CER Op-Ed
by Jeanne Allen, President
The Center for Education Reform
The Wall Street Journal, September 17, 1996
Two recent educational polls have made national news, both claiming wide support for public education as we know it and overwhelming opposition to choice programs that would allow parents to send their children to private schools. But both polls were deeply flawed, probably by design. In fact, it may not be an exaggeration to say that the polls lied, in an attempt to ward off popular ideas that threaten the livelihoods of a failing system's defenders.
"The Public Still Believes in Public Schools," declares a press release from Phi Delta Kappa, a professional educators' association that since 1968 has commissioned an annual Gallup poll on attitudes toward public schools. Each year the survey gives high marks to local schools and finds strong opposition to school choice--although support for choice has risen from 24% in 1993 to 36% this year. (It's also worth mentioning that Phi Delta Kappa changed the wording of its question in 1993. Before then, a more explanatory and objective question annually yielded about 45% in favor of a "voucher system.")
The other survey, conducted by GOP pollster Linda DiVall for the National Education Association (the nation's largest teachers' union) came up with similar findings. According to the NEA poll, school choice is opposed even by 69% of Republicans, allowing the union to claim its views have the overwhelming support of both parties.
These results seemed suspicious to us. They conflicted with a bevy of state-based polls (in Arizona, Connecticut, Minnesota, Wisconsin and elsewhere) that have found overwhelming support for school choice. Wondering whether Phi Delta Kappa and the NEA were simply asking biased questions, we decided to conduct our own poll.
We hired t reputable independent polling firm, International Communications Research, to ask nine questions about school choice and the public's perceptions of public schools. We crafted our questions to ensure that they were unbiased and informative enough to make clear what we were asking.
Our findings differed sharply from those of the union and its allies. Of those surveyed in the Center for Education Reform / ICR poll, 86% said they favor permitting parents to send their children to the public, private or parochial school of their choice. Seventy-two percent believe that state legislators should assist children in failing schools to opt out of that school and attend a school--public, private or parochial--of the parents' choosing. And 73% favor allowing poor children government-funded scholarships to attend any school. On this last question, support was stronger among blacks (90%) than whites (71%), and among Democrats (77%) than Republicans (67%).
Why were our results so different from those of Phi Delta Kappa and the NEA? Because they designed questions likely to elicit negative responses, using such loaded phrasing as "at public expense" or "with public tax dollars." The NEA even went so far as to ask if school choice is preferable to helping public schools--as if the two were mutually exclusive.
Now, one can easily object that our group is biased too, since we favor
school choice. You decide. Here are questions from the three polls:
Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup: Do you favor or oppose allowing students and
parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense?
NEA: Do you think that tax dollars should be used to assist parents who
send their children to private, parochial or religious schools, or should tax
dollars be spent to improve public schools?
Center for Education Reform / ICR: How much do you support providing
parents with the option of sending their children to the school of their
choice--either public, private or parochial--rather than only to the school to
which they are assigned?
As dishonest as the tendentious polls is the NEA's claim that voters have defeated school choice 21 times at the ballot box. In truth, school choice initiatives have only been defeated three times--and for reasons having more to do with politics and money than with genuine public opposition to the principle of choice. Women's suffrage took far more attempts than that before it finally won over the public. As for the other initiatives the NEA cites, they were efforts to subsidize private or religious schooling directly, something few choice proponents believe in.
The NEA's claim that school choice means less money for public schools may fool the public for a while. For just as much as we all want things to change, we also want to protect America's long-established tradition of public schooling. The good news is that school choice doesn't threaten public education. On the contrary. the challenge of competition may be just the spur to improvement the educational Establishment needs.
Public education was never intended to be an institution owned and controlled by government alone. Local control has historically been the hallmark of educational excellence. Americans know it, and they want the freedom to educate their children in whatever manner they see fit.
Furthermore. contrail, to Gallup's results, both our poll and the more comprehensive Public Agenda survey released earlier this year found widespread dissatisfaction with the quality of public education. With that reality in mind, it's no wonder the unions and their special-interest allies have to skew their polls. If they dared to ask honest questions, they'd be forced to admit they've long outlived their usefulness.
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Jeanne Allen is author of THE SCHOOL REFORM HANDBOOK: How to Improve Your Schools, and president of The Center for Education Reform in Washington, DC, a national non-profit advocacy group providing support and guidance to thousands of individuals and communities nationwide who are working to bring fundamental reforms to their schools. For more information, please call (202) 822-9000 or (800) 521-2118, or send e-mail to cer@edreform.com.