Obama Sways Public Opinion on Education

In the first survey on education policy, a guy from Arizona said he supported merit pay. A year later, he changed his mind and decided that he wasn't so in love with the idea anymore. A third time around, he wasn't so sure.

Not to pick on Arizona, but people all over the United State change their opinions on issues such as merit pay, single-sex schools and national accountability standards. Overall, though, their net opinions stay the same. Go figure. Apparently the opinion swappers cancel each other out.

In fact, they're often influenced by President Barack Obama's views, a public policy report about a controversial issue or some little-known facts. What's that got to do with anything? A lot. Everyone knows, or should know, that people change their minds and are influenced by politicians or research.

But that individual shift is paired with a stable overall public opinion, and that's the kicker, as Education Next and Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance found in their latest survey experiment.They analyzed their last three surveys of public opinion starting in 2007 and discovered some interesting data that they fleshed out in The Persuadable Public.

While a "substantial share" of the public is willing to reconsider its views on public school policy, whether they change depends on a few factors:

• Presidential appeals persuade fellow partisans more than people in other parties
• Research findings impact survey respondents the most when the issue is unsettled
• When people hear about basic facts, they tend to give them more weight if the facts are not well known

The researchers wanted to see why individual opinions constantly changed, but the general consensus stayed the same, so they split more than 3,000 respondents to their 2009 survey into randomly chosen groups. They asked the first group to share their opinion about a policy issue while they gave the other groups some extra tidbits of information such as the president's position on the issue, a research finding or a fact.
 

The results

They asked the different groups questions about merit pay, charter schools and school vouchers.

Merit pay

• Forty-three percent of the Americans who were asked an objective question said they supported "basing a teacher's salary, in part, on his or her students' academic progress on state tests." Twenty-seven percent opposed the idea, and 30 percent weren't sure.
• In contrast, 56 percent of respondents in another group supported it when they were told that the president's view was positive and 21 percent said they wouldn't.
• When another group found out that research evidence cast merit pay in a positive light, 49 percent of them said they supported it, while 23 percent opposed it.

Charter schools

• When they weren't given any information, 39 percent of the respondents said they would support charter schools while 17 percent were against it, and 44 percent were undecided.
• For the group that heard the president's positive view of charter schools, 50 percent supported it, 14 percent didn't and 37 percent weren't sure.
• In the research evidence group, the participants heard that research was positive, and 53 percent approved of them. Eleven percent didn't support charter schools, and 37 percent didn't support or oppose them.

School vouchers

•  Thirty-five percent supported school vouchers, 42 percent didn't like them and 24 percent didn't go one way or the other in the control group.
• When the second group heard that the president didn't support school vouchers, 52 percent of them also decided not to support them. Twenty-four percent did agree with the concept while 23 percent didn't support or oppose them.
• As for the third group that heard that research evidence on the vouchers is negative, 48 percent of them opposed, 25 percent supported and 27 percent didn't go either way.

We'll let the researchers wrap this analysis up for themselves:

"Our findings suggest that a well-publicized stance taken by a popular president on an education issue might shift the opinions of large segments of the American public. Similarly, scholarship appears to be a potent weapon for groups with policy agendas they wish to pursue, as the committed can broadcast research findings with great repetition. Indeed, any group that seeks to change public opinion without gathering research to back its positions is leaving a flank unprotected. Finally, advocates are well advised to search for facts the public does not understand, and then to communicate those facts as widely as they can."