Susan Pendergrass speaks with Colyn Ritter, research analyst at EdChoice, about the annual Schooling in America survey. They discuss why public confidence in K-12 education has been declining, the real reasons parents switch their kids’ schools, why open enrollment polls at 80 percent support among parents, and what parents think about AI and cell phones in the classroom.
Episode Transcript
Susan Pendergrass (00:00): Thanks so much for joining us this morning, Colyn Ritter from EdChoice. You guys once a year put out your Schooling in America survey, is that right?
Colyn Ritter (00:08): That’s right, and thank you so much for having me, Susan. So we do an annual survey with Braun Research, who is our partner on this project, and it is called Schooling in America. We’ve been doing it since 2013. And I’d say about 75% of the survey is dedicated to questions that we ask each year so that we’re able to trend them and see how things change over time. And then I’d say about a quarter of the survey is dedicated to newer, more timely questions, depending on what’s happening. I know a few years ago we were asking about school safety. In 2020 we asked about COVID-related things. We dedicated some questions in the last few years to AI and technology. This year we spent some time looking at the federal tax credit program.
Susan Pendergrass (00:49): Yeah, I definitely want to dig in on some of those. But the big thing that I think, I don’t know, it seems to be an emerging issue, and there’s a Gallup poll that you and I were just chatting about offline a little bit, is that the general feeling of positivity toward public education in the United States seems to be suffering. And in fact, in your poll you show that when you look at, not necessarily just parents, but the general population, about sixty percent of folks say that public education is on the wrong track and forty percent say it’s on the right track. What do you think’s going on there?
Colyn Ritter (01:23): So yeah, we did talk a little bit about it offline. The public is more pessimistic than parents. Like you said, sixty-two percent of the public say it’s on the wrong track compared to fifty-six percent of parents. We did see that peak for both groups in twenty twenty-four, and it has come down slightly since that point. My personal belief is that K-12 education news is not widely covered in mainstream media, especially with other things going on, when there’s a war going on and an election year and things like that.
Susan Pendergrass (01:57): We are hearing a lot, I think it’s hitting mainstream media, that young kids can’t read. And there was a little stuff in the media, or maybe just in my corner of the media, and some podcasts and whatnot about the University of California San Diego kids who can’t do math. They showed up
Colyn Ritter (02:12): That’s right. Yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (02:13): and they needed to take elementary-level remedial math. And then a
Colyn Ritter (02:17): Yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (02:17): few days ago some new international test scores were released, PISA, and they showed
Colyn Ritter (02:21): Yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (02:22): that our fifteen-year-olds’ reading skills are at the lowest level since the turn of the century, I think. I mean, tanking, and not COVID-related, just tanking on reading. So I think it’s possible that people are blaming the public school system for some of that.
Colyn Ritter (02:37): Yeah, and to round out my thought, when K-12 education news does hit mainstream media, it’s almost always going to be negative, at least in my experience following it. And rightfully so in some cases, like you said, with the test scores and things. So I think that contributes a lot to why the public feels that K-12 education is on the wrong track, and parents as well. But it is something to monitor when it comes to the new developments in K-12 ed, what does kind of break through. Some part of what we’ve thought about asking is following up with a why. Why do they feel K-12 education is headed on the wrong track, especially from the parents’ perspective, because we kind of want to dive into what’s different about their own kids’ education that they do feel satisfied with, which we see constantly in Schooling in America and in our other polling. Nearly, over two-thirds, nearly three-fourths of parents are at least somewhat satisfied with their kids’ education, public,
Susan Pendergrass (03:33): Yeah.
Colyn Ritter (03:34): private, across sector. But why that is compared to their feelings about the overall landscape of K-12 ed. And I think, the stories about test scores, the NAEP scores over the past few years, those
Susan Pendergrass (03:44): Yeah.
Colyn Ritter (03:45): definitely hit, hearing that an entire grade level across the country is struggling to read or do basic math is going to stick with you, and that will kind of contrast with what you’re seeing with your own kid. Parents aren’t going to be happy if their kid can’t read or do math.
Susan Pendergrass (04:02): Right. And also the public school system seemed to have, well, it has in fact entered into the culture wars in some ways.
Colyn Ritter (04:09): No doubt.
Susan Pendergrass (04:09): We got into the 1619 Project and CRT and all of that, and I think that even people without kids in school were being very concerned about what was happening in the schools, in general. But what I
Colyn Ritter (04:23): I also think there’s a lack of engagement from the public school system. I
Susan Pendergrass (04:26): Yeah.
Colyn Ritter (04:27): was listening to a story about the Texas ESA program and how a lot of kids with special needs are moving. There were, they highlighted a specific school district in Texas, and in part they asked, they reached out to that school district for comment as to why these families are leaving, and there was just no reaction, no response. And I think, if you’re a public school system that is saying we need more money, school choice is sucking funds from the public school, I would expect to at least hear how much money, or for what, or maybe answering the question why they’re leaving, which we look at a little bit in the survey with school switchers, but I don’t want to derail the conversation completely.
Susan Pendergrass (05:11): No, I want to get to switchers, ’cause that’s really kind of why I wanted to talk to you. But, you know, I was gonna say, certainly you guys at EdChoice, you work in this policy area similar to us at the Show-Me Institute, where we want to get parents, every parent, at least a handful of high-quality options for their child. And I’m also agnostic about what they pick, but I don’t want any one child to be forced into a school that is either a failing school or failing for that kid for whatever reason. And as long as people have options, I feel like when parents choose they get a little bit more invested and they are more likely to be a little bit more satisfied, right? But in a lot of places, Missouri is one of them, ninety-five percent of our parents have no choice. They only have their one assigned public school and that’s it, unless they want to do virtual. But
Colyn Ritter (05:58): Right.
Susan Pendergrass (05:59): that’s got to be, to me that would reduce the overall satisfaction rate with the system, because everyone whose kid doesn’t want to get on the bus in the morning, or thinks the teachers don’t
Colyn Ritter (06:09): Yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (06:10): like them, whatever their reason is, they have to go anyway. They don’t have any choices. So that’s not going to lead to a very positive outcome. So let’s talk about the questions that you asked about switchers, ’cause I think this is very interesting. Do you think people are surprised at the percentage of parents who do switch their kid’s school at least once?
Colyn Ritter (06:31): Yeah, I do think it’s more than what most people would expect. We’ve asked this question in our other polls through the Morning Consult public opinion tracker, which is more monthly, and that’s a whole other operation that we have that I’m happy to touch on.
Susan Pendergrass (06:45): You guys are a great source for polling data, for sure.
Colyn Ritter (06:48): That’s very kind. Sometimes it feels like we’re throwing too much out there. We might be overloading people. But I agree that it’s very fun to look through all the different types of questions and the different subgroups and crosstabs. But with school switchers, we’ve seen roughly a quarter, it usually hovers between twenty to twenty-five percent, but twenty-eight percent in Schooling in America said that they’ve switched their child’s school types. And we were keen in the wording of the question to say besides switching from elementary to middle or middle to high school, some more traditional types of switching that you’d expect to see. And it was 28% who say that yes, their child has changed school types. And then we asked, not so much directly why they switched, but what issues the child was struggling with at their previous schooling environment. And the reasons were similar to what we’ve seen in the past. The top reasons were excessive stress or anxiety at thirty percent, academic needs not being met at thirty percent, and then bullying at twenty-eight percent. And those are typically the three that we see. So, from what I’ve heard and listened to and learned from talking to people about this data is that most people think when parents switch schools it’s because their kid’s not learning. Which, we see here certainly with the academic needs not being met, but it can be happening for other reasons like stress or anxiety, mental health, or a safety thing like bullying. And I think that’s kind of where my issue with the overall discussion around choice, it falls flat in the sense that people might think it’s very transactional, my kid’s not learning best here, so I want to move. But it’s more than just that. It always has been. It’s about safety, it’s about mental health, it’s about special needs not being met, issues with teachers, too-big class sizes, lack of personalized or individualized learning. And so I think that’s sort of where this conversation around choice needs to start, and it has started in a lot of states. Parents are diverse, students’ learning is quite diverse and it’s changing rapidly, especially with the introduction of technology and all these new ways to learn. And we should take it seriously that not all kids are alike, and the reason they’re leaving is similarly diverse.
Susan Pendergrass (09:05): Yeah, we have discussed the idea of open enrollment, public school open enrollment, in Missouri now for I don’t know, five, six, seven years, and it’s never gotten anywhere.
Colyn Ritter (09:13): Yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (09:14): And even when we do talk about it, it’s generally a system where districts would get to opt in, they wouldn’t have to participate, they wouldn’t have to take kids. And the conversation around it is always so disheartening to me, because I think people are like, well the only reason kids will switch is X, like they want to go from poor schools to rich schools. I’m like, that does not play out in the data. That’s not what we know about parents. And if you just think about it, I have three kids who went through the public school system. One kid, one year, just not getting along with whatever’s happening there, or the youngest kid having to put up with whatever the older kid did with the teachers. There’s so many reasons, and it’s not anyone’s job to try to figure out what those are. You don’t need to justify that. You just need to have a place that your child wants to go to in the morning and wants to learn when they get there. And that’s what we’re trying to guard for. But it’s always like, well they’ll just all want to go to the rich districts. That’s nowhere on your list.
Colyn Ritter (10:08): Yeah. It’s more than just that. And I think parents are looking at their other options. It might be the fact that they do want to go to rich schools, but it might be the fact that they’re far away, or that their kid has some need that that school can’t offer. And I think, like you said, if we give parents more options, they’ll be more engaged in their child’s learning, and I think that is an overall win-win for everyone. We talk about student engagement a lot, but I think parent engagement with their kids’ learning is a very underappreciated, underrated aspect of this whole thing. EdChoice has looked at studies around parent engagement for parents that participate in a school choice program versus parents that aren’t, and it’s higher, and that might seem practical and make sense, but that’s what we’re really trying to do here, is just get parents more engaged, and hopefully their students will be more engaged as well. And to do that we need to deliver high-quality options and have a marketplace that’s reflective and can help provide the types of options that parents say their child needs. And that is changing all the time.
Susan Pendergrass (11:19): That’s right.
Colyn Ritter (11:20): We’re not looking at schools the way we should, in the sense of what is changing in the future that schools need to be preparing students for. We’re still looking at things like, can your child read and can they do math. Absolutely, those are
Susan Pendergrass (11:39): Yes.
Colyn Ritter (11:40): paramount. Those are the bottom of the pyramid in terms of hierarchy of needs. But now we’re kind of looking toward the top and saying, all right, well, what if my kid wants to learn a trade? What if my kid wants to be an engineer, what if they want to be a welder? Is this something that the school can offer? Are these skills that this school can offer my child if they’re pursuing something like this? And we’ve seen this in data, not so much in Schooling in America, but what are parents looking for for their child after high school. And the traditional graduate high school, go to a four-year college, get a scholarship, it’s still the most prominent option chosen by parents, but it is decreasing year over year. And I think that’s reflective of the cost of higher ed, what’s
Susan Pendergrass (12:22): Yeah.
Colyn Ritter (12:23): required, the skills required. And it starts from K-12. And so we need to have a robust marketplace with a good supply side of education that parents know how to navigate. And so that’s sort of what we’re trying to embark on, and you know that well, obviously.
Susan Pendergrass (12:38): Yeah, I think the model of the last century was, well, we’ll just make every school fit every kid, basically. So we’ll just put it
Colyn Ritter (12:45): Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Susan Pendergrass (12:46): all under one roof, and we’ll try to get every school, we’ll have every vo-tech program, every college prep program. And sometimes people who are against school choice will say, we have to take every kid that shows up. And I’m like, that’s the whole point. It
Colyn Ritter (12:56): Mm-hmm.
Susan Pendergrass (12:58): that is an ineffective and inefficient way to go about this. You shouldn’t have to take every kid that shows up when they state what their needs are. We could have a robust marketplace, a pluralist system of schools, and they can gravitate to the one that’s the best fit for them, rather than trying to make every school fit every kid.
Colyn Ritter (13:16): No doubt. And that impacts teachers, it impacts administrators, it impacts parents. I mean, no wonder we’re looking at a reading, a literacy crisis and a math crisis, because we’ve flown too close to the sun in that regard, in my mind. We’ve asked schools, teachers, administrators to do way too much with too many kids, because we’re stuck in the zip-code-assigned schooling model that has been around forever. And school choice has existed forever, for those who can afford to pick up and move their house to a different school district. But we have to adapt. How many signs do we need staring us right in the face before we say, hey, we need to kind of rethink this thing? And credit to a bunch of states across the country, and not just any, it’s a very diverse list of states with very robust school choice programs. I’m talking about a Florida, an Arizona, Iowa, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Arkansas as well.
Susan Pendergrass (14:14): Arkansas. Alabama, right? Yeah.
Colyn Ritter (14:17): Indiana, Ohio. You cannot just group these states in one bucket, red, blue, South, north type of thing. It’s happening because they’re listening to parents, and parents are very clear in what they’re saying. And that’s kind of what we’ve seen constantly in Schooling in America, is that parents have very diverse schooling preferences. And the reasons this year we’ve seen why their kid left or they switched their kid’s school are also diverse, and it’s
Susan Pendergrass (14:43): Yeah.
Colyn Ritter (14:43): staring us in the face again.
Susan Pendergrass (14:45): Well when we look at open enrollment in particular, ’cause this is an issue that’s near and dear to us Missourians, that
Colyn Ritter (14:52): Of course.
Susan Pendergrass (14:52): has always had extremely high favorability, both among parents and among the general population. When you put this idea, when Minnesota started it thirty-five years ago, I think nineteen-ninety-ish, some states have just been doing this for decades basically, people are like, yeah, absolutely. What’s the seventy-some percent support of the general population for open enrollment? And is it eighty for parents in your data?
Colyn Ritter (15:15): Eighty-three percent for parents, which we don’t see eighty percent support for much today,
Susan Pendergrass (15:20): Yeah.
Colyn Ritter (15:21): but especially in these surveys it’s ESAs and open enrollment that see eighty-ish percent support. And one thing I’d add on open enrollment, Susan, is that we ask parents if they’re aware of the policy in their state. We ask about ESAs, vouchers, charter schools, open enrollment. Charter schools, now granted, they’ve been around for longer, but over half of parents are able to say whether their state has open enrollment. Another eleven percent say no. But the fact that the unsure percentage is lower than the others is interesting and worth harping on, the fact that people are more aware of open enrollment than other types of choice policies. Now whether or not they’re accurate or not, that’s still something I’m working on, and the sample sizes from all states aren’t the best. But
Susan Pendergrass (16:07): Mm-hmm.
Colyn Ritter (16:08): it’s a fun little exercise with this data to see, all right, they’re aware of these policies, now how accurate are they based on where they responded from. I believe last year we were at, like sixty percent accuracy with open enrollment overall,
Susan Pendergrass (16:22): Like.
Colyn Ritter (16:22): which I think is pretty great.
Susan Pendergrass (16:24): Yeah, I’ll usually have, in late summer, a handful of parents reach out to say, hey, can I, I’m just checking, can I switch my kid to a different public school? And I
Colyn Ritter (16:33): Yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (16:33): always have to say, I’m sorry, you cannot, take it up with your legislator, but not yet.
Colyn Ritter (16:35): Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (16:38): We’d love to see it happen, but we’re one of the last holdouts, certainly in our region. Iowa,
Colyn Ritter (16:43): Mm-hmm.
Susan Pendergrass (16:43): you can pick public or private. Arkansas, public or private. Oklahoma, public or private. We’re just surrounded by school choice, and we are somehow keeping a stake in the ground that we’re going to be the last bastion of zip-code assignment.
Colyn Ritter (16:56): Yeah, it’s kind of, Kansas and Missouri are constantly trying to be the last one. I live in Kansas. I went to school in Missouri.
Susan Pendergrass (17:02): Yeah, I don’t know. Well, Kansas, you live in Kansas now?
Colyn Ritter (17:06): I do. I went to school at Saint Louis University and now I live in Kansas City, Kansas, which, the border is two minutes from us.
Susan Pendergrass (17:14): But I mean Kansas has a robust public open enrollment policy.
Colyn Ritter (17:19): They do have good open enrollment. I’m more so thinking about private school choice. They have a very limited tax credit scholarship program, but you’re
Susan Pendergrass (17:26): Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Colyn Ritter (17:28): right that there is a distinction between Kansas and Missouri with open enrollment.
Susan Pendergrass (17:32): So real quick, what are you finding? You said you did last year some questions around technology and AI.
Colyn Ritter (17:39): Mm-hmm. That’s right.
Susan Pendergrass (17:40): What are you finding with parents there?
Colyn Ritter (17:43): It’s interesting, so, and this is last year’s data, I’m happy to share it with anyone that’s interested.
Susan Pendergrass (17:49): Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Colyn Ritter (17:51): We kind of break it into two molds, there’s AI and then there’s cell phones. Cell phone bans are a very prominent topic in K-12 education discourse now, with more states looking to experiment with cell phone bans, whether it’s bell-to-bell or just during instructional time. We ask parents whether or not they support the use of such technology in their child’s classes. They’re very okay with laptops and online learning platforms like Canvas, things like that. They’re about 50-50 with AI, which is decreasing actually, which is interesting. And then cell phones, it’s about, only the support for AI is decreasing in classrooms,
Susan Pendergrass (18:27): Which is decreasing, people who want it? Yeah. Sure it is.
Colyn Ritter (18:33): which is worth monitoring, obviously. So we asked, do you support the teaching of responsible use of AI in schools? And parents are very supportive of that. So while they’re skeptical of AI being used, they do still want schools to teach how to use AI responsibly. So it’s a little bit of a contradiction there, but I think we’re all trying to
Susan Pendergrass (18:52): We’re all trying to figure it out.
Colyn Ritter (18:54): figure it out. Schools certainly are, but I do think that second bullet point is more important, that parents are keen to have their kids learn how to use it responsibly, and they feel that schools can help in that. It’s tough, because that’s adding another thing that schools need to sort of, we’re trying to figure out, schools are trying to figure out their AI policy. But tech and AI, the questions around that are only going to expand. So we’re going to keep asking those as well, just to keep a finger on the pulse.
Susan Pendergrass (19:23): Well, I do want to make a plug for this, because this is, number one, a very great survey, and you’ve been doing it for over a decade now. But also you’ve got a great website that’s very interactive. Folks can look at all of these full questions by category, you’ve got cool charts that move around. Where can anyone find this information?
Colyn Ritter (19:41): That’s very kind. We have an absolutely amazing communications and graphic design team who do it all. If
Susan Pendergrass (19:46): Yeah, it’s really great.
Colyn Ritter (19:47): I was in charge of it, it would look way, way less nice. So
Susan Pendergrass (19:50): No.
Colyn Ritter (19:52): edchoice.org is where you should go. Then the research library, where you’ll see on our banner tab, you’ll see the research library where you can find all the reports by my great colleagues and our fellows, like Susan.
Susan Pendergrass (20:07): Uh-huh.
Colyn Ritter (20:07): And then we also have a Schooling in America tab where we have an online dashboard, so if you just want a quick set, you can find that very
Susan Pendergrass (20:12): Really cool. And what’s your monthly survey, or your other survey?
Colyn Ritter (20:18): Yes, so right under the Schooling in America tab, you’ll see the Public Opinion Tracker, which is in partnership with Morning Consult. That is our monthly polling that we use for more state-specific topics. We still ask questions like right direction, wrong track for education, support for school choice policies, things like that. We do it more monthly because we want to be more reflexive to what’s going on in K-12 education, because a once-a-year survey only gives you one shot at that. And we survey teachers there as well, so it’s not just parents in the gen pop. But we’re always looking for questions, for ideas to poll to include in our polls, so feel free to reach out. My email is [email protected], or just
Susan Pendergrass (21:00): Great.
Colyn Ritter (21:01): type it into the contact us at edchoice.org, and one of us will reach out. But yeah, we’re always trying to
Susan Pendergrass (21:07): Yeah, it’s really great.
Colyn Ritter (21:08): better understand what parents and the gen pop are saying about K-12 ed.
Susan Pendergrass (21:12): Well, thanks for coming on and explaining it to us. I really appreciate it.
Colyn Ritter (21:15): Thank you so much, Susan.
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