Teachers versus the Public: What Americans Think about Schools and How to Fix Them

5. Information Corrodes

Iron remains perpetually strong in the absence of oxygen, but when exposed to the open air, it begins to rust and disintegrate. In politics , the iron triangle survives by means of closed doors, secret meetings, quiet negotiations, and unidentified financial contributions. When the public becomes better informed, fresh air corrodes the iron triangle. As the nation witnessed the spectacular collapse of some of its largest financial houses in 2008, calls for more financial regulation increased. The DoddFrank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act soon followed. Similarly, when the public learned of serious damage to beaches and wildlife in the wake of British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, public support for offshore drilling declined and demand for environmental protection increased. When Solyndra, a politically wellconnected and government-assisted solar energy company, found itself the subject of headlines reporting financial troubles and questionable dealings , Congress put federal subsidies for alternative energy companies under tighter scrutiny. In each of these cases, greater public focus disrupted the normally cozy dealings between policymakers and client groups. But does information have the same impact on the education iron triangle? “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,” reform-minded jurist Louis Brandeis once wrote, and information has always been among the levers that education reformers have pushed to build public support for their cause. Horace Mann, recognized today as the progenitor of the modern public school system, shifted power from local school boards to state education officials in the 1840s by first gathering and disseminating education statistics. When the U.S. Office of Education was established in CHAP TER FIVE Information Corrodes 57 1870, its primary purpose was to collect information about the condition of education in the states and territories. Its commissioner asked districts to report the number of students enrolled by grade level, the numbers of teachers and other employees, expenditures on a wide range of school functions, and much more. Even after the Office of Education became a full-fledged cabinet-level department in 1980, serving as chief information officer for the nation’s school systems continues to be one of its core responsibilities.1 In recent years, demands for school reform have been propelled by evidence that U.S. students trail their peers abroad as well as by the wide gaps between the performances of white and minority students within the United States. With the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), every school district is required to report annually the aggregate math and reading performance of students in each of its schools, both overall and within subgroups defined by race and income. In many schools, student proficiency levels have been found to be alarmingly deficient. Advocacy groups have relied heavily on that information to make the case for school reform through research articles, commission reports, high-profile television and film documentaries, online databases that rate the performance of students in local districts relative to that of students in other countries, and even Super Bowl advertisements.2 In light of such efforts, is it possible that information about American schools is so widely available that the provision of any new data would leave public opinion—and the divide between teachers and the general public on education issues— unchanged? That is the question that motivates the analyses in this chapter and the next. Gross Underestimation of Costs Surprisingly, given the collection of detailed information on school expenditures by the U.S. Department of Education, the members of the American public have a poor grasp of the per-pupil cost of education in their local school district or the average salary paid to public school teachers in their state. They grossly underestimate both. As a result, their views on whether more money is needed and whether salaries should be increased change dramatically when they are provided with this basic information. For teachers, the impact of this information is not as great. 58 Information Corrodes School Spending Knowledge In 2007, we asked respondents to estimate the average amount of money spent per child each year in the school district in which they lived. Half of the sample was asked to estimate costs without any help or guidance. The other half, randomly chosen, was reminded that districts’ costs included “teacher and administrator salaries, building construction and maintenance , extracurricular activities, transportation, etc.,” thereby encouraging respondents to think expansively when making their estimates. At the time that the questions...