic performance. Twenty-three states currently require students to pass an examination in order to graduate from high school, but the rest, a group that includes Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, do not.

Despite the fact that holding students accountable for their performance is far from a universal practice in American education, student accountability commands widespread public support (see Figure 2). No less than 81 percent of all respondents support requiring students in certain grades to pass an exam before they proceed to the next grade, and 85 percent support requiring students to pass an exam before graduating from high school. Only 10 percent of respondents oppose either policy. African Americans, Hispanics, and current and former school employees are all modestly less likely to support graduation exams than other respondents, but in no case does more than 16 percent of a subgroup oppose the policy (Q. 3, 4).

Although Americans appear quite willing to use test results to determine the pace of students’ progress through school, they are less enthusiastic about using them to open up alternative routes into higher education. Only 45 percent of respondents support allowing students who pass an exam at the 10th-grade level to transfer immediately to a community college, as recently proposed by the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. Rather, 55 percent of all respondents, and roughly the same share of each subgroup, support requiring students to complete four years of high school (Q. 5).

School Accountability under NCLB

High-stakes student accountability is more popular than the simple practice of publishing the average test performance of each school’s students. Only 60 percent of those surveyed support the latter policy, which is less stringent than the NCLB requirement that states publish the percentage of students in each school, and of various subgroups within it, that are proficient in math and reading. Just 20 percent of the public oppose publishing average test scores at the school level, with another 20 percent expressing neither support nor opposition (Q. 6).

NCLB also requires that schools be reconstituted if they fail to meet state-mandated performance benchmarks for five years in a row. Currently, states and districts are granted a great deal of flexibility in deciding how to reconstitute schools. Options range from minimal reorganization to replacing teachers and administrators to conversion into charter schools. When asked about these options, Americans express greater support for replacing teachers and principals than for converting failed district schools into charter schools. Roughly two-thirds of the adult population support replacing teachers and/or principals at persistently failing schools, and only one in ten opposes such options. Just 29 percent support converting the schools into charter schools. Still, that doesn’t signal widespread opposition to charter schools, a topic we return to below. Only 25 percent of the population actually opposed charter-school conversion, while fully 46 percent take no position one way or the other (Q. 7).

School Choice

Many accountability initiatives have long enjoyed the support of policymakers and the general public. More controversial in state and national policy discussions have been proposals to enable parents, especially low-income parents, to exercise greater choice over their children’s education through school vouchers, tax credits, charter schools, or home schooling. Despite that controversy, a plurality of the general public supports choice initiatives. African Americans and Hispanics express more support for school choice than do white Americans. Opponents of most forms of choice, meanwhile, constitute a fairly small segment of the American public, though many adults have yet to be persuaded one way or the other.

Vouchers

Few education reforms inspire as much debate as do proposals to provide low-income families with vouchers that would allow them to send their children to private schools. Apart from programs serving disabled students, only Wisconsin, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., have publicly funded voucher programs in operation. Elsewhere, state legislatures, referenda, and/or state courts have defeated proposed voucher initiatives.

Despite the legislative and legal disputes, a plurality of the public supports the voucher idea (see Figure 3). Forty-five percent of those surveyed favor offering vouchers to low-income families, 34 percent oppose the idea, and 20 percent neither favor nor oppose it. Both African Americans and Hispanics are markedly more likely to support vouchers than are whites. Indeed, 68 percent of African Americans and 61 percent of Hispanics favor vouchers, compared to 38 percent of whites. Only 15 percent of African Americans and 23 percent of Hispanics oppose vouchers, compared to 40 percent of whites (Q. 8).

When asked about the design of a school voucher program, 85 percent of Americans support allowing parents using vouchers to choose both religious and nonreligious private schools, a practice the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in 2002. Though African Americans appear slightly more likely to support the option of sending a child to a religious school, subgroup differences on this matter are small (Q. 9).

Tax Credits

Tax credit programs that help defray the cost of a private education are a less publicized, but more widely available, form of school choice than vouchers. Such programs exist in one form or another in several states, including Pennsylvania, Arizona, Minnesota, Illinois, and Florida. The greater incidence of tax credit programs could be due to the broader public support for this approach than for vouchers. Nationwide, 53 percent of adults favor tax credits, while only 25 percent oppose them, with another 23 percent neither favoring nor opposing the idea. As with vouchers, African Americans and Hispanics express the highest levels of support for tax credits (Q. 10).

Charter Schools

Compared to school vouchers and tuition tax credits, state legislatures have generally found charter schools to be more politically palatable. Charter schools are public schools of choice that are privately managed under a renewable performance contract that exempts them from many of the regulations that apply to other public schools. The first of these schools opened its doors in Minnesota in 1992, and their numbers have grown steadily since. In the 2006–07 school year, roughly 4,000 charter schools served 1.15 million students across 40 states and Washington, D.C.

For the most part, Americans either express support for charter schools or opt not to take a position one way or the other (see Figure 4). Forty-four percent of respondents support their formation, and another 42 percent neither support nor oppose them. Only 14 percent of Americans oppose charter schools. Differences across subgroups are reasonably small, with slightly higher proportions of African Americans supporting charter schools and school employees opposing them (Q. 11).

Three-quarters of Americans also believe that charter schools should be given at least the same amount of funding per child as district-operated public schools, in contrast to the widespread state practice of awarding charter schools less funding. Even 68 percent of present or past school employees endorse funding charter schools at levels equivalent to (or better than) those of traditional public schools (Q. 12).

Though Americans appear cautiously supportive of charter schools, most are confused about them. For example, when asked whether charter schools are free to teach religion (they are not), or whether they can charge tuition (they cannot), almost two-thirds of the public confesses to not knowing the answer and another quarter offers the wrong answer. Indeed, only 13 percent of adults nationwide correctly note that charter schools cannot teach religion and 16 percent correctly observe that charter schools may not charge tuition (Q. 13).

Importantly, support for charter schools appears especially high among those adults who reveal higher levels of knowledge about them. Fully 66 percent of those adults who correctly answer both of the knowledge-based questions support charter schools, as compared to 38 percent of those who answer both incorrectly. Similarly, 81 and 68 percent of the two respective groups claim that funding for students in charter and other public schools should be equalized. Opposition to charter schools, to the extent that it exists, appears to be highest among those who know less about them.

School Choice under NCLB

Under NCLB, if a school has failed to meet the law’s accountability provisions two years in a row, parents have the option of sending their child to a higher-performing public school within the same district. But only about 1 percent of those eligible to move to a different school under NCLB have taken advantage of this option. As a result, choice advocates have proposed revisions in the legislation that would expand the range of options available to parents.

A clear plurality of the public at large supports revisions in NCLB to increase the number of choice options available to parents whose children attend low-performing schools. Sixty percent support allowing them to select a school in another district, a step that would vastly expand the range of options, yet has not received serious consideration in Congress. Only 14 percent oppose it. Meanwhile, 47 percent support giving parents the option of sending their child to a private school, and only 23 percent oppose it (Q. 14).

Americans reveal low levels of support for the option of sending children to a failing school within the same district. Only 25 percent express support, probably because the public sees scant benefit from moving a child from one failing school to another.

The number of American families opting to teach their children at home has increased dramatically in recent years. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 1.1 million students were being home schooled in the United States in 2003, the most recent year for which official data are available, up from roughly 850,000 students in 1999.

Forty percent of the public say they know a family that currently home schools its children. And most Americans support allowing home-schooled children to take advantage of public school resources (see Figure 5), including attendance in selected classes and participation in sports and other extracurricular activities. Americans who know a home-schooling family are especially likely to support a more expansive array of schooling options for them. Fully 68 percent of adults who themselves know a home-schooled child believe that such children should have the option of taking selected classes at local public schools, and another 61 percent support allowing them to participate in sports and extracurricular programs, as compared with 48 percent and 51 percent, respectively, of adults who do not know a home-schooled child (Q.15, 16, 17).

Teacher Pay and Licensure

Just as lively (and divisive) as the controversy over school choice and home schooling has been the debate over teacher pay and licensure. On these issues, pluralities of the public support some, but not all, reform proposals.

Differential Pay

Although most scholars agree that teachers represent the single most important school contributor to a student’s academic progress, consensus breaks down as soon as the question turns to how best to design compensation systems to enhance teacher quality. On one side, the National Education Association defends the current practice of paying all teachers the same amount, except for differences based on past experience and graduate coursework. On the other side, groups such as the Teaching Commission, and the Progressive Policy Institute have proposed that we pay teachers according to how much students are learning in their classrooms (often as measured by test results), the difficulty of the teachers’ classroom environment or how hard it is to recruit quality teachers knowledgeable in a particular subject.

Though willing to entertain some reforms, the public is in no rush to abandon the traditional compensation system. Forty-five percent agree that a teacher’s salary should depend in part upon students’ academic progress while 31 percent disagree, and the remaining 24 percent choose not to express an opinion (see Figure 6). (Opinions about merit pay do not differ notably if Americans are asked about basing a teacher’s pay on “students’ academic progress” or on “students’ academic progress on state tests.”) A bare majority of Americans support increasing the salaries of those teaching in challenging school environments instead of using the same funds to offer all teachers a smaller pay increase. By a two-to-one margin, however, respondents would prefer to see new funds for teacher pay distributed equally across all teachers rather than targeted toward those in high-demand subject areas, such as math and science (Q.18, 19, 20).

State Licensure

To be fully certified, public school teachers in nearly every state must complete a requisite number of courses in education and the subject matter appropriate to their chosen area of instruction. In recent years, however, some states have modified this practice by allowing principals to hire college-educated individuals who have not completed the coursework ordinarily required for certification. The innovation remains controversial, as many education schools and teacher organizations believe that a teacher is only qualified after completing appropriate pedagogical training.

A plurality of the public, however, supports a more permissive teacher-recruitment policy. Forty-eight percent of those surveyed say that principals should be allowed to hire college graduates who lack formal teaching credentials, while only 33 percent oppose the idea, and 20 percent express no opinion. A larger share, 41 percent, of current and former school employees oppose the idea (Q. 21).

School Spending

The average amount of money spent per pupil by U.S. public schools has more than doubled in real terms since 1970, and the number of pupils per employed teacher has declined from 22 to 15. Teacher salaries have only barely kept pace with average wages nationwide, and the gap between teacher salaries and those of other college-educated workers has actually widened. Given these facts, some policy analysts claim that current spending levels are more than adequate and that further cuts in class size are unnecessary, while others say much more needs to be done, especially on the teacher salary front.

The public is closely divided on this issue (see Figure 7). Specifically, 51 percent say that spending on public education should increase, while 38 percent think it should remain the same and 10 percent favor spending cuts. Support for additional spending is highest among African Americans, Hispanics, and current and former public school employees, with more than 60 percent of each of those groups calling for increases in public school budgets (Q. 22).

Most Americans also express confidence that spending more on public education in their local school district would result in increased student learning. Fifty-nine percent of the public is at least somewhat confident that spending would increase student learning, as are 80 percent of African Americans, 70 percent of Hispanics, and 64 percent of school employees (Q. 23).

Given the stagnation of teacher salaries in the last three decades and the concomitant decline in class sizes, it is somewhat surprising that the public continues to prefer further cuts in class size over increases in teacher salaries. When asked whether education dollars are better spent increasing teacher salaries or decreasing class size, fully 77 percent prefer the latter option. Though scholars continue to debate the benefits of class-size reductions, the general public would appear convinced (Q. 24).

Voting in School Board Elections

The expanding reach of federal and state policies notwithstanding, responsibility for the day-to-day management of the nation’s 14,000-plus school districts still lies primarily with locally elected school boards. Yet turnout for school board elections, which are often held at dates different from those of general elections, is notoriously low, often lingering in the single digits. Such dismal figures may make it possible for a motivated group, such as the local teachers union or advocates of a particular curricular innovation, to disproportionately influence election outcomes. One wonders, then, whether the relatively small number of voters who show up on election day share the general views of other district residents.

When using poll data to examine turnout, it is important to keep in mind that Americans consistently overstate their propensity to vote in U.S. elections. As a result, the precise proportion of Americans who claim to vote in school board elections—40 percent, in our survey—is less informative than differences in reported turnout across the various subgroups. Whites and African Americans appear slightly more likely than Hispanics to have voted in their last school board election (Q. 25). Important differences, meanwhile, are observed among public school employees and the rest of the population. Indeed, current and former public school employees are 21 percentage points more likely to claim that they voted in their last school board election than is everyone else (see Figure 8).

Support for school choice in all its forms and for NCLB appears to be somewhat weaker among voters in school board elections than among the population as a whole. Compared to the rest of the population, those who claim to have voted in the last election are 8 percentage points more likely to oppose school vouchers, 7 percentage points more likely to oppose charter schools, and 9 percentage points more likely to oppose tax credits. Voters are also 10 percentage points more likely to oppose the renewal of NCLB when the law is mentioned by name, than is the rest of the population; but when the law is described but not named, nonvoters are actually 2 percentage points more likely to oppose its renewal.

Overall Assessment

When asked to grade the public schools, respondents in this survey offer assessments that look much like those observed in other national surveys of education attitudes (see Figure 9). Forty-three percent give the schools in their own community an A or a B, 38 percent assign a C, and 18 percent give a D or F. When asked about public schools around the nation, these grades drop. Just 22 percent of Americans give public schools in general an A or B, 55 percent a C, and 24 percent a D or F.

Among the various subgroups, some interesting differences emerge. When asked about the schools around the nation, whites, Hispanics, and African Americans offer similar assessments, as do public school employees and the remaining population. When asked about the schools in their own district, however, African Americans and Hispanics give notably lower marks than whites. Fully 48 percent of whites award the schools in their community an A or B grade, as compared to 40 percent of Hispanics and 27 percent of African Americans. The responses of public school employees and everyone else do not differ significantly (Q. 26, 27).

For the most part, how Americans evaluate the public schools in their own communities does not strongly correlate with their support for the reform proposals included in this survey. One exception, though, bears mentioning. Though respondents who give their schools a C, D, or F are just as likely as respondents who give their schools an A or B to support increases in school spending, the former group is twice as likely to express no confidence that more spending will improve student learning.

Conclusions

This survey reveals a U.S. public that continues to support its public schools, but also one that wants these schools to become more effective and is willing to endorse a wide variety of reforms it thinks will bring that about. Americans, for the most part, are pragmatists. They are searching for something that works. It could be accountability, it might be choice, it could be class-size reduction, and it may be changes in teacher recruitment and pay. Reform proposals in each of these areas have pluralities in support of them. In some instances, though, sizable portions of the public remain unpersuaded by advocates on either side.

Clearly, the debate over American education is far from over.

William G. Howell is associate professor in the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at Brown University and an executive editor of Education Next. Paul E. Peterson is professor of government at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He serves as editor-in-chief of Education Next.

The foundation in New York City offered 1,300 scholarships, each worth up to $1,400 annually toward tuition at a private school.

The privately funded voucher programs in New York City, Dayton, and the District of Columbia are especially conducive to study. In each city, vouchers were awarded randomly, generating treatment and control groups that are statistically indistinguishable from one another. Before conducting the lotteries, our evaluation team collected data on student test scores and family background characteristics. One and two years later, we retested the students. Since the two groups of students-the lottery’s winners and losers-had similar average abilities and family backgrounds, any subsequent achievement differences observed between them can be attributed to the effects of the vouchers.

As a result, our evaluations of the New York, Dayton, and D.C. voucher programs have yielded the best available information on students’ test-score outcomes and parental assessments of public and private schools. Here we use the data from all three cities to analyze the one- and two-year effects on academic performance of switching from a public to a private school. We find that vouchers have a moderately large, positive effect on the achievement of African-American students, but no discernible effect on the performance of students of other ethnicities.

The Literature

Earlier comparisons of public and private schools generally have found that low-income and African-American students who attend private schools outperform their public-school peers. For instance, University of Wisconsin economist Derek Neal’s analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth found that, even after adjusting for family background characteristics, students from Catholic schools were 16 percentage points more likely to go to college than were public-school students. The gap between Catholic-school students and public- school students was largest among urban minority children. Other studies have reached similar findings. University of Wisconsin political scientist John Witte’s review of the literature on school effects led him to conclude that studies of private schools “indicate a substantial private-school advantage in terms of completing high school and enrolling in college, both very important events in predicting future income and well-being.”

All of these studies, however, have one important limitation. They can account for only observed family background characteristics, such as the mother’s educational level, a student’s ethnicity, or family income. There is no assurance that these studies have successfully controlled for an intangible factor: the willingness of parents to pay tuition to send their children to private school and all that this implies about the value they place on education. As a result, it remains unclear whether these studies have unearthed actual differences between public and private schools or simply differences in the kinds of students and families attending them.

The best way to compensate for this limitation is to assign students randomly to experimental and control groups whose only substantive difference is whether they are offered a voucher. Past evaluations of voucher programs have not been able to take full advantage of a random-assignment research design. Consequently, the findings from New York, Dayton, and D.C. provide a unique opportunity to examine the effects of school vouchers.

The Programs

In several key respects, the three voucher programs followed similar designs. All were privately funded; all were targeted at students from low-income families, most of whom lived in the inner city; all provided only partial vouchers, expecting the families to supplement them; and all of the students in the evaluations previously had been attending public schools. Brief descriptions of the three programs follow.

New York City. The School Choice Scholarships Foundation (SCSF) in New York City offered 1,300 scholarships worth up to $1,400 annually toward tuition at a private school for at least three years. To qualify for a scholarship, children had to be entering grades 1 through 4, live in New York City, attend a public school at the time of application, and come from families with incomes low enough to qualify for the U.S. government’s free or reduced-price school-lunch program. More than 20,000 students applied between February and late April 1997. By the end of the scholarship program’s second year, 64 percent of the lottery-winning students were attending a private school.

Dayton, Ohio. In the spring of 1998, Parents Advancing Choice in Education (PACE) offered low-income students in grades K-12 the opportunity to win a scholarship to attend private school. For the 1998-99 school year, PACE offered scholarships to 515 students who were in public schools and to 250 who were already enrolled in private schools in the Dayton metropolitan area. During the program’s first year, the PACE scholarships covered 50 percent of tuition at a private school, up to $1,200. Support was guaranteed for at least four years, with a possibility of continuing through high school, provided funds remained available. Of those students offered scholarships, 49 percent enrolled in a private school during the second year of the program.

Washington, D.C. Established in 1993, the Washington Scholarship Fund (WSF) is the oldest of the three programs. By the fall of 1997, the WSF was serving approximately 460 children at 72 private schools. On receiving a large infusion of new funds from two philanthropists, the WSF announced a major expansion in October 1997.

To qualify, applicants had to reside in Washington, D.C., and be entering grades K-8 in the fall of 1998. Families with incomes at or below the poverty line received vouchers that equaled 60 percent of tuition or $1,700, whichever was less. Families with incomes above the poverty line received smaller scholarships. Families with incomes higher than two-and-a-half times the poverty line were ineligible. The WSF claims that it will maintain tuition support for at least three years and, if funds remain available, until students complete high school. In April 1998, the WSF awarded more than 1,000 scholarships by lottery, with the majority going to students previously attending a public school. Of those students offered scholarships, 35 percent were still using them to attend a private school in the second year of the program.

Evaluation Procedures

The evaluation procedures used in all three studies conformed to those used in randomized field trials. Our evaluation team collected baseline test scores and family background information before the lottery, administered the lottery, and collected follow-up information one and two years later.

Students took the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) in reading and mathematics. Students who were entering grades 1-4 in New York City and grades 2-8 in Dayton (and other parts of Montgomery County, Ohio) and Washington, D.C., were included in the evaluations. Parents responded to survey questions about their satisfaction with their children’s schools, their involvement in their children’s education, and their demographic characteristics. Students in grades 4 and higher completed similar surveys. In all three cities, the follow-up procedures replicated the pre-lottery procedures: students again took the ITBS in reading and math; parents and older students filled out surveys about their backgrounds and educational experiences.

More than 5,000 students participated in pre-lottery testing in New York City. Of the families that did not win the lottery, approximately 1,000 were selected at random to compose a control group of approximately 960 families. All of these students were attending public-schools at the time. In Dayton, 1,440 students were tested before the lottery; 803 of them were attending public schools at the time. In Washington, D.C., 2,023 students were tested before the lottery; 1,582 of them were attending a public school. In Dayton and in D.C., separate lotteries were held for students who were enrolled in public and private schools at the time of application. The fact that only public school children were eligible to apply for a scholarship in New York obviated the need to hold separate public and private lotteries there. In all three cities, only those students who were in public schools at the time of the lottery are included in this study.

In New York City, 42 percent of the students participating in the second year of the evaluation were African-Americans; in Dayton, 74 percent; and in D.C., 94 percent. Hispanic students accounted for 51 percent of the New York City group and 2 percent and 4 percent of the Dayton and D.C. groups, respectively. Whites accounted for 5 percent of New York City’s evaluation group, versus 24 percent in Dayton and 1 percent in D.C. The remaining students came from a variety of other ethnic backgrounds.

In New York City, 80 percent of the students included in the evaluation attended the first-year testing sessions; 66 percent attended the second-year sessions. In D.C. the response rate after one year was 63 percent; after two years, 50 percent. In Dayton, 57 percent of families attended follow-up sessions after one year, 49 percent after two years.

We are reasonably confident that these modest response rates do not undermine the integrity of our findings. First, with the exception of the second year in New York, response rates were similar for both the treatment and the control groups after one and two years in all three cities. Second, comparisons of baseline test scores and background characteristics revealed only minor differences between the composition of the test and control groups in all three cities. Finally, to account for the minor differences between respondents and nonrespondents that we did observe, the test scores of children who, based on their demographic characteristics, were more likely to attend follow-up sessions were weighted less heavily, while the test scores of children who were less likely to attend follow-up sessions, but nevertheless did, were weighted more heavily. Given the slight differences between respondents and nonrespondents, however, the weights had little effect on the results.

The randomized lottery ensured that lottery winners as a group were not significantly different from the control group (those who did not win a scholarship). In all three cities, the demographic characteristics and pre-lottery test scores of scholarship winners and losers (the treatment and control groups, respectively) resembled one another. Only in Dayton were there minor differences in the pre-lottery test scores: those offered a voucher scored 6.5 percentile points lower in math and 3.1 points lower in reading than those not offered a scholarship, a statistically significant difference.
To measure the effect on children’s test scores of switching to a private school, we estimate a statistical model that takes into account whether a child attended a public or a private school, as well as baseline reading and math test scores. Baseline test scores were included to adjust for the minor baseline differences between the treatment and control groups on the achievement tests and to increase the precision of the estimated impact.

The lottery generated two groups: those who were offered a voucher and those who were not. We’re not interested, however, in the effect of being offered a voucher. Rather, we’re interested in the effect of using a voucher to attend a private school. A significant number of the students who were offered vouchers did not use them; similarly, a smaller proportion of those students not offered a voucher attended a private school anyway. Therefore, a simple comparison between public and private school students is inappropriate because certain students may be more likely to take advantage of a voucher. Their parents may place greater value on education and be more willing to supplement the voucher, or they may live in a neighborhood with a broader selection of private schools. If these children differ from students who won a voucher but failed to use it in ways that are related to student achievement, it could bias our findings. To solve this problem, we used as an instrumental variable whether or not a student was offered a voucher to predict the probability that she attended a private school; with these predicted values, we can provide an unbiased estimate of the actual impact of switching from a public- to a private-school. This two-stage regression technique was first used in medical research and is now commonplace in econometric studies.

Results

Our findings varied by ethnic group. In all three cities, there were no significant differences between the test-score performance of non-African-American students who switched from a public to a private school and the performance of students in the control group-after either one or two years. For African- American students, however, the receipt of a voucher made a substantial difference. In the three cities combined, African-American students who switched from public to private schools scored, after one year, 3.3 percentile points higher on the combined math and reading tests (expressed as National Percentile Ranking [NPR] points, which run from 0 to 100 with a national median of 50). After two years, African- American students who used a voucher to enroll in a private school scored 6.3 percentile points higher than African-American students who remained in public schools (the control group) (see Figure 1).

We emphasize the overall test scores, which represent the average of the math and reading components. When using one-hour testing sessions to gauge student performance, combined reading and math scores serve as a better indicator of student achievement than either test separately. Theoretically, the more test items used to evaluate performance, the more likely performance will be measured accurately.

Nevertheless, the differences after two years were approximately the same for both the reading and the math tests. On average in the three cities, African-American students who switched from public to private schools scored 6.3 percentile points higher than their peers in the control group on the reading portion of the test and 6.2 points higher on the math portion.

The largest test-score differences between African-American students in private schools and African-American students in public schools were observed in the D.C. program. Black students who attended D.C. private schools for two years scored 9.0 percentile points higher on the two tests combined than did students in the control group. The smallest differences after two years were observed in New York City, where the combined test scores of African-American students attending private schools were 4.3 percentile points higher than those of the control group. In Dayton the difference was 6.5 percentile points for African-American students.

The trend over time also varied from city to city. In New York City, at the end of the first year, African-American students in private and public schools displayed substantial differences in test scores, but these diminished slightly in the second year. After two years the difference in scores is 4.3 percentile points, which is slightly but not significantly (in statistical terms) less than the 5.8 percentile point difference observed after one year. It is reasonable to conclude that African-American students’ initial gains in the New York City school voucher program were preserved but did not increase between year one and year two.

In Dayton, there appears to be a steady upward trend in the combined test-score performance of African-Americans. African-American students who switched from public to private schools performed 3.3 percentile points higher on the combined test in year one and 6.5 percentile points higher in year two.

In some ways, the most striking results in terms of trends over time concern African-Americans in D.C. After one year, no significant differences were observed for African-American students as a group, but older and younger students experienced significant differences. While younger students may have benefited slightly from the voucher program after one year, the older students who switched to private schools scored significantly lower than their public- school peers after one year. By the end of the second year, however, these students seemed to have overcome the initial challenges of changing schools. Both younger and older African-American students who switched from public to private schools posted positive and significant gains. On the combined reading and math tests, younger students in private schools scored 9.3 percentile points higher than those who remained in public schools. Older African-American students in private schools scored 10.3 percentile points higher.

The lottery ensured that scholarship winners as a group were not significantly different from those who did not win a scholarship. In all three cities, the demographic characteristics and pre-lottery test scores of scholarship winners and losers resembled one another.

Controlling for Demographics

Most research on the impact of private schools attempts to control for differences in family income and other background characteristics among students attending public and private schools. When a lottery is used to assign research subjects to experimental and control conditions, however, such statistical adjustments are generally unnecessary simply because the two groups being compared are virtually identical.

Nonetheless, after the release of our study, some analysts objected to the apparent absence of controls for family background characteristics. Bruce Fuller and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, for instance, argued, “The experimental group may have been biased as some of the most disadvantaged voucher winners did not switch to a private school, and therefore were excluded from the group (possibly boosting mean achievement levels artificially).” An interest group, People for the American Way, lodged a similar complaint: “The study’s key finding improperly compares two dramatically different groups and may well reflect private-school screening-out of the most at-risk students.”

In the three cities roughly half the students initially took the voucher that was offered to them (the takers), and about half did not (the decliners). Takers had higher family incomes in New York and D.C., but lower incomes in Dayton. The New York and D.C. findings are not surprising, given that the voucher awards did not cover all the costs of a private education. These additional costs were the reason most frequently given by families for not using the voucher. Presumably acceptance rates would rise if the monetary value of the vouchers were increased.

However, we did not drop the decliners from the analysis, as some of our critics have charged. All voucher applicants were invited to follow-up testing sessions, and each of the families who participated, including those who declined a scholarship, is included in the analysis. To estimate the impact of switching from a public to a private school, we did not simply compare those students who used a voucher to enroll in a private school with all those who did not. Such a comparison would have introduced bias and squandered all the advantages of a random-assignment evaluation. Instead, we used a familiar technique, often used in medical and econometric research, that preserves the essence of a random-assignment evaluation. The outcome of the lottery, a random event, was used to create what statisticians refer to as an instrumental variable, which obtains unbiased estimates of the effects of attending private school on students’ test scores. According to the statistical theory that underpins this technique, results from lotteries are powerful instrumental variables, because the lottery, being a random event, is not directly related to students’ test-score performance. In other words, the use of this statistical technique fully corrects for any differences that arise from the fact that not all of the families who were offered a voucher made use of one.

To see whether the instrumental variable worked in practice as it should in theory, we conducted a second analysis in which we controlled not only for the students’ pre-lottery test scores but also for their mothers’ educational level, her employment status, family size, and whether the family received welfare. If the critics were correct, the introduction of these background characteristics into the analysis should have diminished the estimated effect of attending a private school, because only after these adjustments were made would the analysis have adjusted for the background differences between those who used the voucher and those who did not. But if the use of the lottery as an instrumental variable works in practice as it is expected to work in statistical theory, it would already have corrected for these differences. The results should remain essentially the same.

As statistical theory anticipates, the average difference in the combined reading and math test scores of African-Americans in all three cities remained exactly the same-6.3 NPR points-after the adjustments for family background characteristics were introduced. Minor differences in the two estimates were observed within each city. The impact of switching to a private school without controlling for family background in New York City was originally estimated to be 4.4 NPR points; after accounting for family background, the impact was estimated to be 4.2 NPR points. Introducing controls in Dayton decreased the estimated impact from 6.5 to 5.9 NPR points. In Washington, D.C., the estimated impact increased from 9.0 to 9.1 NPR points. In New York and Washington, the estimated impacts, after adding controls for family background, remain statistically significant. In Dayton, the impact just missed the standard threshold for statistical significance.

Discussion

It is possible that conditions specific to each city or minor fluctuations in testing conditions might skew results one way or another. But when similar results emerge from the evaluations of school voucher programs in three very different cities, we can be fairly confident that the intervention is the main cause of the differences in achievement.

In general, we found no evidence that vouchers significantly improved the test scores of ethnic groups other than African-Americans, most notably Latinos in New York and whites in Dayton. The impact of vouchers for African-Americans, however, was moderately large. After one year, black students who switched to private schools scored 0.17 standard deviations higher than the students in the control group. After two years, the difference grew to 0.33 standard deviations, roughly one-third of the test-score gap between blacks and whites nationwide. These effects are approximately the same as those observed in Tennessee when class sizes were reduced from 24 students to 16 students, a much more costly intervention.

Whether the gains from these small, private scholarship programs will translate to large-scale, publicly funded school-choice programs in urban areas is unknown. Only a small fraction of low-income public-school students in New York, Dayton, and D.C. were offered vouchers, and these students made up a small share of the cities’ private-school populations. A much larger program carried out for longer periods of time could yield quite different outcomes. But we’ll never know unless we try. The nation’s capital, the city where the largest effects were observed, would be a good place to begin.

-William G. Howell is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Patrick J. Wolf is an assistant professor of public policy at Georgetown University. Paul E. Peterson directs the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, where David E. Campbell is a research associate. To view their study in its entirety, log on to www.edmattersmore.org.

“Principal Stratification Approach to Broken Randomized Experiments: A Case Study of School Choice Vouchers in New York City,” “Comment,” and “Rejoinder”
By John Barnard, Constantine E. Frangakis, Jennifer L. Hill, and Donald B. Rubin; “Comment”
by Alan Krueger and Pei Zhu

Journal of the American Statistical Association, June 2003.

Another Look at the New York City School Voucher Experiment

By Alan Krueger and Pei Zhu
Presented at the National Press Club, April 2003.

In The Education Gap: Vouchers and Urban Schools (Brookings, 2002), we and our colleagues reported that attending a private school had no discernible impact, positive or negative, on the test scores of non-African-American students participating in school voucher programs in Washington, D.C., New York City, and Dayton, Ohio. But after one, two, and three years in New York City, and after two years in Washington and Dayton, significantly positive impacts for African-Americans were observed.

Our results came from randomized field trials, which are generally thought to be the gold standard for research on human subjects. In such studies, subjects are randomly assigned to treatment and control groups by means of a lottery. In the best of worlds, researchers are able to collect information on the subjects’ characteristics before the lottery begins, enabling them to confirm that the lottery, in fact, worked as intended. If the treatment and control groups are similar at the beginning of the study, any differences between the two groups that emerge over time can be attributed to the programmatic intervention-in the case at hand, using a voucher to switch from a public to a private school. The results reported in this article are thus to be understood as the difference in test scores between those students who used vouchers to attend a private school and those of their public school peers who would have used a voucher had they been offered one.

Despite the strength of our evaluation’s design, the findings have not been without controversy. Specifically, two secondary analyses of the New York City data have recently been published, with widely diverging results. One study, conducted by a group of distinguished statisticians, John Barnard, Constantine Frangakis, Jennifer Hill, and Donald Rubin (hereinafter referred to as Barnard), has confirmed our first-year results but has been virtually ignored in the public media. The other, by Princeton economists Alan Krueger and Pei Zhu, has contradicted our results and twice received favorable coverage in the New York Times, where Krueger is an occasional columnist.

From the standpoint of pure innovation and analytical rigor, Barnard has produced the more impressive piece. As befitting an article published in the nation’s leading statistics journal, it introduces new statistical techniques to deal with problems that often emerge in randomized field trials: 1) missing data (for instance, not all students who initially joined the study participated in the follow-up testing sessions), and 2) noncompliance (some students, for example, refused the vouchers that were offered to them).

It remains to be seen whether the statisticians’ proposed innovation becomes more widely used. At its current stage of technical development, it permits the examination of effects only after one year. Also, in using the technique, Barnard opted to restrict their analysis to those families with only one child participating in the voucher program.

Despite differences in statistical approach and in the selection of students to be included in the analysis, Barnard’s findings are largely consistent with those we reported. While we estimated that, after one year, African-American students scored 7 percentile points higher on the math portion of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills than their peers in public schools, Barnard reports impacts of 6 percentile points for African-American students from low-performing public schools. (Almost all the African-American students came from schools with average test scores below the district mean; the few that did not had almost identical average impacts, but the number of available observations was too small to recover precise estimates.)

By contrast, Krueger and Zhu concluded, “The provision of vouchers in New York City probably had no more than a trivial effect on the average test performance of participating black students.” This conclusion rests primarily on three methodological decisions that distinguish their research from both our study and that of Barnard:

• We and Barnard let the mother’s ethnicity define the student’s ethnicity, while Krueger and Zhu defined a student as African-American if either parent was African-American.

• We and Barnard considered the results for only those students in grades 1-4, almost all of whom took achievement tests before the lottery. This provided us with what are known as “baseline test scores” that can be used to obtain more precise estimates of program effects. By contrast, Krueger and Zhu also included a large number of kindergartners for whom no baseline test scores were available.

• We and Barnard always adjusted the data to account for students’ baseline test scores in estimating our results. Krueger and Zhu, in their preferred results, as presented in their “Comment” on Barnard, exclude these baseline test scores.

All three of these alterations to the research strategy must be made in order to obtain results that differ substantially from those that we and Barnard obtained. Using any one or two of these different strategies does not generate appreciably different results.

How to Define African-American

Let’s consider Krueger and Zhu’s decision to classify students as African-American if either parent was African-American. Krueger and Zhu regard this decision as a key reason why they obtained results different from ours.

To understand the issue, bear in mind that because many of the students were very young, their ethnic backgrounds were ascertained from information provided in questionnaires filled out by the adults who accompanied them to the testing sessions. These adults were asked to report the ethnicity of the student’s mother and, separately, the student’s father. They could assign parents to one of nine categories, five of which are: Black/African-American (non-Hispanic); White (non-Hispanic); Puerto Rican; Dominican; and Other Hispanic. Classifying a child’s ethnicity is usually straightforward, because both parents are of the same background. In cases where parents were not of the same ethnicity, we classified the child by the mother’s ethnicity, simply because most children lived with their mothers, 74 percent of whom were single parents. Sixty-seven percent of the students lived with only their mother, compared with just 2 percent who lived with only their father. Mothers accompanied 84 percent of children to testing sessions; in 94 percent of the cases, the accompanying adult claimed to be a caretaker of the child.

Given the fact that these children tended to live with their mothers (and, often, not with their fathers), the decision to link the child’s ethnicity to the mother’s appears perfectly sensible. Alternatively, one might classify students as African-American only if both parents are African-American or if the child’s primary parental caretaker (usually the mother, but on a few occasions the father) is African-American.

Eschewing these alternatives, Krueger and Zhu used a unique classification scheme. They identify students of mixed heritage as African-American as long as either the mother or the father is African-American. If the mother was white but the father was African-American, the child was defined as “black, non-Hispanic.” Even if a child had a Hispanic mother and an African-American father, Krueger and Zhu still classified the child as “black, non-Hispanic.” Unless one departs from the standard practice of using mutually exclusive categories, students could not be classified as Hispanic or white if either parent was African-American. Krueger and Zhu defend this classification scheme on the grounds that it is “symmetrical.” But symmetry is hardly the word for a scheme that classifies Hispanics, whites, and African-Americans according to different principles.

Nevertheless, not much turns on how one defines a child’s ethnicity. Regardless of one’s definition, impacts after three years that range between 7 and 8 percentile points are observed for African-Americans in New York City (see Figure 1). If one classifies a student’s ethnicity by the mother’s (the approach we prefer), the effects are 8 percentile points; if one uses either the mother or the father (the approach favored by Krueger and Zhu) the effects are 7 percentile points, a result that is not significantly different from the one originally reported. By itself, altering the definition of a child’s ethnicity provides no basis whatsoever for concluding that effects disappear.

Students without Baseline Test Scores

Figure 1 presents results for students with baseline test-score information-the first bar reporting impacts for the definition of African-American originally used, the latter three bars for alternative definitions. The figure’s results are based on analyses that exclude from the study all kindergartners, none of whom were tested at baseline. Also excluded are the 10 percent of the students in grades 1-4 who were sick, who refused to take the test, or whose tests were lost in the administrative process.

Krueger and Zhu object to the exclusion of any students from the study, claiming that this constitutes the “most important” deficiency of our analysis, as well as that of Barnard. But even when all students are included in the analysis, African-American students who attended private schools scored significantly higher than their public school peers (see Figure 2).

Nonetheless, it is problematic to include students in a study if you don’t know what their achievement level was at the beginning. How well students perform on a test at, say, age seven, is tightly connected to how well they will do at age eight, nine, or ten. In fact, the correlations between baseline and follow-up test scores in New York consistently hover around 0.7. By comparison, the correlations between mother’s level of education and follow-up scores were only about 0.1.

Restricting the study to those students for whom baseline test scores are available affords a check on whether the lottery worked as intended and whether any problems arose downstream. For these students, all looks fine on both accounts.

When including all students, even those lacking baseline test scores, one can only hope that the two groups are similar with respect to this critical characteristic. Nonetheless, Krueger and Zhu defend their inclusion on the grounds that “because assignment to treatment status was random . . . a simple comparison of means between treatments and controls without conditioning on baseline scores provides an unbiased estimate of the average treatment effect.” This claim, says Barnard, “is simply false.”

If not quite false, the claim is at least dubious, because there were many ways for the treatment and control groups to become unbalanced. For example, about a third of the students did not remain in the study into the third year-a fairly standard rate of attrition from this kind of research protocol, but one that raises concerns that the treatment and control groups might have lost students with different baseline test scores. For this reason, we limited our analysis to those students for whom baseline scores were available, and hence for whom we were able to verify that the treatment and control groups did not become unbalanced.

But perhaps something else is to be gained from including all students, regardless of whether baseline information was available. Krueger and Zhu suggest that by adding these cases one can generalize findings to another grade level (kindergartners). Unfortunately, this is a hazardous generalization, given the fact that the results for kindergartners were significantly different from those for the older students. African-American students in grades 1-4 scored significantly higher if they attended private school, a result observed in all three years of the study. The results for kindergartners, meanwhile, were considerably more erratic; the effect of attending a private school for three years was a negative 13.9 percentile points. In the absence of baseline scores, we don’t know whether the findings for kindergartners are genuine or simply the result of errors in the administrative process.

Krueger and Zhu also note that their inclusion of all students in the sample generates more precise estimates. But gains in precision obtained by increasing the number of students observed will be offset by losses associated with failing to control for baseline test scores. One can assess the extent to which these competing forces balance each other by comparing the estimates’ standard errors: the smaller the errors, the more precise the estimate. As it turns out, the standard errors are larger, not smaller, when estimating statistical models that include all students but do not control for baseline test scores.

A compromise strategy, suggested by Krueger and Zhu, includes all students and adjusts for baseline test scores whenever possible. This analytic approach generates more precise estimates, the results from which are presented in Figure 2. But since these analyses also introduce risks of bias (principally by including the kindergartners for whom no baseline scores were available), the results in Figure 2 are inferior to the results provided in Figure 1. Nonetheless, they still reveal significantly positive effects of attending private schools on African-American test scores. In other words, even if one includes kindergartners in the study, as Krueger and Zhu recommend, the essentials of our original finding remain intact.

Krueger and Zhu have not accepted these findings, however. Instead, they have said that they cannot obtain equivalent results when they attempt to conduct an analysis identical to ours. But this claim is misleading. In fact, Krueger and Zhu’s results, available by correspondence, hardly differ from ours. As the first set of columns in Figure 3 shows, among students with baseline test scores, we both find that the estimated year three private school impact is 8.4 percentile points for all African-Americans (as defined by the mother’s ethnicity, our preferred definition). And, as shown in the second set of columns in Figure 3, we both find an impact of 7.6 percentile points for African-Americans when using Krueger and Zhu’s preferred definition of African-American (students whose mother or father is African-American). Moreover, when students without baseline scores are added to the analysis, they obtain results that are, once again, virtually indistinguishable from ours (see the last two sets of columns in Figure 3).

In other words, Krueger and Zhu also now report consistently positive results for African-Americans, regardless of how ethnicity is defined, even when kindergartners are included in the analysis-as long as baseline scores (and only baseline scores) are taken into account in the statistical estimation of programmatic effects.

To Ignore or Not to Ignore Baseline Test Scores

Neither changing the definition of African-American nor adding students for whom baseline test scores are missing appreciably changes the results we originally reported. To get different results, still a third methodological step is required. Krueger and Zhu argue that, to avoid a biased estimate, one must ignore baseline test scores, even for those students for whom these are available. But if including baseline scores introduced bias, the magnitude of the effect would change substantially. It does not. Adding baseline scores shifts estimated effects by less than half a percentile point.

Not only is no bias introduced, but including baseline test scores has the advantage of yielding more precise results, allowing researchers to reach firmer conclusions about the efficacy of a programmatic intervention. Estimated impacts from models that control for baseline scores are significant at the .05 level (using the two-tail test), while the less-precise results in models that do not control for baseline scores are significant at only the .10 level, using a one-tail test (a significance level below the threshold Krueger and Zhu find acceptable).

In sum, Krueger and Zhu take three methodological steps to generate results that are not statistically significant: 1) changing the definition of the group to be studied, 2) adding students without baseline test scores, and 3) ignoring the available information on baseline test scores, even though this yields less precise results.

By contrast, Barnard agreed with our decisions to: 1) use the mother’s ethnicity as the basis for defining the child’s, 2) focus on those students in the grades for which baseline scores were available for most students, and 3) control for baseline scores, whenever possible. Using pioneering statistical techniques, Barnard reports similar findings, while Krueger and Zhu venture far afield to uncover contrary ones.

The Value of Randomization

Given differences of opinion among researchers, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that randomized field trials are not the gold standard they are thought to be. If social scientists can reach opposite conclusions from the same data set, then research, even from randomized field trials, may do little to inform policy debates.

We take a different view. In New York, the results reported by all parties are consistently positive-only the magnitude of the effects and the level of statistical significance fluctuate. Furthermore, different statistical techniques generate roughly equivalent results. Moreover, the results that we report are consistent with past research on public and private schools. More than 25 years ago, James Coleman and his colleagues found that attending a private school was more beneficial for black students than for whites, as measured by test scores. More recently, Princeton economist Cecilia Rouse, after reviewing the research literature, concluded that “the overall impact of private schools is mixed, [but] it does appear that Catholic schools generate higher test scores for African-Americans.” Another literature review, conducted by economists Jeffrey Grogger and Derek Neal, found few clear-cut gains for white students, while “urban minorities in Catholic schools fare much better than similar students in public schools.”

Controversies surrounding randomized experiments can nonetheless be reduced by collecting baseline data on the outcome variable of greatest interest-in this case, students’ test-score performance. In the absence of this information, experiments devolve into endless arguments over whether random assignment actually occurred and whether the two groups being compared are genuinely equivalent. Consider, for example, the recent skepticism directed toward Tennessee’s Project STAR study, a randomized field trial on class size that failed to collect baseline test-score data.

Still, whether or not one restricts the analysis to those cases where baseline test scores were available, results are clear. In New York, private-school attendance positively affected the test scores of African-American students, but not those of any other ethnic group. For this reason, we think that the evidence from New York continues to support the conclusion-also reached in a wide variety of earlier studies-that disadvantaged African-American students living in urban environments benefit from private schooling.

-Paul E. Peterson, the editor-in-chief of Education Next, and William G. Howell are professors at Harvard University. They are the principal authors of The Education Gap: Vouchers and Urban Schools (Brookings, 2002). To view the unabridged version of this article, log on to www.educationnext.org.

The impact of NCLB, which Caradonio terms the No Teacher Left Standing Act, was supposed to be felt most strongly in urban centers with large minority and disadvantaged populations-places just like Worcester. Instead, during its first two years, NCLB appeared to have little impact at all.

As of June 2003, 12 of Worcester’s 50 public schools had been labeled “in need of improvement” for two consecutive years, and five schools for three years in a row. During the 2002-03 school year, under the new law’s choice provisions, almost 4,700 students were entitled to transfer out of their failing schools and into one of the district’s higher-performing schools. Roughly 1,800 students had the right to use Title I funds to obtain supplemental academic services from qualified public or private providers, another carrot the new law extends to children enrolled in underperforming schools.

As of December 2003, however, only one child in Worcester had switched schools. And just one more had taken advantage of the supplemental services provision to obtain tutoring from a provider outside of the public school system.

For the most part, local officials have taken the fact that so few parents have switched schools or demanded private supplemental services as confirmation of the district’s excellence. But is there really no more than one family that wishes to change schools? If there are others, what is limiting their exercise of choice? And why aren’t parents taking advantage of the supplemental services by private providers that are guaranteed to them under the law?

Obviously, the implementation of any major piece of legislation proceeds in fits and starts, making it much too early to proclaim NCLB an unmitigated success or failure. Nevertheless, for reasons inherent in the writing of the law, districts’ incentives to implement it, and parents’ current knowledge of its provisions, early returns suggest that NCLB is not likely to revolutionize public education in Worcester anytime soon.

The No Child Left Behind Act “looks great” but it is “killing teachers and killing principals,” says James Caradonio, superintendent of the Worcester, Massachusetts, school district.

Already on the Move

Worcester is the third largest school system in the state of Massachusetts, serving roughly 25,000 students in 46 public schools (36 elementary, 4 middle, 5 high, and one pre-K-12 school). The federal government provides just 10 percent of the district’s $265 million annual budget, with state appropriations, local contributions, grants, and revolving funds covering the balance.

Worcester’s schools house an increasingly diverse and disadvantaged population of students. During the past two decades, the percentage of nonwhite students has more than doubled, from roughly 20 percent in 1980 to slightly more than 50 percent in 2002. The district provides 7 percent of its students, representing no fewer than 50 different languages, with English as a Second Language (ESL) tutorial programs. More than 50 percent of the district’s students qualify for the federal lunch program, a common measure of disadvantage. And on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS)-the state’s standardized test, first administered in the spring of 1998-Worcester public school students in different grade levels were 8 to 20 percentage points less likely to score at or above proficiency than were students statewide.

Making matters worse, Worcester’s schools serve an extremely mobile population of families. Between 1999 and 2002, on average, 23 to 37 percent of elementary students changed schools within a given academic year; among middle schools, mobility rates ranged from 24 to 32 percent; and for high schools, from 24 to 28 percent. Much of this movement occurred across district lines. For instance, during the 2001-02 school year, 12 percent of Worcester elementary students changed schools and another 21 percent left the district altogether. That such a high proportion of Worcester’s families are moving in and out of the district exacerbates the problems of tracking students and delivering a coherent education program.

Schools that failed to meet their “adequate yearly progress” targets, as required by NCLB, serve some of the most mobile student populations. Among those elementary schools that were deemed in need of improvement between 1999 and 2001, mobility rates reached as high as 51 percent. When determining whether a school has made adequate progress, the state does not account for these mobility rates-a fact that almost every public official in the district is quick to point out. “You really can only determine whether you’re making progress or not if you’re testing the same kids, year after year,” says Worcester mayor Timothy Murray. “And that’s something that is not lost, I think, on parents or the School Committee.”

The causes of mobility vary widely, though by most accounts it has little to do with parents seeking better schools. As Brian O’Connell, vice chair of the city’s School Committee, notes, “Parents are moving from one apartment to another or husband and wife separate, mother and boyfriend separate, evictions take place, friends go off, parents move, parents are homeless, parents leave in November to go back to Puerto Rico and come back in the spring and come back to a different school.”

In short, even without satisfying the choice provisions of the new law, the Worcester school district must cope with a dizzying amount of movement in and out of its schools. Schools struggle just to keep track of their students from year to year. Moreover, the district already provides a significant amount of choice. During the 2002-03 school year, only 61 percent of students attended their neighborhood public school. The rest attended one of two charter schools or six citywide magnet schools, participated in the interdistrict choice program, or joined in the district’s desegregation plan.

Friendly Discouragement

Ultimately, districts are responsible for informing parents of their rights and opportunities under NCLB. But given the challenges that Worcester faces, along with the incentives to safeguard public finances, it should come as no surprise that administrators subtly, and not so subtly, discouraged families from transferring their children out of underperforming schools.

In the spring of 2003, the district notified families at underperforming schools of their rights under NCLB. The designation “in need of improvement,” the letters explained, “means that although these schools are succeeding in some areas, there is still room for growth.” After highlighting limitations of the NCLB grading system, the letter underscored unattractive features of the law’s choice provisions. For example, “In most instances, because of space limitations, we may not be able to transfer every child in a family to the same school.” Furthermore, the letter noted, families with children at underperforming schools who switch schools forfeit their rights to supplemental services.

The letter goes on to cite many exciting developments in Worcester public schools. “We believe that your child’s school is on its way towards achieving the NCLB goals. The principal and teachers at your child’s school have implemented new programs and services during the school day as well as after school. These include: a proven literacy approach designed to meet the individual needs of the students; the Everyday Mathematics program for students in grades K-6; an after-school program to help students improve MCAS scores; and other special programs.”

The district then set up a multistage procedure for parents to exercise their right to choose another school. The first step involves a meeting between a parent and her child’s principal, wherein the parent has an opportunity to explain why she is unhappy with her child’s school. The principal can then clarify the problems with NCLB and show why the family ought to stay put. Principals also explain why students are best served by receiving supplemental services within their schools. (The district offers an academically based after-school program for Title I students, which qualifies as supplemental services under NCLB. More than 800 students are currently enrolled in this program.)

Not surprisingly, very few parents requested a meeting with their principal. According to Elaine De Araujo, principal of Harlow Street Elementary School, “Nobody has wanted to change. Not one parent has come forward. If you were here, you would see why. You would see what a nurturing, wonderful place this is.” Ruthann Melancon, the principal of Elm Park Elementary School, notes, “A couple of parents came to me thinking that the school was going to close. I sat down with these sets of parents and reassured them. They’ve been here since preschool and they have liked what they’ve seen.” Under NCLB, both Harlow Street and Elm Park have failed to make adequate progress every year that the schools have been evaluated.

If, after consulting with the school principal, parents still want to change schools, they must schedule yet another meeting at the Parent Information Center. Robert Vartanian, the center’s director, say that he has met with just two families interested in NCLB choice, and only one of those families ended up switching their child to a different school. Each time, Vartanian has taken the opportunity to reiterate many of the points made by the school principal. Perhaps most consequentially, though, Vartanian informs parents that the district may not be able to accommodate their request to attend any specific school. Indeed, since the district is obligated only to offer parents a choice of two schools that did make adequate progress, that is all they can expect to receive. There are also no guarantees that either of these schools will be near the family’s home or that transportation will be provided over the longer term of a child’s education. As district official Joan Fitton explains, “The feds told us we had to offer a choice, not the parents’ choice, but a choice.”

Standing on the Sidelines

The Worcester district also uses its control over the flow of information to limit the influence of NCLB’s supplemental services provision. While the district can advertise its tutoring and after-school services directly to parents, private providers hoping to capture a piece of this market have few opportunities to get their foot in the door. As Seppy Basili, vice president of Kaplan K12 Learning Services, notes, “The school district is the owner of the relationship between provider and the parent. And I can’t get in.” The five companies with contracts to provide supplemental services in Massachusetts-Brainfuse (The Trustforte Corporation), Huntington Learning Centers, Kaplan K12 Learning Services, Princeton Review, and the Summit Educational Group-do not even know which students are eligible for Title I funding and, thus, supplemental services. Therefore they must rely on the district and its representatives to present their services to parents in as favorable a light as possible.

Curiously though, private providers are not complaining yet-at least publicly-perhaps for fear of alienating district administrators, on whose cooperation and goodwill they depend. Meanwhile, for some companies that provide private tutoring, the state-mandated amount involved ($1,238 per year, per student in Worcester) is simply insufficient to warrant serious investment.

For instance, Huntington Learning Centers, which have the distinct honor of having served the only Worcester student to obtain supplemental services from outside of the public school system, typically contract with families for 100 to 150 hours of individual tutoring. The Title I money available for supplemental services, however, covers just 30 to 40 hours of tutoring, which would require either an abbreviated or an entirely restructured program. Notes Mark Shobin, the owner of three Huntington franchises in Massachusetts, “From a financial perspective, it doesn’t make sense for us to try to corral these students into our program. We are happy to work with and develop programs for those students who seek us out. But I am not going to seek them out.”

Transportation problems further inhibit parents’ interest in sending their child to private providers. “We don’t provide transportation for supplemental services,” explains Joan Fitton. “And neither do the supplemental service providers provide transportation. So, there, right away, is a big glitch in the whole program. We’re not required to provide transportation. And, to be honest, to send money out of the district, I’m not sure that we would even offer to do that.” As long as children continue with their own school’s program, parents need not worry about transporting them across town during the middle of the day. The district benefits as well, since it avoids losing Title I funds to private providers.

What Parents Know and Want

Many parents in Worcester simply do not know much about their school’s performance or their rights under NCLB. In a telephone survey conducted during the summer of 2003, public school parents routinely expressed confusion over basic points of fact. Overall, 25 percent of parents surveyed in Worcester had children who attended underperforming schools. However, when asked whether their child’s school was on the list of underperforming schools, just 6 percent of parents said yes, 54 percent said no, and 41 percent said that they did not know (see Figure 1). Fully 93 percent of parents of children in underperforming public schools either did not know that their school was deemed in need of improvement or incorrectly thought that their child attended a school that had made adequate yearly progress.

As one might expect, levels of knowledge varied depending on parents’ socioeconomic status and ethnicity. Whereas 54 percent of whites knew whether their child attended an underperforming school, just 28 percent of African-Americans and Hispanics did. Just 26 percent of parents born outside of the United States and 17 percent of parents of children who receive English as a Second Language instruction knew whether their school was underperforming.

Are parents interested in choice? Among those with children in underperforming schools, just 13 percent said there was another public school in the district to which they were interested in sending their children (see Figure 2). By comparison, 8 percent of parents of children in schools that had made adequate yearly progress said they were interested in another school. Consistent with these responses, parents appeared to be satisfied with their public schools. Eighty-seven percent of parents with children in schools that made adequate progress gave their school an A or a B, as did 80 percent of parents with children in underperforming schools.

However, interest in choice spiked when the options included private schools. Fully 58 percent of parents with children in underperforming schools said that they would rather send their child to a private school than their current public school (see Figure 2), compared with 39 percent of parents with children in schools that made adequate progress. When asked, “If costs were not an obstacle, which type of school would you most like your child to attend?” 49 percent of parents with children in underperforming schools picked a private school, 44 percent a public school in their district, 4 percent a public school outside of the district, and just 2 percent a charter school.

The clause “if costs were not an obstacle” apparently freed up some parents’ imaginations to consider elite (read: expensive) private schools. When asked to name a preferred private school, roughly half named independent private schools (the most popular being Worcester Academy and Milton Academy), with tuitions that eclipse the values of even the most generous school vouchers offered in public and private programs across the country. The rest identified a Catholic or Protestant day school, most of which were located within or near the city of Worcester.

Misalignments of information, interests, and schooling options have effectively limited NCLB’s influence in Worcester. Those parents who qualify for public school choice and supplemental services are the least likely to know it; fewer than one in ten parents with children in schools that failed to make adequate progress could correctly identify their school’s status. Meanwhile, Worcester parents are most interested in pursuing schooling alternatives that NCLB does not furnish.

The Road Ahead

In Worcester distrust of NCLB runs rampant. While many principals extol the benefits of using student achievement data as a diagnostic tool, officials downtown remain deeply suspicious of the longer-term consequences that will accompany repeated failures to make adequate yearly progress. Notes Caradonio, “We’re screwed. This whole thing has been set up to make sure it looks bad so we can bring in the miracle drugs, the vouchers, and all this is very clear.” School Committee member Kathleen Toomey expressed much the same sentiment to the town newspaper. “[NCLB] is one way to promote flight out of city schools,” she said. “Proponents of charter schools will be able to say, -Look, see, those public schools are not working.’” Local officials have assumed a defensive posture, poised at every opportunity to minimize the impact of a law that they think is designed to set them up for failure.

Some short-term solutions may encourage higher participation rates. It is sheer folly, for instance, to expect school districts to vigorously implement an accountability scheme that disrupts their school assignment procedures, drains money from their coffers, and threatens their administrative autonomy. Until an independent organization is established that disseminates information about which schools are underperforming, which students qualify for choice and supplemental services, and which providers are available, there is little reason to expect that NCLB will induce an exodus of students from underperforming schools.

However, even if an independent agency were established, a massive reallocation of students and resources would be unlikely. The district will continue to pursue its strategies of blame avoidance. If the survey results are any indication, few qualifying families appear likely to switch to a different public school. And as the number of schools failing to make adequate progress grows, the number of options remaining for families will only dwindle.

-William G. Howell is an assistant professor of government at Harvard University.

Diana Jean Schemo, “Nation’s Charter Schools Lagging Behind, U.S. Test Scores Reveal,” New York Times, August 17, 2004, page A1

It is not unusual for interest groups to issue reports that further their own political agendas–and to muddle the facts in the process. For this reason, newspapers generally ignore them, treat them with great skepticism, or make sure they properly vet the research with independent observers.

Not so in the case of the study of charter schools leaked by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) to the New York Times, which then placed it in the right-hand column of the front page of its August 17 edition–a slot typically reserved for the day’s biggest story. Headlined “Nation’s Charter Schools Lagging Behind, U.S. Test Scores Reveal,” the story sent shock waves through the charter school movement and left more than a few education reformers scrambling for cover.

Using the data tool on the National Center for Education Statistics website, the authors of the AFT study called up some basic numbers on the performance of students from a nationally representative sample of charter schools. Their conclusion: “Charter schools are underperforming.” Their evidence: data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often called the nation’s report card, showing students in charter schools doing less well than students in other public schools nationally, as well as in a small number of more focused comparisons.

The Times had a field day with the news. The AFT’s findings, the paper reported, “dealt a blow to supporters of the charter school movement, including the Bush administration”–a blow made all the more powerful (and credible) by the fact that the AFT had “historically supported charter schools.” Amy Stuart Wells, a sociology professor at Columbia University Teachers College, was quoted as saying the data were “really, really important” as they “confirm what a lot of people who study charter schools have been worried about.” Would that it were that simple.

Where do we begin to sort out the outlandish claims of the AFT study–and those made by others on its behalf? For starters, saying the AFT has historically supported charter schools is like saying that the Chicago Cubs are historically a World Series champion baseball team. While technically true (legendary AFT president Albert Shanker helped introduce the concept in a 1988 speech to the National Press Club), the union’s position on the issue has changed so markedly that it is now one of the staunchest opponents of charter schools around the nation. In recent years the AFT has criticized charter schools in a series of reports, of which August’s was only the latest and best publicized.

But hardly the most sophisticated. Indeed, on a methodological level, the AFT analyses are sufficiently pedestrian to be laughable. And most mainstream newspapers around the country–once the Times had made it the story of the hour–had the good sense to present a more critical view of the study’s import. In the title and lead paragraph of its coverage, USA Today noted that “achievement [is] not so simply measured” and that critics had already pointed out that “the report is hardly a fair look at whether charter schools help kids improve.” The Seattle Times quoted University of Washington researcher Mary Beth Celio’s dismissal of the study as “one of the most unsophisticated, low-level analyses I’ve ever seen.” The editorial board at the Chicago Tribune went further, deeming the AFT findings “about as new as a lava lamp, as revelatory as an old sock, and as significant as a belch.”

A Flawed Report

What’s wrong with the study? The basic problem is straightforward: raw comparisons showing charter school students scoring lower than public school students on standardized tests may simply reflect the fact that charter schools serve students in low-performing districts with high concentrations of poor and minority children. Many states allow charter schools to form only where students are having difficulties, and many charter schools are then asked to accept the most challenging of students. Any credible analysis of their effectiveness must account for these facts on the ground.

Indeed, if the AFT believes its own findings, it must also concede that private religious schools outperform public schools (see Figure 1). According to the same NAEP data that are the basis for the new AFT study, religious private schools outperformed the public schools nationwide by between 9 and 17 points, a gap at least as large as the public school-charter school difference that the AFT–with considerable help from the Times–is trumpeting. On past occasions, the AFT has objected vehemently to interpreting such findings as evidence that religious schools are superior on the grounds that they attract an especially able group of students. But for charter schools, it seems, the problem of selection effects need only be addressed in the most superficial of ways.

The authors’ sole strategy to “enhance the fairness of the analysis” was to look separately at students in 14 categories, including those from six different states, those who qualified for the federal free-lunch program (and those who didn’t), those from different ethnic backgrounds, and those living inside and outside a central city. As a strategy to control for the background characteristics that differentiate students in charter and traditional public schools, this approach is feeble. At best it can eliminate the effects of differences with respect to one background characteristic at a time. But it may not even be effective for that purpose if, for instance, the students eligible for a free lunch who attend charter schools come from even poorer families than eligible students in traditional public schools.

Even so, in most of the comparisons holding just one characteristic constant, the performance differences between charter and traditional public school students attenuate to the point of statistical insignificance. Twenty-one of the 28 comparisons the AFT conducted using 4th-grade average scale scores are statistically insignificant. As previous research has found that ethnic differences in achievement are large, it is especially noteworthy that all comparisons within ethnic groups in the NAEP charter school data cut against the AFT’s overall conclusions. The small differences that remain when looking separately at white, African-American, or Hispanic children are all statistically insignificant–a fact that is not apparent in either the Times story’s text or the tables that accompanied it.

But do any of these comparisons–within ethnic groups or otherwise–tell us anything meaningful about the quality of traditional public, charter, or religious private schools? Not a bit.

Plainly, to account adequately for the influences of a child’s family, home environment, and community on his or her learning capacity, one must do much more than look separately at students grouped by free-lunch status, ethnicity, or school location. At a minimum, it is essential to gather detailed data on students’ background characteristics and to put them to good use. Control variables now standard in education research include parents’ education and marital status, household income, and the quality of learning resources in the home, to name but a few. And rather than using aggregate comparisons within subgroups to eliminate the effects of differences in one background characteristic at a time, as the AFT has done, the influence of all of these factors must be addressed simultaneously.

But all this may just scratch the surface. As schools of choice, charters are likely to attract students who are not doing well in their traditional public schools. Moreover, many charter schools explicitly target “at-risk” students. Both of these facts would lead you to expect students in charter schools to perform at a low level even after taking into account their observable back.ground characteristics.

Ideally, one would therefore study charter schools in the context of a randomized field trial, assigning students randomly to attend either a charter or a traditional public school, gathering data on their performance at baseline, and tracking their progress over time. In the absence of that possibility, it is vital to use data from multiple years to track the learning trajectory of students in both charter and traditional public schools.

Yet another critical flaw in the AFT’s analysis is its failure to account for the length of time that a charter school has been in place–a factor known to affect any school’s performance. Having just hired new staff and teachers, implemented new curricula, and acquired building facilities, new schools often face considerable start-up problems. Almost one-third of the charter schools nationwide were less than two years old when the 2003 NAEP was administered, raising doubts about whether even meaningful findings about charter school performance would apply when more of them are well established.

Encouragingly, research on charter schools using more reliable methods to gauge school quality is under way. Nonetheless, it will be some time before definitive conclusions about the merits of one of the nation’s most prominent, and popular, reform strategies can be drawn. In the meantime, the AFT’s study does not even amount to a good interim report.

Why All the Fuss?

Given all of these problems, why would the Times see fit to bestow instant credibility on the AFT study by granting it glowing, page-one coverage? While we have no special insight into the motives of the newspaper’s editorial staff, the coverage itself suggests two factors that are important.

The first concerns alleged chicanery by the U.S. Department of Education, which, reported the Times, had buried the flawed charter school findings in “mountains of data . . . released without public announcement.” According to the authors of the AFT study, “a combination of intuition, prior knowledge, considerable digging, and luck” was required just to locate the data. Such sleuthing makes for dramatic storytelling–for the next best thing to doing it oneself, in the newspaper business, is reporting (exclusively, one hopes, so you can break the news) on someone else’s discovery of a cover-up.

As Bella Rosenberg, one of the report’s three authors, explained to the press, “Analyses are always welcome, but first things first. . . . Surely the interests of children are better served by timely and straightforward information about whether charter school performance measures up to the claims made for it.” In a letter to the Times, educational psychologist Howard Gardner praised the AFT for its act of public service in issuing the study and then asserted that the Department of Education’s decision not to highlight the findings was ideologically driven: “If the results had been positive, the Education Department would doubtless have heralded them. Across the policy spectrum, the pattern of the administration is all too clear: Call for evidence-based results, tout them when supportive, hide them when not, spin them when possible.”

Perhaps. But we draw a slightly different conclusion. Timeliness and transparency are important, but bad information is worse than none. And uncovering misleading information and presenting it out of context does a greater disservice to the “interests of children” than the Department of Education’s decision not to issue a report that does not control for student background characteristics. From this perspective, the AFT study and the Times‘s breathless coverage of it only made a bad situation worse.

The second probable reason for the prominent attention the Times gave the study stems from the fact that charter schools represent one of several remedies for schools deemed chronically failing under George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. (Other remedies include replacing much of the school’s staff or turning its operations over to the state or to a private company.) Thus the story’s import was magnified by the politics of education reform: it suggested a flaw in the Bush administration’s game plan. The very next day, the lead Times editorial heralded the report as “a devastating setback” to the Bush administration’s education program.

Ironically, however, it is not at all clear that political cleavages over charter schools follow strictly partisan lines. Indeed, federal financial support for the charter school movement has its origins in the Clinton era. Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry was an enthusiastic supporter of charter schools. And while Secretary of Education Rod Paige was a vocal proponent of charter schools, President Bush said hardly a word about charters on the campaign trail–nor, for that matter, did he say much about them from the White House.

What the NAEP Data Do Tell Us

While the statistics on the nation’s charter schools currently available from the NAEP are not at all useful for assessing these schools’ effectiveness, they do offer, for the first time, a glimpse of the makeup of a nationally representative sample of the students who attend them. As a result, one important fact about charter schools now appears incontrovertible: they are not bastions of wealth and privilege.

As Figure 2 shows, almost 62 percent of the roughly 3,000 4th graders in the NAEP charter school sample attend a school located in a central city, compared with just 32 percent of NAEP 4th graders in traditional public schools. Roughly 33 percent of the charter school students are African-American, compared with only 18 percent of the public school students. Fifty-four percent of elementary charter school students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch programs, compared with 46 percent of public school students. The analogous differences for the 8th graders tested by the NAEP are even more pronounced, perhaps reflecting the fact that a large number of middle and high school charters target at-risk students.

Given the conditions under which states and districts accept charter schools, the language of their mandates, and the characteristics of families most eager for alternatives to traditional public schools, these differences can hardly come as a surprise. For the foreseeable future, charter schools are likely to serve high concentrations of poor and underprivileged students. What remains unclear is how much they can do for this population. Sadly–and despite the impression given by the gray lady of American journalism–the AFT study tells us nothing about that.

William G. Howell is an assistant professor of government at Harvard University. Martin R. West is a research fellow at the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and the research editor of Education Next.