Parent Poll Reveals Support for School COVID-Safety Measures Despite Vaccine Hesitancy, Partisan Polarization: Private-School Parents Report Less Learning Loss, Greater Satisfaction with Pandemic Schooling

The 15th annual "Education Next" survey, conducted in June 2021, yields a host of specific results that reveal one large fact about the current state of public opinion on American education: The public is cautious--extremely cautious. In the presence of a still-circulating COVID-19 virus, a large percentage of parents and the broader public want schools to take strong measures to keep children safe as they return to school. Yet many parents are not ready to risk the injection of a COVID vaccine into their child's arm, even as government agencies testify to its safety and effectiveness. In this article, the authors report on the 2021 follow-up survey to polls of parents of school-age children that was administered in May and November 2020, enabling them to track children's schooling experiences over the course of the pandemic. In late May and June, the authors interviewed a representative sample of 2,022 parents with children in kindergarten through 12th grade. Every parent then answered a series of questions about each of their children. The survey oversampled Black and Hispanic parents, as well as parents with children in private and charter schools, which allows more-precise comparisons between racial and ethnic groups and between school sectors.