We hear from members of the research team about the results from May’s general population poll, including answers to some new questions.
Mike McShane: Hello. Welcome back to another addition of EdChoice Chats. I’m Mike McShane, director of national research at EdChoice, and I almost just forgot what my job title was. So that would’ve been a heck of a way to start a podcast and maybe bringing attention to it isn’t any better, but you know what? We’re rocking. We’re rolling. The podcast is happening. This is another edition of our monthly tracker podcast. So every month we, in partnership with Morning Consult Poll, a nationally representative sample of Americans, we oversample parents to make sure that we have a nationally representative sample of parents as well. The poll that we are going to talk about today was in the field from May 12th to May 17th, 2022. So it’s an interesting time in the school year. Calendars vary across the country, but the school year is winding down. For some students that might have been the last weeks of school. Others maybe had another week or two after that. I think generally speaking, stuff winds down in almost every district by the end of May there. So this is a snapshot of looking at public opinion, parent opinion at the end of the 2021/2022 school year, which depending on where you were in the country and some places was back to “normal” for a lot of the year. Some, it was still very disruptive. Some it ebbed and flowed. So it’s going to be interesting to look at this and see what people think. I should introduce who I’m on here with, my colleagues, John Kristof and Colyn Ritter. I think Colyn, this is his second time on the podcast here. Second of many. There will be so many more to come, but this is round two. He did a great job the first time. It was on a probationary period, was like is he going to make it? Is he not going to make it? He held his own, so he’s back. And John, all of you are used to the dulcet tone of his voice already. So Colyn, I’ll start with you. One of the things that Morning Consult has put together for us, we’ve been asking this question since all the way back in March of 2020, which feels like a lifetime ago. How disruptive has the coronavirus been to, and we give people options, your community, your family, your household, or your personal routine? And what we’ve seen other than a peak, as one might imagine in April of 2020, a relatively steady decline. Some ups and downs in various places where we started in March of 2020. If we think of people talking about their community, it was at 48%. It’s down to 31%. So I guess my question to you is two things. So one, what do you make of these numbers? And number two, one of the things that still surprises me, almost a third of Americans are still saying it’s very disruptive to their community. Maybe there’s a lot of people in big cities where it’s still happening, but I’m not surprised at the trend of the number going down, but I was a little bit surprised that that number is still as high. I don’t know if you had the same reaction I did.
Colyn Ritter:
Yeah. First off, thanks for having me, Mike. Always good to talk with you and John and everyone about this important stuff. Yeah. I mean, when I saw those numbers, I had a very similar reaction to you, Mike. I was thinking, I mean, that’s a significant portion of people. One/third of Americans are saying it’s very disruptive to their community. We saw close to 60% in April of 2020, and that seems to make sense. We were right at the peak of things. A lot of unknowns were surrounding COVID, and the communities were closing down as a whole pretty much, especially in big cities. So to see that shrink to one-third is obviously a good thing, but looking at it now, I almost want to ask people to elaborate to see. Because I mean, we, as a group, we’ve talked about where’s our off ramp with COVID discussions. Not that COVID’s not a thing anymore, but we’ve learned. We’ve adapted. We’ve learned to live with it. There’s so much more we know about COVID to the point where I would’ve expected this number to be lower, seeing about one-fifth of all adults saying that their personal routine or their family household routine has been disrupted by COVID. That makes more sense to me, but it is interesting to see that uptick, because a couple months ago we observed it getting lower in terms of community disruption. It was lower than 30%. In the last couple months we’ve seen a little bit of an uptick, but yeah, it’s really interesting. I’m curious to see if this is just a short little increase and then back down below a third of Americans, but yeah, that was my first observation. And then seeing the 80% of people being comfortable with their kid attending school that … I might have segued too early there, but that was the next thing that we asked in terms of-
Mike McShane: That’s A-okay.
Colyn Ritter: That was the next question in terms of COVID that they’re asking. And that was also a little bit of a decrease. So people are becoming less comfortable sending their child to school in May. And granted, four out of five Americans are comfortable, but it was interesting to see maybe there was a little bit more COVID disruption in the last month.
Mike McShane: Yeah, no. And it’s interesting that you brought that up, the differences between individual households in the community, because you could say like oh, I could see where given that coronavirus is still out there, someone could say, “My household was ‘disrupted’ because someone got the coronavirus and they had to stay home or whatever.” And they’re like, “Oh, I’d say it’s disruption, but it’s not what we think of.” The first thing comes to my mind when I think of these disruption things, I think of, oh, stay at home or mask mandates or things like that, where people’s lives are actually changing. But yeah, it’s weird to see the community ones. But no, I’m glad you actually made that segue to schooling, because again, as this school year winds down, I’m hoping that we’re not going to have to ask this question in the fall. That it’ll be like, oh, this is a thing of the past. But as you said, we asked parents, “How comfortable are you with your children attending school right now, based on what you’ve seen, read, or heard about the coronavirus?” And as Colyn said, 80% of folks said that they were comfortable. 18%, they were uncomfortable. The comfortable number went down a little bit, went down four points, and the uncomfortable went up four points. So John, do you think, is this just murmuring? It’s such a high number of people that are there, that this is we might see it go up four points, down four points, but it’s leveled off where it is and there’s always going to be a fifth of the population that’s worried about the coronavirus? Are there things happening that we’re missing? What do you think?
John Kristof: Yeah, it feels to me like we’re probably reaching something like a saturation point here. The comfort level is down a couple points from what it has been the last few months. Unless that becomes a significant trend, I don’t know that that changes too much of what our overall perception of parents’ relationship with the classroom right now. And there’s a couple things that go into that. One, there may be an impact of discussions of another wave of COVID happening. And my understanding is that there were cases in some big cities in the East Coast that were rising quite a bit, and we haven’t really seen whatever was going on over there coming over to Indiana. And the wave that wound up happening, and it’s going down now, wound up being the smallest mountain if you look at the timeline of COVID cases going back to March 2020. So if that was a cause, the case numbers continue to go down again, I would expect this number of comfort with the classroom to not continue to decline. But I think it’s also worth mentioning. We don’t talk about this very often, in part because there’s just so much raw data about it, but we collect open-ended text responses for this question about comfort, sending your kid to the classroom. And there’s always a handful of people, whether they’re comfortable sending their kid to the classroom or not comfortable, there’s always a handful of people who don’t first think of COVID. And most people are interpreting this as a COVID question, in part because where it sits in our survey, and that is our intention. There’s always some people who are thinking about something else instead. Some people just don’t think school is safe in general. Some people are worried about curriculum concerns. There have always been a small minority of people, less than a 10th of the people who provide text responses, which already is a fraction of the people who respond, mention these kind of things. But I don’t know that we’re ever going to get to 100% of people comfortable with school, at least is the way that we’re phrasing the question now. So maybe this is it. Maybe it’s about 80 to 85% of people are comfortable sending their kid to in-person schooling in a post-COVID world. And I think something that’s important for school administrators or just people involved in education in general, if they want their communities to feel safe and feel good about their schools as being a trustworthy and safe place to send their kids, what kind of outreach do they need to do to their community to build that kind of trust? What kind of policies can they implement to get that last 15 or 20% of parents interested and invested and trusting of the school system? Is it safety issues? Is it transparency? Is it better communication? I don’t know research on this, but I think we’re kind of reaching-
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:09:04]
John Kristof: Communication, I don’t know, research on this, but I think we’re kind of reaching the point where schools can begin to see, there’s just going to be a gap here from here on out between the total number of parents we’re serving and the parents who feel good about our classrooms. So, what can we do to improve that?
Mike McShane: No, totally. And it’s interesting you bringing up parent opinion because we’ve started to do kind of a deeper dive in some of our survey questions about parental satisfaction. So not just thinking about the coronavirus individually, though I imagine the coronavirus is wrapped up in this in some ways, but, you know, Colin, we asked this question where he said, “To what extent are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your child or children’s experience?” And we gave people based on where their kids go to school. We have this response from homeschooling parents, public charter school parents, private school parents, district school parents. And it seems to me, two things stand out in the numbers we got. One, is that overall, if you put the satisfied together, so the people who say they’re very satisfied and somewhat satisfied, overwhelmingly people are satisfied. It doesn’t matter what sector that you’re in. So yes, 90% of homeschool families said that they were very or somewhat satisfied, but the worst performing, which is district schools was still at 81%. And again, if you’re selling a product somewhere and 81% of people say that they like it, you probably say you’re doing well. But at the same time, the intensity is different, right? So homeschool parents, 60% of them said that they were very satisfied while only 36% of district parents did. That was at least my trying to square the circle of understanding where all of that’s going on, but I would love to know what you saw when you looked at those.
Colyn Ritter: I really like looking at the trend lines with each school type of parent and seeing the very satisfied, because there’s a couple patterns there. Private and homeschooling parents are typically… The majority of them are very satisfied, or at least 40% of them are very satisfied. So that’s a significant number. And then you’ll see, like you said, district level parents, they are typically the least likely to say they’re very satisfied when it comes to their kids’ schooling. And then charter schools, their trend is actually… It made me laugh when I looked at it because one month you’ll see them and they’ll beat out everyone and they’ll say 65% of them are very satisfied, and then you’ll look next month and they’ll be just above district level parents and like one third of them will be very satisfied. But overall, when you look at it, when you combine overall satisfaction, like you said, Mike, you’d be hard-pressed to find district school parents, at least three fourths of them are saying that they’re somewhat or very satisfied. Their overall satisfaction levels are above 75%. And then you can put that in perspective with the other types of parents and they’re almost always above 80%. So it is interesting to see when you break it out like that, when it comes to very satisfied and somewhat satisfied. But like you said, if you were to take this by itself and look at it, you’d be like, “Wow, people are pretty happy or at least somewhat happy with their school performance, with their child.” I think it’s a good thing overall, another segue here. But the next question that we offered, like grading their school, that was super interesting. It was the first time we asked it, and I’d be curious to hear what you and John would have to say about that, but it corresponds well.
Mike McShane: No, I think that’s right. So as Colin said, we asked this kind of drill-down question, so asked parents to say, “In thinking about the school your child attends right now, what letter grade would you give it?” And if we look at all school parents, 36% gave their child’s school an A, 40% gave a B, which I think, as Colin pointed out, lines up roughly with satisfaction levels, 14% gave a C, 3% gave a D, and 3% gave an F. It varies a little bit based on the age of their students. And there’s probably some variation. We asked a second follow-up question where we said, can we pull apart what’s going on there? We asked about facets of the school, so their use of technology, the professionalism of their staff, et cetera, and there was a bit of variation in there. I don’t know, John, there’s a lot of numbers in some of these graphs that morning consult put together for us, so even looking at the total school grades, or as we drill down to those various sections, is there anything that stood out to you?
John Kristof: Overall, you see a lot of satisfaction with parents’ schools that they send their kids to, and that just lines up with what we have seen when we have these bigger questions, “Are you satisfied with your school overall?” Most parents will say yes with a noticeable difference between where their kids go to school. As Colin just mentioned, private school parents very consistently have higher satisfaction rates than district school parents, for example, but it would be inaccurate to say that district school parents are overall unsatisfied with their kids’ schooling. And so, given that, I think if you want to understand where schools could maybe serve families better, or where families maybe are not getting everything that they’re looking for in a school, it’s important to look at the rankings moreso than the numbers themselves, because we know that the baseline is going to be pretty high. One easy one that I actually don’t really have a good answer for is that the younger the child is, the more positive parents are going to feel about their kids’ school. And that just lines up with what we see in other questions. For example, we have a question asking parents how they feel about the overall direction of K12 education in their community, in their state, and in their country. Consistently, parents of younger kids are significantly more optimistic than parents of high schoolers. I could only speculate as to why that is, whether the parents of younger kids, the needs are simpler and satisfaction is more straightforward? Maybe their kid comes home with less stress. I am not a parent of a high schooler or an elementary aged kid so I really can only speculate, but that’s one thing to maybe keep in mind that people involved in high schools should think about what are we not providing that elementary schools seem to be able to be providing, that provide higher satisfaction rates? And then we asked about how parents feel about their school’s use of technology, subject instruction. Those are the two categories that have over 40% of parents giving an A ranking for their school. That means that they trust their school to provide the resources that their kids need to succeed. That’s what I connect the technology to, and they trust their school just to teach well. So, that is where parents have the most trust and satisfaction in schools, and you can make an argument that is the foundation for everything else when it comes to school. The areas that parents are least satisfied, at least in the sense of categories that have the lowest amounts of A or B grades that parents give, are extracurricular activities, discipline and electives. Not core, reading, writing, arithmetic subjects. So, with extracurricular activities and electives there, to me, when I see that, suggest that parents wish that schools could be more tailored to their kids’ particular interests or needs. Discipline is kind of an issue on its own. I think every parent hopes that kids are surrounded by good, positive influences, and if you have a classroom of 25 kids with all different situations, probably not all of them are going to be a good positive influence on a kid at any particular moment. Every good kid has a bad day as well. So, there can be some dissatisfaction there and schools can maybe look at the social impact of the classroom on individual kids. That’s places to look. It would be inaccurate to say that parents are overwhelmingly dissatisfied with those kinds of things but if you want to look for where schools could be improving, that’s where I would be looking.
Mike McShane: Yeah. On some of those lower ones, it’s an interesting kind of like a third, a third, a third splits, where you have a third of folks give an A, a third of folks give a B, and a third of folks give Cs, Ds and Fs. You know, Colin, I’m a little bit surprised, maybe I shouldn’t be, but the top-performing one or the one that got the most As was use of technology. And hearing as much as we heard about how terrible Zoom school was or any of those things, maybe those are the folks that are giving Cs, Ds and Fs, but people seem to think that schools by and large are using technology well. They’re delivering core subject matter instruction well. It drops off a little bit when it comes to professionalism of staff, but it seems to me like two of the more salient things, folks are kind of happy about. That stood out to me. I don’t know if something else stood out to you.
Colyn Ritter: Yeah. I mean, wouldn’t it be a little concerning if technology was at the bottom of the list, especially with how easily accessible an iPad or something like that is for children to use, to aid their learning? Yeah, that was really what stuck out to me, and I was glad to see that core subject instruction was more than-
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:18:04]
Colyn Ritter: to me. And I was glad to see that core subject instruction was more than three-fourths of parents were giving it either an A or a B. I mean, I think that just lines up well, again, with their satisfaction with school type. If we only polled parents on the direction of K12 education, you wouldn’t think things were as bad. And then you see the general population and you’re around a third of people saying it’s heading in the right direction. It’s just, it’s good to see that parents who are on the front lines of these debates and topics are optimistic or are grading their schools well, and that gives hope from the ground up.
Mike McShane: John, one of these things, and we haven’t talked about it much on the podcast, but I thought given the time of year that this survey was in the field in mid May, we’ve asked this question about testing and whether parents think that it’s too low, too high, or about right. When we asked it this last month, 33% of parents, the most popular choice was about right. About a third of parents said that it’s about right. The next highest was too high at 32%. Oh, I’m sorry. I think about right was 39%. My eyesight is failing me in my old age. See, this is why … I see Colin and John are nodding because they practically, added together, are my age, but they spotted that. So forgive me. But about right was 39%, too high was 32%, and too low, I don’t know how many folks are saying, “You know what we needed in this world? More testing,” but those kill joys were at 18%. But John, when you look at those numbers, I’ve tried to pick out patterns, does it rise and fall around the kind of end of the year? But it seems like the numbers are reasonably stable. I don’t know. What do you make of them?
John Kristof: Yeah, it does feel like the numbers are pretty stable over time, which suggests to me that parents’ opinions on this question is pretty solidified and is not really dependent by what their child is experiencing at school at any particular time. At least for the most part. What we can see from these results pretty consistently is that parents are more likely than not to think standardized testing is too high, but also, that, as you mentioned, pretty consistently the most popular response is about right, which kind of, I think, connects back to parents’ overall satisfaction with subject instruction. I’ve talked about this on previous podcasts before. I think there is a good bit of deference that a lot of parents have to schools and to teachers to get the subject material across. But at the same time, I also think there’s not a lot of awareness of how much standardized testing does go on in schools and how important that is in a lot of states for a lot of reasons. It’s hard to go into because it’s so different from state to state. But very few, somehow still 18%, but very few parents are saying my child needs to be tested and compared against kids across the nation more. They don’t see the benefit to their kid, I assume. That’s what we assume the self-interest in parents answering this question is. There’s a handful of parents who do believe that, and maybe that’s just an overall confidence in what standardized testing can provide and what it can inform schools to do and what it can do to inform policy makers making decisions. So, a little less than one out of five people, I think, have that kind of relationship with testing. I would almost maybe call it a detached relationship with testing. But most parents either don’t care too much or don’t see a lot of benefit for it. There is a really interesting disparity between parents and teachers when it comes to testing. We did a teacher survey in March, and we’re going to do the teacher survey in June as well, but around two-thirds of teachers believe that testing is way too high. That’s the highest level we’ve observed since we’ve started polling teachers. I think it’s a really interesting dispar that about one-third of parents think it’s too high and two-thirds of teachers think it’s too high. I wonder if there’s a debate to be had there. I’m curious to see what the teachers will say in June as well. Because like you said, Mike, this is around the time.
Mike McShane: That’s really good. It will be interesting to compare those. Yeah, for sure. A little pivot. It’s primary season now. It seems like every couple weeks a new tranche of states have reported their primary elections for governor, Senate, House, et cetera. So we’ve been asking now for a couple of months, but I think it’s going to become increasingly salient as the primaries happen, and then there may be a little bit of a lull and then as general elections for the fall start to rev up, but we’ve asked this question, now, thinking about your vote, what would you say are the top three issues on your mind when you cast your vote for federal offices, state offices, and local offices? Now, I don’t think anyone listening to this podcast will be surprised that in the middle of May, the top issue for local, state, and federal offices were economic issues. Shouldn’t really surprise us. But number two were healthcare issues. And then it starts to kind of change. At the local level, education issues comes in at number three. For state offices, it comes in a four way tie for fourth of the one, two, three, four, five, six, seven issues that we have. So we’re at 24% of people added it. And then in federal offices of the seven issues we asked, well, which is economic, healthcare, education, security, energy, seniors, and women’s issues, it came in last at 22%. So to give some sense of perspective, economic issues came in at 51% of people said it was one of their top three issues for federal offices, education issues were only 22%. So, Colin, as you look at this spread, it seems to me that, as these elections happen, education will be on the ballot. Perhaps not as important as other things. But I guess maybe the question would be, how do you see education playing a role in these elections that are going on and that are coming up?
Colyn Ritter: I think local elections, obviously with education being as close to home as it is for many people, I think local elections is going to play the biggest role. That obviously is shown in our polling, with close to a third of adults saying that education is one of their top three issues when it comes to local offices. And then you get a slight drop off when you expand that to state and federal offices. It’s nice to see education closer to the top. Anytime we get these reports, these are one of my favorite questions because it takes education, it puts it in the grand scheme of things and it compares them against other issues that are similarly important and can affect people to a much different degree, depending on where you stand on things. But it’s just good to see education up at about a third, which is the highest that we’ve seen. Because it’s never taken over … it’s never overtaken healthcare or economic issues. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. But like we saw with the teen survey, education was one of the top priorities. For this batch of respondents, special education parents really helped drive the education issue prioritization.
Mike McShane: I was going to go with that because I thought that was super interesting. We do these demographic breakdowns. So we look at of those people who said education was in their top three issues, we had, I don’t know, 20 or something different groups, all the racial method groups, suburban, urban, rural, various education levels, income levels, et cetera, regions across the country. So all of these things are broken down by that. And Colin, as you said, the group that was most likely to put it in their top three were special education parents. 41% of special education parents had it in their top three. That’s up 10 points from April. After that, the next most common were Hispanic respondents, suburban, those in the west, middle income folks, and then independents. Which I thought was really interesting, because there’s been all sorts of hubbub of contentious school board meetings and others, and sort of narrative about what that means for education and things. But the group of people that were most likely to put that in their top were special education parents. I haven’t necessarily seen big protests about special education or anything. So I don’t know whether that’s a … John, if that’s a kind of silent majority thing. Or, when you look at some of those demographic breakdowns, did anything else jump out to you?
John Kristof: Yeah, I do want to highlight special education parents valuing this so highly because they’re not considered a group unto their own very often. Parents in public discourse about education are often lumped together, which I think is a big mistake because I think we wind up missing a lot of important information when we just lump all parents together. For example, special education parents, I think are more likely to have a different relationship with education and schools than your average parent, like non-special education kids. Because, this is partially from my experience too, seeing special education parents, talking to special education parents, where maybe their third or fourth kid … I had a conversation with one last weekend who their third kid was a special needs kid, that changed their understanding and relationship of-
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:27:04]
John Kristof: special needs kid that changed their understanding and relationship of kids in school broadly and forced them to learn about learning. That then changed what they were looking for in schools for kids that followed that third kid as well. A lot of special education parents can’t afford to kind of drop a kid off at the local district school, whatever you’re assigned to, and just kind of not think about it, because there are going to be clear challenges that just, frankly, some non-special education parents might not experience. And so I think we need to keep those people in mind and consider their needs from their schools. Because as we see now, they’re a big voting group, and how their school treats their kids and meets their kids’ needs will be very important to them. I think it’s an important lesson for policy makers and people making the laws themselves. Obviously suburban parents are high up on this list and that’s not too surprising because it’s just kind of an amalgamation of that there’s a lot of self-selection there. A lot of people do move to the suburbs when they have kids because they want to take advantage of particular school districts, and we had that choice. Like to say that is a form of school choice, so good for them, but there’s a little bit of self-selection there. You move to the suburbs because you care about schools. Yeah, no, I think there’s a lot of good information that people can take away from a lot of the demographic breakdowns that we post that’s just really important to keep in mind when you’re having discussions about parents. Especially following a school year where there have been so many stories and narratives about parents want this and parents’ rights. Where a lot of people are seeing these kinds of discussions for the first time, it is important to try to break down what parents, what income bracket, where are they living? What’s their race or ethnicity background, college education, all have pretty significant trends on a lot of education questions. So I think there’s an important lesson for a lot of people interested in this issue here.
Mike McShane: Absolutely. And, John, you kind of ruined my transition because what I was going to transition to this[crosstalk 00:29:02] last. Well, it’s funny. I was thinking about it in my head. We had some weird like mind meld thing, because what I was going to say was we’ve gone 30 something minutes into this podcast without saying the phrase school choice, which no one would’ve expected, and that was going to be my pivot to talking about our polling on school choice. And literally as I’m thinking like, “Oh, hey, I’m watching the clock tick up. This is something clever that I’m going to be able to interject into this.” I’m literally looking at you on the video screen and you say, “Oh, so that’s a kind of school choice.” I’m like, “That’s what I was going to say.” So anyway, so yes, we still went however long that was, we’ve gone slightly more, I’ll say without talking about the numbers that we’ve seen. Now, part of the reason for this is not because it’s not interesting or useful, but frankly we don’t always see a lot of movement in these numbers. So this is where we’re going to kind of end the podcast. So I think, Colin, I’ll give you the last word here, but when we look at, we talk about education savings accounts, school vouchers, charter schools. We ask people whether they support them or they don’t. We don’t give them a description of the thing and then we give them a description of the thing. And generally speaking, we see for ESAs, 67% with a description, 43 without, school vouchers, 62% support with a description, 41% without, and charter schools, 63% support with the description, and 48% without. And all of these numbers are basically unchanged from the last month and frankly unchanged in most of the times that we’ve looked at it. So, Colin, I’m relying on you, newest member of the team, to look at a straight line and tell me something interesting and insightful. So the walk up music is playing as you step up to the plate. So take a cut. Let me know what you think.
Colyn Ritter: Do you think waiting 30 minutes to talk about school choice is like a personal ed choice podcast record, because if so, I mean, that’s interesting.
Mike McShane: We’re going to have to back and check, but that is quite possible.
Colyn Ritter: That’s a good question. I mean, it is hard to make a serious headline about this because the support is always there. I made a joke last podcast that when we asked about how much funding goes into schools or school expenditure, the most I’ll always see is $5,000. That is about as constant as the school choice support, which is no matter whether it’s ESAs, vouchers, charter schools, even open enrollment we’ve started to ask about, the support is well over 50%, it’s well over majority, it’s most of the time up near over two-thirds of people around 70%. And I mean, I always like the with information, without information questions, just because it just goes to show that there are people out there who don’t know or aren’t up to date with school choice as a whole, and the intricacies that come with each policy, even though once you get to know them, take it from me, I’m relatively new in this space. It didn’t take me too long to understand the broad appeal or just like why people would like them. But for example, like ESA is 43% of support without a description. That’s not bad without a description and then you look with a description you’re at exactly two-thirds of people support it, 67%. So maybe there’s like a break glass in case of emergency button, like one day we’ll see the support be like 20%, and we’ll be like, “What happened?” But I would bet a good amount of money that every month we check this, you can bank on at least 60% support with a description for ESAs, vouchers, charter schools. It’s really that simple. They are popular, they help people and it’s hard to dislike them. And when we ask why people dislike them, one of the most popular answers is, “need more information” or “I don’t know,” which is a good summary of the argument as a whole. So yeah, I mean, that’s what I take away when I see these, but it’s good to see the support. It’s as reliable as you can expect.
Mike McShane: Well, John, Colin, a pleasure as always. Look forward to chatting with you all next month as new data. It’ll be kind of fun. We’re going to look at some of these things over the summertime. I think we’re in the process of developing these questions now, so we might try some new things. So hopefully there’ll be some interesting and insightful things. And I don’t know, maybe some of these questions will be a train wreck and we can laugh at like, “Oh, we probably should have asked that question differently,” but I’m going to keep you, our dear audience, in suspense knowing that this is going to happen. As always, please subscribe to this podcast, give it the old five star rating, share it with your friends, shout it from the rooftops. And thank you to the one and only Jacob Vinson who edits this and makes it sound awesome. It was great talking with y’all today. And I look forward to talking to you, our beloved audience, again on another edition of Ed Choice Chats.
PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [00:33:39]