Parent Opinion on Public Schools is Positive but Soft

There are many things I love about living in Ireland. Towards the top of the list is carvery.

Many pubs have what to most Americans would look like a cafeteria line where you can get a reasonably priced, hearty meal to enjoy with your pint (or, in my case, pints).

Generally there are a couple of meat options (lamb, turkey, and ham are popular choices), vegetables, at least two potato varieties (I’m a mashed and roastie guy), and the option for gravy or pepper sauce to cover it.

One of the first times I went through a carvery, I had been watching horse racing, bouncing from my bar stool to the bookies next door to place a wager, then returning to my pint with a bar mat over the top to signal I would be back to watch the race. Pint, bookie, race, repeat. Pretty much an ideal day. In a lull in the action I decided to nip over to the carvery for a kind of late lunch/early dinner.

When it was my turn in the queue, the chef in his white coat and cylindrical hat asked me what meat I wanted, what veg, what spuds and what sauce and then asked a question that threw me.

“Would you like a pudding?”

I had never heard pudding spoken of in the singular. Not fully understanding what he was asking me, I mumbled something about waiting for dessert later, and clearly identifying my yank accent and taking pity on me, he held up a big, fluffy pastry and said, “This is a pudding, would you like one of these?”

“Sure,” I said.

Reader, when I first bit into what I now know is a Yorkshire Pudding, it exploded with a mix of sweet, savory, and salty that was so delightful I haven’t been the same since. I now eat them like a 19^th century miner from Huddersfield. If you ever get the chance, you’ve got to give one a try.

I’ve also learned that pudding making has contributed a phrase to English, “to over-egg the pudding.” This would not make sense in the American sense of pudding, but in the Yorkshire sense, putting in too many eggs would make a pudding rubbery and gross instead of fluffy and perfect. The Cambridge Dictionary states that to over-egg the pudding is “to make something seem larger, more important, better, or worse than it really is.”

So I have now taken north of 400 words to set up the point that I actually want to make. Here it is:

When we talk about parent opinions about school, we risk over-egging the pudding.

Here is a figure from our most recent poll of American parents.

There are several important findings.

First, private school parents are more likely than public school parents to be generally satisfied with their child’s school.

Second, private school parents are more likely to be very satisfied with their child’s school than public school parents.

Third, almost 20% of public school parents are dissatisfied with their child’s school. If we take a rough estimate of 50 million public school students that means millions have parents who aren’t happy.

Fourth, nearly 80% of public school parents are generally satisfied with their child’s school.

Fifth, the majority of satisfied public school parents are “somewhat” rather than “very” satisfied.

And here is where choice advocates need to make sure not to over-egg the pudding. It can be very easy to lazily assert mass dissatisfaction with public schools that just isn’t there. There is a substantial population that is dissatisfied, enough families to fill tens of thousands of new schools, but they are not the majority. Not even close.

Choice should speak to the needs of dissatisfied parents. If there are currently 1.3 million students enrolled in private school choice programs, that number could easily grow sixfold or more with the population of dissatisfied parents alone. That would be huge.

But choice also needs to speak to the somewhat satisfied. Telling them that their schools are terrible isn’t going to do anything, because they don’t think that their schools are terrible. They think they are fine. They think they are OK.

Presenting these families with better options, options that solve the problems that keep them from being very satisfied, is the way to go. Maybe they like their child’s school but it’s just a bit too big. Offering a school that has many of the same characteristics, but that is smaller could be appealing to them. Maybe they like their child’s school but the reading program stinks. Giving parents more flexibility in choosing individual courses or supporting them as they supplement their child’s education could be the solution. Maybe they like their child’s school but it is too focused on sports and they want a school with a better arts program. The list goes on and on.

In all of these cases, trashing their current school doesn’t help win them over. It makes advocates come off as out of touch, overly ideological, or just too online.

Focusing on the concrete problems that parents have and demonstrating how choice can solve those problems is the way to go.

This was originally published to our Substack.