2014 Schooling in America Survey: Perspectives on School Choice, Common Core, and Standardized Testing. Polling Paper No. 20

The "Schooling in America Survey" is an annual project, commissioned by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice and conducted by Braun Research, Inc. (BRI). The purpose of the project is to measure public opinion--and in some cases awareness or knowledge--on a range of K-12 education topics and reforms. The author and his colleagues report response levels, differences, and intensities for the country, four major regions, and demographic groups. These annual snapshots consider the perceived direction of American K-12 education; the federal government's performance in K-12 education; education spending; grades and preferences for different types of schools; and school choice topics addressing charter schools, vouchers, education savings accounts, and tax-credit scholarships. This report contains responses to two sets of questions with a special focus on standardized testing and the Common Core State Standards, and compares split-sample responses on questions exploring public spending on education; perceptions of political party support for school choice policies; test-based accountability; and the development and implementation of academic standards. All are salient issues in state politics and reflect undercurrents in education policy discussions. This polling paper has four sections: (1) a summary of findings; (2) "Survey Snapshots," which offers charts highlighting the core findings of the project; (3) the survey's methodology, which summarizes response statistics, and presents additional technical information on call dispositions for landline and cell phone interviews; and (4) the survey questions and results ("topline numbers"), allowing the reader to follow the interview as it was conducted, with respect to question wording and ordering.