Education Next: When Provided With Accurate Information, Public Support for Increased Spending on Schools and Teacher Salaries Declines, Researchers Find

STANFORD, Calif.--(Business Wire)--
Education researchers William G. Howell of the University of Chicago and Martin
R. West of Brown University have released newly compiled evidence from the 2008
Education Next/PEPG survey which shows that if the public is given accurate
information about what is currently being spent on public schools, their support
for increased spending and confidence that more spending will improve student
learning both decline. And they find that knowing how much the average teacher
earns lowers support among the general public for salary increases.

According to the 2008 national survey by Education Next and the Program on
Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at Harvard University, most of the public
has an inaccurate picture of how much is spent on public schools and how high
teacher salaries are. Most are also inclined to support increases in both.

To understand how public opinions shift, Howell and West embedded a series of
experiments within the Education Next/PEPG survey by dividing respondents into
randomly chosen groups: some were simply asked their opinion about school
spending and teacher salaries, while others were first provided with accurate
information about each of these issues.

The average per-pupil spending estimate from respondents to the 2008 Education
Next/PEPG survey was $4,231, and the median response was just $2,000; but for
these respondents, local average spending per pupil at the time exceeded
$10,000. When told how much the local schools were spending, support for
increased spending dropped by 10 percentage points, from 61 percent to a bare
majority of 51 percent.

Howell and West find that these differences in opinion based on exposure to key
information are consistent across a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds,
views about the local public schools, and political ideologies.

"It`s clear that the American public is quite willing to update its views in
light of new information about public schools," Howell and West said.

Interestingly, note Howell and West, differences also appear among teachers,
whom one might think already have deeply entrenched and well-informed views
about public education. Whereas 35 percent of teachers not specifically informed
of spending levels claimed that spending should "greatly increase," only 22
percent of those who were told the amount of money spent to educate a child in
their district thought so. Additionally, 29 percent of uninformed teachers
expressed strong confidence that increased spending would boost student
learning. When exposed to the current spending in their district, however, that
confidence dropped by 9 percent.

As with per-pupil expenditures, the public significantly underestimates how much
their states pay public school teachers. On average, Education Next/PEPG survey
respondents underestimated average teacher salaries in their state by more than
$14,000, nearly one-third of the actual average salaries of $47,000.

When asked directly, 69 percent of the public supported increasing teacher
salaries. African Americans and teachers appeared most enthusiastic about
increasing teacher salaries, with roughly 9 out of 10 endorsing the idea. When
provided with the facts, support among the general public decreased by 14
percent. The two most enthusiastic groups of supporters of increasing teacher
salaries, however, responded very differently from one another to the
experiment. Support for increasing salaries dropped by 20 percentage points
(from 91 to 71 percent) among African Americans who were told about actual
teacher salaries. Support among teachers, meanwhile, dropped by just 8
percentage points.

The fact that information had especially large and negative effects on support
for increased teacher salaries among African Americans and those least satisfied
with their local public schools may hold important implications for the politics
of education in the large urban districts where these groups are most
concentrated.

"An urban superintendent seeking to reform teacher compensation might well
increase support among the district`s constituents by ensuring that they have
accurate information about what teachers currently earn," Howell and West
suggest.

Attitudes on Charter Schools

Howell and West also studied the affects on public attitudes toward charter
schools when accurate information is made available.

The 2008 Education Next/PEPG survey revealed widespread confusion about charter
schools. For example, less than 1 in 10 respondents knew that charter schools
may neither charge tuition nor provide religious instruction. Howell and West
found that providing additional information scarcely affected responses of the
public as a whole. However, public attitudes are dramatically different when
grouped according to self identified political ideology. Forty-nine percent of
conservatives and 36 percent of liberals who were not provided information
supported charter schools. But when they were told that charter schools are
tuition-free and secular, support dropped among conservatives by 6 percentage
points and increased among liberals by 11 percentage points. Indeed, when
provided information, liberals were 4 percent more likely to support charter
schools than were conservatives.

These last findings suggest that information may actually polarize the debate
over charter schools - and could also portend a major shift in the political
landscape of school choice, note Howell and West. Charter schools have been
traditionally been seen as an education reform effort championed by
conservatives. Yet Howell`s and West`s findings show that basic facts about the
design of charter schools appeal more to liberals.

"If the public becomes more informed about charter schools, it`s possible that
support may shift from the right to the left of the political spectrum," Howell
and West point out.

Read "Educating the Public" now available online at www.EducationNext.org.

William G. Howell is associate professor in the Harris School of Public Policy
at the University of Chicago. Martin R. West is assistant professor of education
at Brown University and an executive editor of Education Next.

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that
is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring
institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

University of Chicago
William G. Howell, 312-550-3767
or
Brown University
Martin R. West, 401-863-6467
or
Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Caleb Offley, 585-319-4541
www.hoover.org

Copyright Business Wire 2009