The results come from a that polled 1,518 parents of K-12 public school students conducted by the National Parents Union between May 7-11. 

“We can point to the fact that parents still feel good about schools,” said founding president and The 74 contributor Keri Rodrigues “[and] still feel good about teachers … There’s a lot of bright spots around the fact that parents are still fully invested in public education and that — contrary to what we might be hearing from the voucher folks — that there’s no fear of parents completely walking away from America’s public education system and moving towards ‘do-it-yourself’ methods.” 

Vouchers, which let parents use taxpayer money to send their kids to private schools, have in the last several years. At the same time, more parents are experimenting with alternative schooling methods, including homeschooling and microschools. 

The majority of parents (72%) also expressed confidence in their kids’ principals and schools for meeting overall expectations. 

But, according to the survey — dubbed “The Parent Report Card” — as parents considered the outer echelons of the education system, their confidence began to wane. Just over half rated their superintendents and school boards favorably, a figure that continued to drop for state governors (45%), U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona (32%) and President Joe Biden (33%). That last number is lower than the president’s overall 37% approval rating among respondents nationwide, according to a Reuters/Ipsos released June 28.

Rodrigues said this is evidence of the disconnect between families and those in power at the state and federal level. 

“I always encourage [elected officials] to go back and listen to the people who are experiencing what is going on in classrooms: our young people,” Rodrigues said. “If you have a problem with parent and family engagement, talk to the parents and families. They will tell you why they’re not engaged. [You] need to do the work, too.”

There has been a significant gap — averaging 31 percentage points — between parents’ favorable views of their own child’s education and Americans’ more critical take on U.S. education at large since at least 1999, according to almost 25 years of The most recent data from last year’s survey saw the second-largest gap to date: 40 points, second only to the 42-point divide in 2000.  

Megan Brenan, senior researcher at Gallup, credits this almost-record setting number to underlying parisian divides, with Republicans expressing the lowest satisfaction with the public education system at large (25%) to date. This also marked the largest gap in history between Democrat and Republican satisfaction, with a 19 percentage point difference. 

“We’re seeing the biggest partisan gaps on a whole lot of measures right now,” she said, reflecting America’s deep polarization. 

According to last year’s Gallup survey, only 36% of Americans are satisfied with K-12 education quality, matching a record low in 2000. Despite this, parents remain mostly pleased with the education their oldest child is receiving, with just over three-quarters reporting they are completely or somewhat satisfied, numbers that reflect historical averages. The vast majority of parents also support their children’s teachers, with the majority rating their performance as excellent (36%) or good (37%).

“This is kind of a pattern that we see over a number of measures where Americans are much more likely to rate national measures lower than their own,” Brenan said. “So we see this with crime: that people say, ‘Oh, crime in the U.S. is at a high, but my neighborhood is fine.’ We see it with their own congressmen. It’s very much like, ‘I hate Congress but my congressman deserves to be re-elected.’ And if you look at the trend in education, then you also see this is something which has held up throughout …. I think it’s just [that] they can relate more to their own personal situation than they can to the national picture.”

One reason why may be that schools are often the centers of communities, said Joshua Cowen, an education policy professor at Michigan State University. 

“That’s where you start to see this point of personal contact that matters to people in terms of what they want to protect,” he continued. “When it’s framed as this large, bureaucratic, nebulous system, then that’s where I think you see these negative results. But [it’s different] when you’re talking about your community, your kids, your football team, maybe your employer or your spouse’s employer.”

When thinking about the role these views on education might play in November’s presidential election, though, Brenan, the Gallup researcher, argued that there are a number of other issues eclipsing education in voters’ minds. 

“The fact that they’re personally satisfied with their own children’s education might have something to do with that,” she said, adding, “I think education is always there as an issue kind of in the background. And unless these other matters — like immigration and the economy — are solved before election day, I’m not sure this is the year that education is going to get its due.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to the National Parents Union and to The 74.

The results come from a that polled 1,506 parents of K-12 public school students conducted by the National Parents Union between Feb. 6-8.

For the past four years, the organization has surveyed parents leading up to the State of the Union address, “because we want parents to be able to give their own State of the Union,” said founding president and 74 contributor Keri Rodrigues. All questions are written by parents who serve on the group’s Family Advisory Council, composed of delegates across the country that represent different intersections of American families.

While some results were unsurprising — like parents welcoming more financial support — they are still important, according to Rodrigues, because they serve as an essential message to policymakers about what parents care about. “We have these little, ‘We told you so moments.’ I think this is yet another one.”

Rodrigues said that voters are repeatedly and inaccurately told that parents are angriest about hot-button, culture war issues.

“We have consistently said to people, ‘Please, listen. Look at the data …’ It is clear,” she said.
“Parents are struggling with economic issues … Inflation, the cost of living, people living on the edge. Parents and families are scared and they’re hurting.” 

“We are obviously focused on education justice but economic justice for families is equally important to us,” Rodrigues added later, “because we really deal with the intersectional issues … we just don’t think you can separate those things.”

Overall, surveyed parents ranked K-12 education as the third most important issue for the president and Congress to address, behind the economy and immigration.

“In education, we think we’re the center of the universe, and we’re not,” Rodrigues said. “We’re a piece of the puzzle. It’s relevant, it’s in the mix, it’s definitely a concern. But we have to understand the intersectionality of the larger political context and where we fall in it and how it competes with other issues for the average voter and for the average American family.”

According to another released by the organization in November 2023, voters trust Democrats slightly more on education and Republicans by a small margin on the economy. The majority of parents reported wanting policymakers to work together to find bipartisan education policy solutions, even if it means compromising with people they disagree with.

“It just makes me crazy that our elected officials don’t listen,” Rodrigues said. “There are really big, important things that American families want us to do,” including the child tax credit, which during last week’s State of the Union, and stronger, evidence-based reading and literacy programs. 

“We can do big things,” she continued. “We can have unity … The majority of us can agree on some big, important things.”

Of parents surveyed in February, 87% were in favor of expanding the child tax credit and 85% were in favor of expanding subsidies to reduce health insurance costs. The vast majority were also in favor of providing funding directly to families of K-12 public school students to help them pay for supplemental resources such as tutoring. 

The survey did not include questions about more controversial vouchers, which let parents use taxpayer money to send their kids to private schools. The National Parents Union is known for both its criticism of traditional public schools, including teachers unions, that is sometimes seen as aligning with pro-school choice education reform forces and for elevating the voices of parents, especially lower-income parents of color.

Over 80% of surveyed families want the federal government to support all K-12 public schools via counseling and mental health services, free school lunch, free, high-quality preschool programs and increased funding for schools in low-income communities.

Among the 484 parents who responded to demographic questions, 27% consider themselves to be conservative, 24% liberal and 43% moderate. They were also socioeconomically and geographically diverse. About half of respondents were white, 15% Black, 24% Hispanic or Latino and 3% Asian. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.

While the vast majority of school districts across the country have received additional federal funding to address COVID-related challenges, only 27% of parents reported having seen or heard anything about how these ESSER dollars were being used in their kids’ schools.

Just over 70% of parents, though, did report that their child’s public school had provided laptops or tablets for students since 2021 and about 45% said schools were offering additional tutoring or counseling services, which could have been supported by pandemic relief funds.

The ESSER funding results, Rodriguez said, reveal that parents did not get the voice they were promised in how that money was spent and that “a lot of things that we actually wanted — like additional mental health support — were not realized.” 

“Are we whipping laptops and chromebooks at kids? Hell yes we are. Is that necessarily a good thing? I mean a lot of parents would argue that that’s not actually getting us to the outcome.” 

Pro cell phones, wary of social media use 

To help inform the survey’s focus, Rodrigues said the National Parents Union presented data to their Family Advisory Council around student use of social media and its impact on mental health. 

A new understanding emerged from these discussions: Parents view cell phones and social media as separate issues, yet the two have become convoluted. This reframing was a lesson for her, she said, both as president of the organization and as a mother.

This same distinction was borne out in the survey results, she said: Parents want their kids to have access to their phones during the school day so that they can stay in touch with them, but they also recognize the dangers of social media and its negative impact on their children.

The top reasons kids use their phone, according to surveyed parents, is to contact family members, play games, contact friends, listen to music and take videos. A majority of parents (65%) also reported that their children used their phones for social media and 83% said there should be a minimum age limit on when kids are allowed to have their own social media accounts, with the largest share (20%) citing age 13. Just under 30% of parents said their children spend somewhere between four and five hours a day on their phone. 

Despite social media concerns, nearly half of parents said their child’s cell phone use had a positive impact on them and an additional 42% said phones have about an equally positive and negative impact. 

Parents listed a number of reasons they want their kids to take phones to school, with about 80% saying it was so they could use it in case of an emergency. About half of parents said it was an important tool for coordinating transportation to and from school, and 40% said they want their kids to be able to communicate with them about their mental health or other needs throughout the day. 

Just over half of parents believe that kids should sometimes be allowed to use their cell phones in school, while about a third believe students should be banned from using phones unless they’re needed for a medical condition or disability. There was very little parent support for locking up students’ cell phones in secure pouches or containers. 

“I think it goes back to something that we have been talking about since the beginning of the pandemic and the Great Parent Awakening,” Rodrigues said, “which is that the implicit trust that parents have in schools— that they’re going to tell us what’s going on and the communication — a lot of that has eroded. And that’s not toothpaste you can put back in the tube.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to the National Parents Union and to The 74.