The Phi Delta Kappa Poll of the public’ attitude towards public schools was just released and found a striking rise in public support for public schools.
Despite three decades of public school bashing, the people who actually know public schools have a high opinion of them. The public is tired of the hyper-focus on testing and does not support public money for religious schools.
Valerie Strauss writes:
“Most American adults are weary of the intense focus on academics in public schools today, according to a new national survey, and want students to get more vocational and career training as well as mental, physical and dental services on campus. Even so, a majority of public school parents give higher grades — A’s and B’s — to the traditional public schools in their neighborhoods than they have in years.
“A majority of Americans polled also said they oppose programs that use public money for private and religious school education, policies that are supported by President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. And a majority said they do not think that standardized test scores — which have been used for more than a dozen years as the most important factor in evaluating schools — are a valid reflection of school quality.
“These are some of the findings in the 49th annual PDK Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools, the longest continuously running survey of American attitudes toward public education, released late Monday. It was commissioned by PDK International, a global association of education professionals that is headed by Joshua Starr, former superintendent of the Montgomery County Public School District, and was conducted, for the second year, by Langer Research Associates of New York City. Gallup had long conducted the poll.”
Trump disparaged public schools again last week but even his supporters send their children to public schools and don’t consider them to be “failing.”
“The new poll finds that the proportion of Americans who give their community’s public schools an A grade is at its highest in more than 40 years of PDK polling. In the newest survey, 62 percent of public school parents gave public schools in their own communities an A or B grade, compared with 45 percent of nonparents. Grades go higher when parents are grading their own school — 71 percent gave them A’s or B’s. The report said that 24 percent of Americans give public schools nationally an A or B (with no difference between parents and all adults)…”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is amazingly resilient, public support for public schools, especially considering the decades-long political campaign against them.
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This is such a shame. The Trump Administration hired the head of a company that defrauded students to “police” fraud:
Trump admin taps former DeVry University dean as new head of @usedgov unit meant to police fraud
Why should any college student anywhere rely on the US Department of Education for information or advice when they hire the same people who brutally ripped off college students?
How can they trust this government agency? They’d be crazy to do so.
They really, really need an advocate. They’re simply too young and too unsophisticated to borrow all this money without someone working on their behalf. They will get screwed.
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In NJ, the Democratic candidate for governor, Phil Murphy, is talking about phasing out PARCC, high stakes standardized testing and returning more control to the local districts, even as regards whether a charter school is dumped on their district. I hope it’s more than empty rhetoric.
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Nu? This is no different from DeVos for Secy of Ed (or Candice Jackson for her OCR head), or Pruitt for EPA, or Jeff Sessions for AG, etc.
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I haven’t heard anything from the Republicans (yet) in the Ohio governor’s election but the Democrats are both highlighting a “return” to supporting public schools.
I’m wary but I think it’s encouraging that there’s at least a POLITICAL recognition that Democrats (and Republicans) have abandoned public schools.
It’s about time. Lawmakers probably can’t go another 15 years ignoring the schools 90% of kids in the state attend. Ohio has dropped something like 10 slots in various educational rankings – they’re headed straight to the bottom if this keeps up.
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There are many fine publicly-operated schools in this nation. Fairfax County VA, where I live has excellent public schools. The public demands them, the state government supports them, and the county residents pay the taxes to provide for them.
Just because I support limited school choice, in some circumstances, does not mean that I am anti-publicly-operated schools. I want all of America’s schools to be excellent, not just the schools of the more affluent communities.
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“Just because I support limited school choice, in some circumstances, does not mean that I am anti-publicly-operated schools.”
Right. Just because I frequently steal your lunch money and rough you up and give you a bad name doesn’t mean I have anything against you.
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Charles cheers for every voucher plan. But he loves the public schools from which they steal funding.
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I support the Fairfax public schools. I have been approved to be a substitute teacher here.
I support publicly-operated universities, and I support students getting BEOG’s to attend private/parochial colleges.
Supporting school choice, is not a zero-sum game.
There is no dichotomy.
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Charles, if you agree that the state should create a new source of funding you would not be a hypocrite.
Money for school choice means less funding for public schools.
Please make comments less often. My time is valuable and I waste it saying the same things over and over. You never listen.
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I feel the same about my town’s public schools, & those of my county (Union, NJ). But I will be vocally opposed to the incursion of any charter school that attempts to siphon public funds from our county schools. We here pay among the highest of RE taxes in the nation, most of which goes to support among the best pubschs in the nation.
And I bitterly oppose the state’s imposition of charter schools on Newark, Camden, & Paterson: the state collects the lion’s share of funding for those pedagogic experiments from town’s like mine– we in our town pay 96% of our district sch budget on our own– no industry here, no pharmaceutical co– no ratables, just us the residents, sans NJ state aid [oh except for 4%].
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You cannot fool all the people all the time.
How tragic we have and continue to have such unsubstantiated propaganda being throust down the throats of people. A chimera which is self defeating for education.
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Only 15% of respondents gave their communities’ schools an A grade. The number of public school parents who gave their own kids’ schools an A (35%) is actually down from 2012, when it was 37%
PDK, Strauss, and everyone else is burying the most important finding: an astonishing 59% of public school parents would prefer to send their child to a charter or private/religious (if cost weren’t an issue) school. 59%!
There are some very discouraging results regarding school integration, too. The toplines should be read in addition to the full report: http://pdkpoll.org/assets/downloads/PDK-2017-Topline_National_FINAL.pdf
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Tim,
I understand that to mean that if the government gave every family $40,000-50,000 a year for tuition, they would choose to send their child to an elite private academy like the one Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, and Michelle Rhee could afford.
There are already voucher programs in several states, where children’s tuition is paid for religious schools. No more than 2-3% of eligible students use them.
Still playing the role of Betsy DeVos or is it Eva?
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I don’t think these attempts to “unskew” the results hold up. It is a representative national poll: many respondents don’t live near one of the nation’s small handful of elite $50,000/year private schools, or in a jurisdiction that has vouchers, or in an area with a lot of charter schools. The question doesn’t ask the respondent to consider whether Kid X could score high enough on Dalton’s IQ test, or how much of a pain it would be to get Kid Y to and from Success Harlem 10 every day. It asks, simply: as a parent, are you aware of a school that you would rather have your child attend than the one she actually goes to?
Six of ten public school parents said yes, there is. And I’m guessing it would be more like 8 or 9 in ten if you expanded the question to include, “a traditional public school that your child can’t access because of where you live.”
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Thanks, Betsy.
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Tim,
We are not reading the same poll results.
Here is a direct quote:
Twenty times since 1993, PDK surveys have asked: “Do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense?” Asked again this year, 52% of Americans oppose the idea while 39% are in favor, a 13-point gap.
However, this year’s survey also included a more detailed question: “Some people say public funds should be used only to pay for public schools that offer tuition-free education for all students. Others say parents should be able to direct some public funds to any school their child attends, whether public, private, or religious. This would cover the full cost of public school or the partial cost of private or religious schools.”
Given this description, 61% prefer a system that funds public schools only vs. 34% support for the voucher option, a broader 27-point gap. Further, when told that a voucher system either could help public schools by making them compete or hurt them by reducing their funding, preference for only funding public schools rises to 67%, compared to 26% support for vouchers, a 41-point gap.
The striking difference in the two main questions is not chiefly informed by a sense that vouchers would make public schools worse; only 21% hold this view, while 34% think they’d make them better, and 37% expect no effect. (That said, support for vouchers, naturally, is lowest among those who say they would make public schools worse and highest among those who say they’d make them better.) Instead, increased opposition appears to relate to including religious schools in the more detailed question. The first question only mentions using public funds for private schools, while the second version references funding private or religious schools. As detailed below, opposition to vouchers increases most sharply with the new wording among non-Christians.
The role of cost
The results suggest that if cost were not an issue, public schools would lose students. In that hypothetical, 34% of parents say they would send their child to a public school, but 31% would choose a private school, 17% a charter school, and 14% a religious school.
In response to a separate question, a slim majority of public school parents (54%) say that if they had a choice to send their child to a private or religious school using public funds, they would still send their child to a public school. But, of course, cost is a factor: If the voucher were to cover just half of private or religious school tuition, then the proportion of parents who say they would stick with public schools rises to 72%. Local school quality also matters. In statistical modeling, public school parents who give higher grades to local schools are less likely to send a child to a nonpublic school when only half-tuition coverage is provided.
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If so many people would prefer a private school, why is DC’s voucher system failing? http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2017/08/why-dcs-vouchers-are-failing.html#comment-form
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Here is my response to a similar comment at the WaPo article:
“Only 34% of parents would choose govt-run public schools, if cost was not a factor.”
And in what world is cost not a factor?
In the pro-voucher [fantasy] world– ideally– each parent would receive back [i.e., not pay taxes for] the full district per-pupil allotment– let’s say the natl ave, $11k per kid. Let’s say they have 3 kids. $11k each could pay for 1/3 of a hi-qual priv sch [for each], or for 1/2 of a mediocre priv sch [for ea], or cover a low-qual charter or religious sch[for ea].
But that’s not going to happen– the taxpayer getting to ‘keep’ 3xthe distr per-pupil allotment. First of all, that family is not paying $33k/yr in prop taxes. There are many others paying into the pot, some of whom may question the type of school chosen– may not be interested in supporting mediocre/ religious schools. Plus, the taxpayer has to keep supporting the pubsch sys, which educates all comers including those who just moved in, as well as those who weren’t accepted at a charter or private, or who just got bounced out of there.
So you can cut that est voucher value by half– say, $6k per annum per kid– but, whoops! YOU, the family, are still not paying $18k per annum RE taxes! Plenty of other folks are paying in, & they’ll have their own opinions of what kind of “public school” they want to support.
You ‘school-choice’ folks can say, well, let’s do “ESA” instead– the scheme where corporations get a state tax write-off for contributing to a pool of $ from which ‘school-choice’ vouchers can be drawn. That might work for a while. But it ‘s only good for as long as the state can afford to give local corporations that particular tax break (on top of all the other tax breaks they gave them to stay on & do biz in the state)…
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DeVos’s Trumpish response to the 49th annual PDK Poll will say, “This is all fake news.”
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Good one, Lloyd.
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and, its worth noting, it shows support for vouchers etc. on the rise as well
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Propaganda works miracles, particularly in light of the fact that several recent studies have shown that children who use vouchers are worse off than those who stay in public schools
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Why did only 71% of parent give their school an A or B? What percentage gave an A? And what best practice can we glean from the A schools?
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Ina poll, there is sampling. No one knows which schools were rated A by which Parents.
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