Educators Are Fed Up And Voters Are On Their Side
By Kevin Reuning and C.M. Lewis
There’s been a dramatic shift in the public discussion of education policy.
A decade ago, corporate education reformers like Michelle Rhee and documentaries like “Waiting for Superman” dictated public perception of education. To hear education “reformers” tell it, the only things that could save failing schools was to tear the education system down and start over. Indeed, education reformers and their allies have positively hailed bringing a Silicon Valley ethos of “disruption” to the classroom. “Education reform” was a bipartisan consensus, with Democrats like Cory Booker vocally backing charter schools and corporate reform agendas.
But a progressive education agenda and rising support for public education has ridden the wave of education strikes, beginning in West Virginia and concluding most recently in a dramatic confrontation between the Chicago Teachers’ Union, SEIU Local 73, and ostensibly progressive Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
So with a shifting tide in opinion, we decided to see what the public thinks. We surveyed 5,171 voters from January 9-12 using the Lucid Platform. The responses are weighted based on gender, age, region, education, race, and the interaction of education and race to look like the overall population of registered voters.
School Discipline and Safety
Tackling pervasive violence in schools has generated innovative policy proposals, including putting buckets of rocks in classrooms. Generally, a large share of the policy discussion has focused on increasing armament within schools through armed security and/or by directly arming teachers; the latter proposal has generated opposition from teachers unions across the country.
However, those aren’t the only items under discussion; tackling mental health is also on the table. To figure out what voters want, we surveyed whether voters would prefer arming teachers, increasing armed security without arming teachers, focusing more on mental health, or reducing armed security in order to fund more mental health.
Across almost every subgroup a plurality of voters preferred increasing armed security, but not arming teachers directly. Republicans were the only group that slightly preferred arming teachers (40%) to increasing security (36%). Democrats and those with advanced degrees were the most likely to support an increased focus on mental health (26%). Very few were interested in cutting security funding in order to boost mental health.
However, voters think that any increase in security needs to come with training on de-escalation and anti-discrimination practices. A strong majority of voters across all subgroups identified this as being very important to them, and in most subgroups more than 80% of voters believed this was important or very important. Voters are nearly unanimous that if increased security is placed in schools it needs to be well-trained security.
Along with security, we asked voters their opinions on zero-tolerance policies allowing students to be suspended for their very first offense. Zero-tolerance policies often magnify racial biases, as students of color are more likely to be suspended than white students. Some teacher’s unions, such as the Seattle Education Association, have made emphasizing restorative justice and minimizing racially discriminatory discipline a major priority.
We found surprising results. A plurality of subgroups express majority support for ending zero-tolerance policies; however, the least supportive group was African Americans, with 37% opposing ending them and a plurality of 45% supporting a ban). This lines up with previous polling on the issue that found African Americans more supportive of zero-tolerance policies. In addition, Republicans tend to be more supportive of ending zero-tolerance (55%) than Democrats (51%).
School Funding and Teacher Salaries
The recent wave of strikes by educators has, in part, been driven by low teacher salaries compared to similarly credentialed professionals. In the cases of West Virginia, Arizona, and Oklahoma, teachers were among the least compensated and overworked educators in the country. Although strike action has been a favored tool of teachers to address stagnant wages, education unions are increasingly turning to legislative action to advocate for increases in starting teacher pay.
We asked voters what they thought the minimum starting salary for a teacher should be. Although this is a hard question given varying costs of living, the results can provide some guidance for policymakers. A plurality in most groups thought that starting teachers should earn at least $45,000.
Voters of color were more likely to provide higher minimum salaries:13% of black voters thought $60,000 a year, compared to 8% of white voters, and 30% of black voters though $50,000 a year compared to 26% of white voters. Republican voters were more likely to support lower starting salaries (24% said $35,000 or less compared to just 12% of Democrats). A similar dynamic can be found across education as well, with individuals with advanced degrees supporting higher minimum salaries.
Funding salary increases means more spending, and appropriations have to come from somewhere. We followed up asking about minimum teacher pay with a question asking where increases should come from: the federal government, the state government or no increase. While the vast majority of every subgroup wanted to increase the minimum wage of teachers, there is disagreement over who should pay for it.
Democrats and voters of color are more likely to think that the increase should come from the federal government while white voters and Republicans think it should come from the state government. For example, 44% of African Americans supported a federal increase compared to 31% of white voters; for state increases, these numbers nearly flipped to 32% of African Americans and 39% of white voters. Nearly a majority of Democrats supported federal increases (46%). There were also differences expressed across education, although this may have been in part driven by higher response rates of “I don’t know” by respondents with an Associate’s Degree or less.
In line with asking about increased funding, we asked voters if they supported federal action to end student lunch debt and provide free school meals to all students. All subgroups expressed majority support. The greatest opposition came from Republicans (32% opposed compared to 60% in support); however, a clear majority still supported federal action. In addition, there was higher opposition from those with advanced degrees as well as men. In sum, however, the results clearly indicate that voters want action to eliminate student lunch debt. Bernie Sanders and Ilhan Omar recently introduced legislation that would make school lunch free for all students.
Finally, we asked if voters supported banning for-profit public charter schools. These are schools that divert funding from local school districts to privately operated for-profit schools (some charters are incorporated as nonprofits). The biggest takeaway: voters are unsure. In many subgroups, Don’t Know was the plurality position. There are some differences that would be expected; Democrats tend to support a ban more than Republicans, for example; however, given the high degree of uncertainty it’s impossible to draw clear conclusions from the results.
School Administration
Next, we asked questions about school administration. We started with a question crucial question: the role of standardized testing in administrative decision-making. Currently, standardized tests are utilized to make decisions from what schools should be closed, to what teachers should be retained, to how funding should be allocated. In some cases, high-stakes testing can create perverse incentives for teachers, leading them to focus primarily on preparing for standardized tests.
We asked voters whether they supported ending the use of high-stakes testing in decision-making. We found that a slim majority of voters support ending its role, with 51% in support of a ban and 31% opposed. There was a small partisan gap with Democrats being more supportive of a ban (60%) compared to Republicans (48%); unusually, Democrats and Republicans were both more supportive than independents.
This issue also had higher rates of “Don’t Knows” than some of the previous questions. This is clear looking at the education breakdown. Although opposition stays consistent across groups, support varies as the “Don’t Know” rates shrink going from lower to higher education. It is possible that some of these “Don’t Knows” could be shifted into supporters if they learn more about the problems with high-stakes testing.
We also asked about support for caps on student-to-staff ratios. These caps require a minimum amount of staff (support workers, librarians, etc) as a function of the student population in a school. Although this may sound wonky, it is a critically important measure of adequate support for students;the recent Chicago Teachers’ Union strike was in part driven by staffing ratio problems.
There was majority support among all voters, with 58% in support of caps and only 20% opposed. For Democrats, the margin increases to 70% in support to 12% opposed; even a majority of Republicans support a cap with52% in support and 29% opposed. Differences in support across education are mainly a function of “Don’t Know” rates.
Finally, we asked voters whether they would support greater funding to increase diversity among educators. We preceded the question with both positive and negative arguments about focusing on diversity. This was our most polarized question with 50% of Republicans opposing greater funding and 67% of Democrats supporting it. Overall voters support greater funding, with 48% in favor versus 35% opposed. White voters narrowly support increased diversity funding (42% to 40%), while a majority of voters of color support it. Only 15% of African Americans oppose greater funding versus 68% in support.
Testing Memes
As a coda to all of this, we decided to test a common meme comparing the cost of education to the cost of the military industrial complex. To do so, we asked voters whether they would support fully funding federal Title I programs for low-income schools by increasing spending from $15.9 to $44.9 billion. In one version we asked this directly; in a second version we explicitly included information that this change would come from a 4% reduction of the Department of Defense’s budget.
Whenever you include a “pay for,” support decreases; even if voters support the goal of increased funding, adding funding sources often polarizes responses. In this instance, overall support decreased from 57% to 52%. The change was the largest for Republicans, which declined from a near majority of 46% to 36%, with a bare majority in opposition (51%). For Independents/Others there was no overall change (50% supported it in both cases) but support weakened with movement from “Strong Supports” to “Somewhat Supporters.”
If we could test this question again, we might do better to pose the increase in education spending as a percentage of the Department of Defense budget and leave the trade-off implied. Likewise, exploring additional “pay fors” to determine the most popular source of funding bears further investigation. In general, though, the results indicate that when voters view a tradeoff between education and the military, a majority favors education.
Conclusion
In some respects, the results are a mixed bag for progressive education advocates. Public response to endemic school violence largely favors armed solutions, whether in the hands of school resource officers, police, or teachers. Many items require additional public persuasion given high levels of uncertainty from voters; crucial items for education advocates, such as banning for-profit charters, do not command clear majority support but show room for growth. Perceptions of education equity bear further investigation and may require additional work by educational advocates. Similarly, the highly racialized dimensions of zero-tolerance policies require additional discussion, though pluralities or majorities support ending zero-tolerance policies across all subgroups.
However, there are some unambiguous and encouraging results. Positive changes to education policy is supported on a bipartisan basis. A commanding bipartisan majority of voters support increasing minimum teacher pay, curbing high-stakes testing, ending zero-tolerance policies, student-to-staff ratios, and racial bias and de-escalation training for school security. Likewise, even the areas where results are more mixed show room for growth with greater voter education and public awareness campaigns. In other words, voters believe there is room to improve education and support prioritizing those improvements.
With education at the forefront of the public policy agenda - a trend driven largely by a wave of educator activism and strikes - educators should know that the public supports a progressive education agenda. After years of corporate-driven “education reform” focusing on privatizing education, expanding high-stakes testing, and undermining public schools, education advocates have strong reason to celebrate.
Kevin Reuning (@kevinreuning) is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Miami University.
C.M. Lewis (@thehousered) is an editor of Strikewave and a union activist in Pennsylvania.