Pay no attention to those pundits behind the curtain
Attempts on the right to vilify teachers and public schools have long infuriated me. As I’ve indicated time and again, it’s about the money. An investor class bent on privatizing public schools wants to turn those not-for-profit abominations into another rent-seeking extension of Wall Street. Teachers and school adminstrators stand between them and their money. Christian right parents are their useful idiots.
Chalkbeat’s Matt Barnum cites data that refutes the notion that parents of school-age children are unhappy with their kids’ public education:
“Contrary to elite or policy wonk opinion, which often is critical of schools, there have been years and years worth of data saying that families in general like their local public schools,” said Andy Smarick, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.
“It would be natural to assume that in 2020, 2021, parental support for schools would have cratered,” said Smarick. “But it didn’t.”
You might not know that from that narrative advanced in the press. Naysayers tend not to have kids in school. “Most Americans” are not most parents:
Surveys actually show that it’s people without school-age children who are especially dissatisfied with public schools.
A recent EdChoice survey found that 57% of parents said their local school district was moving in the right direction, which was 10 percentage points higher than in January 2020, before the pandemic. (This is a bit different from the other parent surveys in that it was not asking about parents’ own experiences directly.) But among non-parents, only 29% said the local schools were on a positive trajectory.
This same gap between parents and non-parents has also showed up in polls by Education Next and the New York Times. The views of those without school-age children may be shaped by news coverage, which has advanced the narrative that schools are in disarray and parents are upset.
Education writer Diane Ravitch responded to Barnum’s Xitter thread:
Declining public support for public schools is the result of 40 years of propaganda, starting in 1983 with release of Reagan’s fraudulent “Nation at Risk.” 90% of US kids go to public schools . We have a great country. Thank a teacher.
Back then, gaslighting was still a movie reference.
Update: Fixed 2nd graph. Thx, RM.