Parents and School Board Members Speak Out: Thoughts about K-12 Education
Introduction:
When it comes to our children’s education, thousands of forces are at work – molding, shaping, influencing, guiding, and a host of other verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Amongst these thousands of forces are, indeed, thousands of individuals who, every day, make the education system what it is today. When COVID-19 hit, that education system was essentially halted on the tracks. However, even though that metaphorical train had stalled, it did not stall parents’ or school board members’ opinions about how the future of education should look. The Heritage Foundation, along with Braun Research, leveraged this time to assess these opinions of the ‘respondent marketplace’ via a ‘first-of-its-kind’ opinion study from April 2020 to June 2020. This inaugural opinion study is labeled as such because, we had been experiencing a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ Global Pandemic, and K-12 Parents as well as School Board Members had never before been surveyed at the zenith of such a crisis.
Survey Topics:
The purpose of this study was to evaluate K-12 parent and school board members’ respective opinions across various, current issues pertaining to K-12 education. These issues covered a range of categories including: "(1) the 1619 Project and civics education; (2) character education, the Success Sequence, and Restorative Justice; and (3) sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) and life issues in schools."
Methodology:
We surveyed K-12 Parents online and used a list of School Board Members to survey these individuals via a mixed methodological approach (online with phone follow-up).
In the End and Thoughts for the Future:
How powerful are the opinions of K-12 Parents and School Board Members in directing and influencing education curricula and policy? How, if at all, did COVID-19 help or hurt K-12 Education? If you are interested to know more…please see this special report from the Heritage Foundation for details about this study including some data outcomes and the survey methodology (January, 2021).
