Do Americans hold a consistent set of opinions about their public schools and how to improve them? From 2013 to 2018, over 5,000 unique respondents participated in more than one consecutive iteration of the annual, nationally representative "Education Next" poll, offering an opportunity to examine individual-level attitude stability on…

For 14 years, the "Education Next" annual survey has tracked American opinion on education policy. This year's survey, administered in May 2020, provides an early look at how the experiences of the past few months as the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools nationwide may shape Americans' views on education policy going forward. The survey's…

With the 2020 presidential election campaign now underway, education-policy proposals previously at the edge of the political debate are entering the mainstream. Support for increasing teacher pay is higher now than at any point since 2008, and a majority of the public favors more federal funding for local schools. Free college commands the…

Education analysts often compare U.S. schools to those in Finland, Korea, Poland, even Shanghai. But surprisingly, few compare the schools here to those in Germany, though the two countries have much in common. Each nation is the largest democracy, with the biggest economy, on its continent. Each has a diverse population, strong unions, a federal…

In May and June 2015, the ninth annual "Education Next" survey was administered to a nationally representative sample of some 4,000 respondents, including oversamples of roughly 700 teachers, 700 African Americans, and 700 Hispanics. The 2015 survey posed many new questions exploring opinion on curricular and other issues that have never…

The year 2016 marks the 10th anniversary of the "Education Next" poll on K-12 education policy, offering "Education Next" the opportunity to take a retrospective look at public opinion on this vital topic. In 8 of the past 10 years, "Education Next" has also surveyed teachers on the subject and has seen some…

A comprehensive exploration of 21st Century school politics, "Teachers versus the Public" offers the first comparison of the education policy views of both teachers and the public as a whole, and reveals a deep, broad divide between the opinions held by citizens and those who teach in the public schools. Among the findings: (1) Divisions…

What do citizens of the United States and Germany think about their schools and school policies? This paper offers the first broad comparison of public thinking on education in the two countries. We carried out opinion surveys of representative samples of the German and American adult populations in 2014 that included experiments in which we…

Democrats and Republicans in Washington, D.C., are more polarized today than they have been in nearly a century. Among the general public, party identification remains the single most powerful predictor of people's opinions about a wide range of policy issues. Given this environment, reaching consensus on almost any issue of consequence would…