The latest Education Next poll results are packed-full of interesting findings on topics ranging from choice to merit pay, from NCLB to tenure reform. But particularly timely, in this era of fiscal austerity, are new insights about the public’s views on school budgets. And guess what: On education, like everything else, Americans don’t want to make tough choices. They want to keep taxes low while boosting school spending. Sound familiar?
Let’s start with taxes. Question 25a asked: “Do you think that local taxes to fund public schools around the nation should increase, decrease, or stay about the same?” Sixty-five percent of the public wanted taxes to remain steady or drop. The numbers were a little lower for African Americans, Hispanics, and parents, but not by much. (Half of teachers even expressed this view.) Interestingly, even more people (73 percent of the public) opposed raising local taxes, even if they were to be targeted to local (instead of national) schools.
OK, Americans don’t want higher taxes. So they must want school spending to remain flat, right? Wrong. Question 3b queried: “Do you think that government funding for public schools in your district should increase, decrease, or stay about the same?” Here, 60 percent of the public wanted increased spending on their schools. (Not surprisingly, the numbers were even higher for teachers, parents, and minorities.) Granted, that sentiment softened significantly when respondents were told how much their local districts actually spend—it kicked down to 46 percent for the public as a whole.
Still, as we see with similar surveys on taxes and spending writ large, the public wants expensive services and low taxes. (Oh, and they abhor deficits.) The math doesn’t add up.
And on what does the public want these phantom extra dollars to be spent? Not higher teacher salaries; once told that the average teacher makes close to $55,000, only 43 percent of the public supports boosting pay.
No, Americans want exactly what they’ve been getting for fifty years: smaller class sizes. In the only “forced choice” question on the survey, respondents were asked (in question 12): “Reducing average class sizes by 3 students would cost roughly the same amount as increasing teacher salaries by $10,000. Which do you think is the best use of funds for schools across the country, increasing teacher salaries by $10,000 or reducing class size by 3 students?”
Respondents clearly struggled with this one, with 29 percent expressing no opinion either way. But by a ratio of 44 percent to 28 percent, those with a view picked class-size reduction over higher pay.
Many people complain that our schools aren’t responsive to public demands, but the opposite seems true. The public wants small classes and is less concerned about paying teachers well; that’s exactly the system we’ve got. And, I suppose, the system we deserve.
—Mike Petrilli
Mike,
You pooh pooh class size, but the research shows that it does matter for low-income kids, and that’s our system’s problem, and helping disadvantaged schools is the prime purpose of federal investments.
Why is it that lowering class size, which is the most commonsensical of all reforms, has not panned out? Part of the problem is that most of the new hires in education have gone to bureaucrats or other people not to the classes. I can’t prove it, but my suspicion is that during the age of “reform” systems felt pressured to hire process-people, and we see how that worked out. (oh yeah, I forgot youre presenting arguments that reform has worked better than we’re now saying but I suspect you are mostly playing devil’s advocate.)
The big reason, I argue, that decreased class size hasn’t worked is the shortage of teachers with the qualitifations and the personality qualities necessary to teach.
I could kick back in a rocking chair and teach huge classes of kids who know how to read and know how to be students. We have huge shortages of teachers qualified to teach in challenging schools. Every year of my career we hired teachers, and tenure was extended to teachers, who had 0% chance of being effective. Hiring more of them to push down class size doesn’t work. Cut my five classes from 30 to 20, and my kids will learn a lot more, but the 10 per class who go to the only warm body they could find to go to the hood will be hurt.
the statistic missing is the per student spending for the last 2o years. What parents want is productivuity for their tax dollars. I would say we have doubled the spending and have seen academic results decline. Something is wrong. And how about researching how many teachers have been dismissed for poor perormance?
Ken, what parents want is a return on NO investment. They don’t want to pay for the necessary conditions needed to supplement their inability to parent properly.
IOW, many would like to blame teachers and schools without looking at lives outside of school.
I actually agree with Mike that the public wants what they refuse to fund or do for themselves.
If the teachers can’t do the job under the present conditions, then let the parents send their children to schools where they feel the job can be done.
How do we feel about the “parents Trigger”?
Ken: The parent trigger may not be a bad option, but we should remember that it’s susceptible to corruption just like anything.
Regarding the post: I think the more we provide people with statistics on education nationwide (I’m assuming the $55,000 number was nationwide), the more the numbers obscure what’s happening in their districts locally. Surely the cost of reducing class size is highly dependent on the district?
Let’s give people the facts from their districts, be careful to make sure they understand the limitations of the numbers provided, and then ask questions about how they’d like to see their districts move forward.
First you say “The public wants small classes and is less concerned about paying teachers well; that’s exactly the system we’ve got. ”
Actually not; we’ve had no progress in reducing class size in the last decade or so, and have had larger class sizes in the last two years, and even sharper increases are likely this fall. Instead, more money is going into programs w/ no evidence behind them like teacher merit pay, online learning, and more data systems and testing.
As for the parent trigger, the way it has been implemented has not given parents real power to devise solutions for their children’s schools (like smaller classes) only to accede to the well-funded, top-down push to privatize through converting to charters. For the perspective of Parents Across America on this, see http://tinyurl.com/3rhbxg3