One of the most significant and controversial educational policies in recent decades has been school choice. As the number of choice policies has grown, so too has interest in the public’s opinion about it. Despite the growth in polling on choice, however, there remain a number of different topics and approaches still not fully explored or understood. This research examined three of them: comparative support for different forms of school choice, the salience of reasons for school choice, and the comparative perceived efficacy of different forms of educational reform, choice included.

This study was guided by four research questions:

 

1. Is there a significant difference in support for choice based on reasons for school choice?

2. Is there a significant difference in levels of agreement with reasons for school choice?

3. Which type of choice enjoys the strongest support?

4. How does a policy of school choice compare to other reform initiatives in their perceived efficacy for school improvement?

It answered these questions using a survey administered to a national sample of 1,000 respondents as part of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. It used a survey experiment in this design:

• All respondents: Rating the nation’s public schools

• All respondents: Seven reform policy options, including choice. This facilitated an examination of support for choice as a reform tool compared to other contemporary reform options.

• Experiment module 1: Respondents were randomly placed into one of two groups—one that answered a module of questions about support for different school choice policies, before seeing a prompt about a reason for choice and a second that received this module of questions after the prompt. This facilitated an examination of differences in support for choice based on the prompts.

• Experiment module 2: Respondents were randomly assigned to receive one of three prompts relative to three reasons for school choice. This facilitated an examination of “issue salience.”

• Experiment module 1: Those respondents who did not see this module earlier received it here.

Questions 1 and 2 were analyzed using multiple regression, and questions 3 and 4 were analyzed with repeated measures ANCOVA.

Results indicate that when presented with six different school choice options, respondents most favored tax credits and least favored low-income vouchers, with only trivial differences in support among the remaining types of choice. And when asked to rate the efficacy of choice among other types of reform, results indicated school choice through vouchers was not seen as the most efficacious way to reform education in the U.S. (that designation belonged to smaller class sizes), but it was also not seen as the least (longer school days was so identified). Turning to reasons for choice, across three different reasons—freedom, competition, and equality—freedom was significantly more salient among participants, but its effect on support for choice was negative. Indeed, all three reasons appeared to reduce support for choice, although differences were generally not significant.