Education Next released their 7th annual survey of the publics attitude towards a range of education issues. You can read their entire survey, here.
We want to draw your attention to the public attitude towards school funding
| Public | Parents | |
| Greatly Increase | 14% | 26% |
| Increase | 39% | 35% |
| Stay About the Same | 40% | 28% |
| Decrease | 6% | 4% |
| Greatly Decrease | 1% | 1% |
We can see from the results above that the majority of people (53%) want to see education funding increase, with a fully 2/3's of parents wanting that. Only 7% of the population want to see education funding cut - the actual policies being pursued by the governor and his legislative allies in the previous 2 budgets. This helps explain his collapsing poll numbers, once it is understood how unpopular this chosen course of action is. To further exemplify how out of the mainstream the governor's policies have been, the publics attitude towards teacher pay is in contradiction to the governor's preferred policy choices (such as SB5). When asked "Do you think that public school teacher salaries in your state should increase, decrease, or stay about the same?
| Public | Parents | |
| Greatly Increase | 10% | 19% |
| Increase | 45% | 37% |
| Stay About the Same | 37% | 40% |
| Decrease | 7% | 4% |
| Greatly Decrease | 1% | 0% |
A majority of the public want to see teacher pay increase. This should sound caution to some of the more extreme school boards around the state (we're looking at you, Fairborn) who are looking to boost their Tea Party bone fides
When looking at the year over year trends, Education next notes
Those supporting such performance pay policies remains at 49 percent, virtually unchanged from the last time we asked this question in 2011. However, resistance to the use of student performance information to evaluate teachers seems to have intensified. Opposition to basing teacher salaries in part on student progress has grown from 27 percent to 39 percent over the past two years.
Similarly, 27 percent oppose basing decisions about teacher tenure on how well students progress on standardized tests, nearly double the 14 percent opposed to the idea one year ago.
[...]
Growing resistance to reform extends to school voucher programs as well. Opposition to expanding school choice through a universal voucher initiative that “gives all students an opportunity to go to private schools with government funding” is higher in this year’s survey than a year ago. Whereas 29 percent of Americans expressed opposition to universal vouchers in the 2012 survey, 37 percent do so in this year’s survey.
The evidence is clear, the corporate reform movements efforts are running out of steam, and support