PAUL PETERSON, HOST:
This is the Education Exchange with Paul Peterson. I am the director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. Thank you for joining us. Public opinion surveys can be wildly inaccurate. A week ago, two polls told the public that Abdul El-Sayed would win the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate by an overwhelming margin. One predicted a 13-percentage point victory. The other said it was going to be 15 points. Well, in the end, he barely won by just 1 percent. That’s a long ways off. So, should we trust surveys of public opinion? Do people tell the truth when they’re asked? And in education, that’s important because we want to know whether or not people are telling us the truth about their children’s school or the issues that they’re being asked about. And right now that issue is burning because people are being asked whether or not they will support, while the governors specifically are being asked whether they will opt into the federal program that funds programs for education scholarships and governors pay attention to polls and public opinion. So to discuss this issue, I have with me Paul DiPerna, Vice President for Research and Innovation at EdChoice. He and his colleagues, Colyn Ritter and Alli Aldis, have just released EdChoice’s latest survey under the title “2026 Schooling in America.” The survey is administered by Braun Research. So thank you, Paul, for joining me on the Education Exchange.
PAUL DIPERNA: Thanks, Paul. It’s great to be here with you. And I’m looking forward to the conversation.
PETERSON: Well, in your poll, you find out that 60 percent of Americans and over 70 percent of school parents support the federal tax scholarship program that was passed as part of Congress’s big, beautiful bill endorsed by the Trump administration. Now, that’s a high percentage, a very high percentage, especially given Donald Trump’s popularity these days. So, do you believe these numbers?
DIPERNA: Well, I mean, I believe that these are estimates, as with all polling are estimates of public opinion. And this is consistent with…we’ve asked these questions and versions of them in our other polling. And this is pretty consistent with the polling that we do monthly with Morning Consult. And so, we have some kind of cross-referencing with this Schooling in America survey, which we do every year with Braun Research, and then the monthly polling we do with Morning Consult. And so, these numbers do appear to be pretty consistent across the two different series that we have. And so, where we seek school parents are more aware, relatively more aware of the federal tax credit for scholarships than the general public. And they are more supportive of their state opting in and participating in this new federal tax credit. And we’ll see as awareness grows; we could be in a period right now where the numbers could shift and be volatile as awareness grows. Because right now we are still at a pretty low to middling awareness where less than half, just under half of parents say they’re generally aware of the federal tax credit and only around a third of the public say that they’re aware.
PETERSON: So right now, people are just sort of saying some things, even though they really don’t understand the issue. But this does provide you with some kind of a baseline.
DIPERNA: Exactly.
PETERSON: That once the program becomes more visible, this could be good or bad to implement it, because I can remember Common Core was very popular at the beginning when people didn’t know much about it. It sounded good, Common Core state standards. But then once it got to the implementation point, public opinion turned against it. And it also happened with No Child Left Behind. So, what do you think is going to happen going forward?
DIPERNA: So, those are really interesting historical examples. And to draw some comparisons. So, No Child Left Behind and even more so, I think, in my opinion, Common Core were political issues and for quite some time. And then it reached, especially Common Core, even reached state and local levels where it was being discussed, debated and contested. And I do wonder with the tax credits; it’s not a program perse. And even compared to, say, voucher programs or education savings account programs; it is a tax credit where individuals can offset their tax liabilities up to $1,700 and receive that tax credit themselves. And they can contribute to scholarship granting organizations. And so, the dynamics could be pretty different. I think the closest comparison we could have are these existing tax credit scholarship programs that have been operating in a number of states going all the way back to the first ones that were created in Arizona in the late 90s and also the Florida tax press.
PETERSON: That’s a really good point. I like that idea that because we might get a clue from that. Have those programs lost popularity as they’ve been implemented? I know the news media has focused in on controversies over…oh, maybe errors that have been made or alleged malfeasance and so forth. Has that undercut support for the ESA programs?
DIPERNA: No, no, we haven’t seen that, especially at the national level or even in the states that we are able to draw some estimates from our monthly polling. And we do 12 month rolling averages to get us to look at state snapshots. And so ESAs in the School in America survey, 84 percent either said somewhat or strongly support ESAs. For tax credit scholarship programs, it was 82 percent. And I think the state tax credit scholarship programs are the closest parallel to what this federal tax credit for scholarships could be. And so the support is still high. It’s been very durable for both ESAs, tax credit scholarship programs going at least five to six years, hovering around 80 percent support.
PETERSON: Well, when I look at the data that you’re presenting over a considerable period of time from different surveys, but, you know, surveys that complement one another, I noticed that there was a huge increase, huge may be the wrong word, a substantial increase in support for school choice. When Betsy DeVos becomes Secretary of Education during the first Trump administration, I think support for tax credit scholarships and ESAs went up by about 10 percentage points. Now, do you think she had an impact on public opinion?
DIPERNA: That’s a great question. And it is for that 2016 to 2017 increase. And the most dramatic increase was the opinion on education savings accounts and ESAs, whereas in our polling, it was a 20-point jump just from 2016 to 17. And then we did see these increases gradually for some time in the 2016 to 2019 period of other types of school choice policies, but then also ramping up starting really 2019, 20. And then through the pandemic, it really kind of leveled off and stabilized, but at a pretty high level. And so, I think…definitely brought more visibility, national visibility, in my opinion, when in the first Trump administration’s presidential term. And with Betsy DeVos’s tenure as the secretary of education, there was a national spotlight on school choice in ways that there wasn’t at the national level before 2017, when the administration took office. And then it seems to have stayed there for some time to be in the kind of national visibility. And then the pandemic also, I think, accelerated that in 2020 through 2022.
PETERSON: Well, I noticed that when it actually went down during the Biden administration, when I looked at your data just earlier today, I saw a fall of about five percentage points. Maybe just on a borderline statistically significant decline, but it was down by five percentage points during the Biden years. And I was wondering whether or not the opposition of that administration to school choice shifted opinion in the opposite direction.
DIPERNA: You know, just based on what we know from the survey as they speculate on my own…what could have been driving that but there was that five-point drop for ESAs and then for other types of policies from 2020 to 2022 and then for the other policies they kind of have been flowed for the most part but some decrease until 2024 and then it’s been roughly flat to increases by one or two several points in the last couple of years if you’re looking at positive and somewhat or strong support of these policies and so it could and it could have been just a natural kind of leveling off too because it had gotten so as high as 86 percent support of ESAs in 2020 that there might have been some going….leveling off maybe due to lowering awareness or familiarity of programs or just engagement too or also parents having to deal with so many different things during the pandemic, like school closures and remote learning and deciding whether or not to maybe have their child participate in a learning pod if we want to go back just some time ago. And so, there’s a lot going on in those few years as well.
PETERSON: We do see more homeschooling, and we see more charter school attendance. I mean, we see a lot of movement into this period. It isn’t like public opinion and what we’re seeing and what people are choosing to actually do are necessarily moving together.
DIPERNA: Yeah, and that’s a great point. And I think that that really has borne out outside of the surveys that we do in these polling estimates that we’re trying to understand. But just those kind of revealed preferences and what people are actually doing, what parents are doing, and students are doing in the last five plus years, like you said, around homeschooling. And there’s so much more information right now about homeschooling and hybrid schooling. Thanks to folks at Johns Hopkins and Angela Watson and the research she’s doing and leading around homeschooling, Eric Werne at Kennesaw State around hybrid schooling. And there’s a lot of energy around micro schools as well. And that’s an under-researched area. So, for anyone listening, we certainly feel at EdChoice that that’s just an open frontier of research to just learn as much as we can about these micro schools that are emerging because there’s a lot of anecdotal, and really interesting stories and some case studies and states—But there’s, I think, a lot that we just need to learn because it does seem like there’s a lot of energy right now in these alternative learning environments.
PETERSON: Well, that’s a marvelous opportunity for me to promote the conference that we’re holding next month in September. We’re having a conference where we’re bringing together a lot of people in the homeschooling sector, and the micro school sector, and hyper schooling. And there’s all these different forms of alternative education that are being explored out there. So, we’re assembling a few hundred people that will all be in one place. And I think there’s still a few places left. So if anybody wants to come, they should sign up quickly on our PEPG website.
DIPERNA: I’ll be there. I’m looking forward to it.
PETERSON: OK, well, so that’s enough for promos. Now, what are the big divides in public opinion when it comes to school choice? Republicans versus Democrats. Is party politics just the main driver of division in this space?
DIPERNA: That tends…party ID does tend to be the most, among the different demographic categories, the most consistently contested area. We still see majorities of support among Democrats, particularly for ESAs. And in some cases, year to year, sometimes we’ve even seen a higher proportion of Democrats supporting ESAs than Republicans. And so I’d have to check. to see what those breakouts are this year. But ESA has been one type of school choice policy that seems to have, at least through the polling and the survey research that we do, that it seems to have broken through to be nonpartisan or bipartisan and where you can see support on both sides of the aisle.
PETERSON: But not with the governor of Arizona. I think the Democratic governor of Arizona is not enthusiastic about the ESA program that’s ongoing in that state.
DIPERNA: That’s right. And so, in Arizona, which has such a large education savings account program, the Empowerment Scholarship Account Program, and right now Governor Hobbs and others in opposition have really staked out and trying to do all that they can to inhibit that program or even try to scale it back in Arizona.
PETERSON: So why do you have so much? I mean, why is there this political opposition on the part of blue state governors? Let me put it that way. Who may or may not join in with this federal scholarship program; why should there be so much opposition by them when there is so much support in the opinion poll? Who do we believe here? Do we believe the governor’s judgment, or do we believe in the opinion polls?
DIPERNA: So that’s a great question. Why is there this disconnect between public officials and governors or legislative leaders and what we see in the polls and special interests, certainly, and you being a political scientist and have studied these areas—
PETERSON: Some people say it’s the teachers’ union, that the union is paying the freight for the Democratic Party and a lot of races out there. And that’s having a big effect on the political choices that’s being made. And one thing we do know is that unions don’t like choice. They would rather have everybody going to public schools where that’s where they’re concentrated; their power is concentrated.
DIPERNA: And it’s interesting because that’s certainly right. The national teachers unions, whether it’s NEA or AFT, have led the charge in the opposition for so long and bringing lawsuits and other types of obstacles against various state-level school choice programs but it’s interesting in some of in the polling that we do Morning Consult on a monthly basis we have asked if there if it if one of the members of the household belongs to a union not specifically a teacher’s union but any union and union households and non-union households look pretty similar in their support of these different types of policies. And so that is something that we would like to look at more closely especially with…we have a teacher survey that we’ll be launching later next month and to see if there if there is just the differences between the quote unquote elites of the unions and the rank-and-file members who maybe can see more closely the benefits of these kinds of policies for their own kids.
PETERSON: Well, that’s interesting. How are you going to do this teacher survey? That’s going to be a challenge because they’re only about what, 2-3 percent of the population. But how do you find them? Because one of the things you do with surveys is try to get a representative sample. A representative sample of just 2 percent of the population is pretty hard to get.
DIPERNA: Right. And so, with the polling that we do with Morning Consult, they can, through online panels and ones that have catered more towards having panelists of educators or others who are employed in schools, are able to take a survey and take the online survey through their sampling protocols. And they use multiple different panels to do this. And you can also…we’ve also done teacher surveys with Braun Research, who conducted the Schooling in America survey with us and has been our longtime partner since the very beginning of 2013. And they use a list-based approach. And so they are able to access lists through if it’s and…aggregating lists through multiple sources and then trying to cross-verify. And so it’s a list-based sampling approach as opposed to, say, like a randomized sampling approach or address-based sampling and those other approaches.
PETERSON: That’s very informative. I can see you’ve got to approach this in a very sophisticated way. And you’ve got two outfits that you’re working with to help you do this. But now I noticed one thing in the poll that we haven’t talked about and that you say the support for school choice in the Black community is less than elsewhere. That’s one of the groups that you identified as being least supportive. I know everybody’s supportive in terms of the very high percentages are supporting, but among the least supportive is the Black community, which is so different from what polls have been telling me over the years that I’m wondering if you could comment on that.
DIPERNA: So, it is interesting that they— We do, towards the end of the back of the report; we do break out those groups that are either most supportive or least supportive among the wide range of demographics. And historically, Black parents have been among the most supportive of, say, school vouchers. And right now, so we see that, and this is all relative, too, because even, say, for like…demographic support for school vouchers bottoms out at around 57 percent. So, it’s still a majority. And those are among baby boomers. And so we have generational breakouts. And it’s still a fairly high level. And it’s quite relative. But we do see among…and I’ll have to find the exact percent, the precise percentage among Black Americans, but they aren’t quite as high or they don’t appear in the top five like we have seen in the past. And we typically we see Republicans. Three quarters of Republicans support school vouchers. Three quarters of millennials and Gen Xers support school vouchers. And we don’t see Black parents or Black Americans or Hispanics or Hispanic Americans in that top five, but they are kind of sandwiched in there. It’s a pretty narrow band between from like 65 percent to 74 percent where they fall.
PETERSON: But one of the things that’s changed in the voucher movement is that, looking back 20 years ago and so forth, people always talked about targeted vouchers. Vouchers for low-income families, vouchers for people in need, and vouchers for those who have special needs. But now people are talking more about universal vouchers. ESAs are really universal vouchers for everyone. They can be targeted, but a lot of them are not being targeted. And so, have you looked to see what the pattern of support is for universal vouchers and more targeted ones?
DIPERNA: And so what we’ve seen right now, three quarters agree with universal eligibility for ESAs, and that’s the framing that we use in this year’s Schooling in America survey. And then almost two-thirds also support needs-based ESAs. And this is done through a split sample experiment. And so half the sample will receive the universal language, and the other half will see the needs-based language. That 65 percent is the highest that we’ve seen in a while for ESAs. The universal percentage, the 77 percent, it’s not going down. It’s staying relatively the same, but we have seen this increase over that believe it’s the last four or five years of the needs-based ESAs increasing, which is interesting. And we haven’t seen, for those who disagree with those approaches; it’s been fairly stable. And it’s something that we have now that we’re… talking about I’d be interested to look and see maybe it’s potentially that there were like don’t knows and no opinions that have shifted on the needs-based ESA’s over time because we haven’t seen the disagreement have been relatively stable I think they’ve gone up slightly for universal essays but still only 22 percent this year and so it could be that people have more of an opinion particularly around the needs-based ESAs, and they have migrated over to that positive response. So, there’s still a 12-point gap, and we’ve always seen that gap. But it’s been as large as 20-plus percentage points between the universal eligibility framing and the needs-based framing.
PETERSON: And how about in the Black community? Does the Black community share the enthusiasm for universal vouchers?
DIPERNA: I would have to go back for the numbers, but based on my last reading, they tend to support as much or even more for Universal. And we’ve seen that among other race and ethnic breakouts, where that doesn’t tend to have a lot of variation across those groups, and they all kind of cluster around what would be the national average for those responses.
PETERSON: So, one final topic to explore with you, Paul, and that’s the switching. About 28 percent of parents say their children have switched from one school sector to another. Now that’s a big percentage. So, is that at some point in the life of the child or is this some point among all their children or what is that 28 percent?
DIPERNA: That’s a really good question because we’ve actually…we’ve asked it both ways and with some time boundedness and then also ever. And so, in the Schooling in America survey, it’s ever switched. So that’s a really important point about the question wording. And then we have asked that with a past few years time boundedness in our Morning Consult polling. And so, the differences are pretty different. And of course, these are different polls and times when they’re taken and all those kind of caveats I should mention. So, it’s 28 percent who say they have ever switched in this current Schooling in America survey. And then what we typically see, and it’s very consistent and has been for quite some time in our other monthly polling that has a time boundedness of the last few years, that it’s around, it fluctuates from like 22 percent to 27 percent any given month or so. And so, I’m sure there’s error there explaining some of that. But it does generally speak—
PETERSON: Yeah, it’s still in the 20s. So that’s a big number. So where is the switching occurring? Is it away from the public schools or toward the public schools? Or is it just back and forth?
DIPERNA: So that’s something we haven’t looked at that. I mean, all candor. We haven’t looked at that in this current Schooling in America survey. And we didn’t ask the questions to be able to identify where are those flows in terms of public to private, private to public. But we have asked that in the past. And even Titan Partners, I believe it was Titan and Partners, some years ago, early on in the pandemic, they were tracking also the school switching and from what sector, and especially sector switching. And there is a… and what we found, I believe, was pretty consistent with what they found is that there was a lot of switching public to charter, public to private. And during the pandemic, there was increased moving to homeschooling from private or from public district schools. And so that’s something we should—That is a good reminder that this is something that we should be looking at because it has been at least a few years to see how those flows are happening among schools.
PETERSON: Well, you did ask the reasons why people were switching. Can you tell our listeners what were the top three or top four reasons for switching?
DIPERNA: Sure. So, it’s really there’s a clustering of the top three are all statistically the same. And so roughly around 30 percent say it’s either excessive stress and anxiety is a reason, academic needs were not being met, and then bullying was a top reason. And then there’s a little bit of a break to the next response. The next set of responses, was difficulty with teachers, not receiving enough individual attention, special needs were not being met if it was a student with a disability. And so, these are all another example of findings that are pretty consistent and durable with what we’ve seen in our other polling, our monthly polling with Morning Consult, because we ask a version of this question periodically in our monthly polling. And I’d say it is those top three that they move around a little bit in the ordering, but oftentimes, like in this case, with the Schooling in America survey, it’s statistically the same. Bullying, stress, and anxiety, academic needs not being met.
PETERSON: I have trouble interpreting anxiety and stress because that can be caused by so many different things. I don’t know quite what it means, but I do find the fact that your academic needs and the bullying are about equally important as reasons that parents give. So bullying is a little bit different from fighting at schools or safety or so forth. Bullying is just the school is organized in such a way that some kids can really harass other kids. And it’s amazing how significant that is for why people want to choose another school.
DIPERNA: Yes. Yes, it’s definitely, it can be a push, one of those kind of push out factors when parents are really thinking about if they should take their child out of that school and move to another school, public, private, or perhaps homeschooling. And I just follow up with that. We did also ask questions among school parents for reasons why they chose their current schools for their kids. And that might be something of interest to listeners, too. And this was a little bit different in terms of what we see among the different kind of school types. But location is a popular reason, no matter what type, but especially for parents who have a child in a district school, location or being close to home is a plurality reason. But then among private schoolers and charter schoolers, academics and safe environment tend to be very important, especially in—And homeschooling, that’s the top reason, which kind of goes back to that school switching reason, safe environment, 44 percent of homeschoolers said that a safe environment was very important to them for choosing that schooling environment.
PETERSON: Well, thank you, Paul. This is an illuminating discussion. Thank you for doing so much in this space about telling us what is really happening with respect to school choice and so many other issues that have to do with the quality of our educational system. So, you’re performing a big public service here. And thanks for joining me on the Education Exchange.
DIPERNA: Thanks, Paul. It’s always great to talk to you about the surveys and polling that we do and have so much respect for all the work that you had been doing in this area, too, for so many years. So, thanks for having me.
PETERSON: I’ve been speaking with Paul DiPerna. He’s the Vice President for Research and Innovation at the EdChoice Foundation. He and his colleagues, Colyn Ritter and Alli Aldis, have just released the latest EdChoice survey, entitled 2026 Schooling in America. I am Paul Peterson. This is the Education Exchange. Please join me every Monday at noon when our weekly podcast is released on the Education Next website.
