Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper will compare the perceptions and attitudes of parents with children in charter, private, and public schools using data from a survey of parents conducted in the summer of 2016 using a nationally representative sample of US parents. In addition, this paper will report results from an experiment embedded in the survey, designed to test whether an appeal for accuracy can elicit more accurate responses to factual questions about school policies from survey respondents.

In the summer of 2016, Education Next will field a survey concerning people’s perceptions of and attitudes regarding US schools to a nationally representative sample. We have been conducting similar surveys for more than a decade. In this year’s survey, we propose to oversample parents. This will enable us to conduct the first ever comparison of the responses of parents in different types of schools using a nationally representative sample.

We will, firstly, explore variation in parents’ perceptions of and satisfaction with their children’s’ schools. We will ask parents about their perceptions of the severity of a range of potential problems at the school, their satisfaction with a range of school characteristics, such as teacher quality and school discipline, and the contact that they have with their child’s school. In addition, we will ask parents about their perceptions of schools more broadly, and their views on a number of school policy issues.

We will compare the perceptions and attitudes of parents across public, charter, and private schools. In doing so, we will link survey responses to data on the relevant school, by asking parents to name their child’s school and using data that we have on respondents’ locations. This will allow us to compare the relationship between school characteristics and parent satisfaction across different groups of parents. This will shed light on the varying demands that schools and policymakers are likely to face from parents at different schools

The second contribution of the paper will be to report results from a survey experiment testing whether accuracy appeals can improve the accuracy of survey responses with respect to aspects of the school system. One of the dimensions along which we will compare parents from different schools is the accuracy of their responses to questions regarding spending on students and teacher salaries. In previous surveys, many respondents have erred in their estimates. Building on recent work by Markus Prior and colleagues, we will explore whether emphasizing the importance of accurate responses and telling respondents that they will be informed of the correct answer an increase the accuracy of responses in the context of US schooling.