Martin R. West

Comparative analyses of the influence of public opinion on education policy in developed countries. Although research has suggested a variety of changes to education policy that have the potential to improve educational outcomes, politicians are often reluctant to implement such evidence-based reforms. Public opinion and pressure by interest groups would seem to have a greater role in shaping education policy than insights drawn from empirical data. The construction of a comparative political economy of education that seeks to explain policy differences among nations is long overdue. This book offers the first comparative inventory and analysis of public opinion and education in developed countries, drawing on data primarily from Europe and the United States.

"A comprehensive exploration of 21st Century school politics, Teachers versus the Public offers the first comparison of the education policy views of both teachers and the public as a whole, and reveals a deep, broad divide between the opinions held by citizens and those who teach in the public schools. Among the findings:• Divisions between teachers and the public are wider and deeper than differences between other groups often thought to contest school policy, such as Republicans and Democrats, the young and the old, the rich and the poor, or African Americans and whites.• The teacher-public gap is widest on such issues as merit pay, teacher tenure reform, impact of teacher unions, school vouchers, charter schools, and requirements to test students annually.• Public support for school vouchers for all students, charter schools, and parent trigger laws increases sharply when people are informed of the national ranking of student performance in their local school district.• Public willingness to give local schools high marks, its readiness to support higher spending levels, and its support for teacher unions all decline when the public learns the national ranking of their local schools.• On most issues, teacher opinion does not change in response to new information nearly as much as it does for the public as a whole. In fact, the gap between what teachers and the public think about school reform grows even wider when both teachers and the public are given more information about current school performance, current expenditure levels, and current teacher pay. The book provides the first experimental study of public and teacher opinion. Using a recently developed research strategy, the authors ask differently worded questions about the same topic to randomly chosen segments of representative groups of citizens. This approach allows them to identify the impact on public opinion of new information on issues such as student performance and school expenditures in each respondent's community. The changes in public opinion when citizens receive information about school performance are largest in districts that perform below the national average. Altogether, the results indicate that support for many school reforms would increase if common core state standards were established and implemented in such a way as to inform the public about the quality of their local schools. These and many other findings illuminate the distance between teacher opinions and those of the public at large. About the Research: In partnership with the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the journal, Education Next, authors Paul E. Peterson, Martin West and Michael Henderson surveyed nationally representative samples of teachers and the public as a whole annually between 2007 and 2013."

Accountability, autonomy and choice are now the watchwords of education reformers around the globe. This book presents new evidence from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test on whether students perform better in school systems with such institutional measures in place. It also provides a theoretical framework for considering these reforms and summarizes previous international evidence. The results confirm that various policies promoting accountability, autonomy and choice are strongly associated with higher achievement for students from both disadvantaged and advantaged backgrounds. In particular, choice through public funding for private schools is associated with both higher performance overall and higher equality of opportunity. Providing detailed and rich facets of different forms of accountability, autonomy and choice, this book is unique in its empirically based and internationally oriented treatment of this up-to-date policy topic. It will be of great interest to academics, policy-makers and practitioners, as well as students in education policy and in the economics of education.