And while just 19 states now offer taxpayer-supported , which allow families to spend public funds on the school or program of their choice, the policy has a growing constituency: Nearly half of parents strongly support it. 

Meanwhile, the constituency for annual testing is withering, with just 29% of parents saying they strongly support it.

The new revelations come from the second edition of , conducted by the policy group 50CAN, which operates chapters in 12 states. It surveyed parents in 50 states and Washington, D.C., and found small but significant improvements across five key educational areas, including satisfaction with school quality and student mental health support. 

The findings paint a slightly different picture than the one we’re accustomed to seeing in accounts of crowding into school board meetings: 47% of parents now say they’re very satisfied with their child’s school, up from 45% in 2024. Satisfaction by low-income parents jumped five points, from 41% to 46%. 

Likewise, 41% are very satisfied with the kind of emotional and mental health support their children get at school, up four points from last year, with significant gains in critical transition grades such as sixth and ninth grade, both up about five percentage points. 

“Overall, my takeaway is we shouldn’t get distracted by all the headlines, all the crazy stuff going on in the world,” said Marc Porter Magee, 50CAN’s founder. “We have a very reasonable shot at making education better in ways that will meaningfully improve kids’ lives. We’re generally heading in the right direction.”

Among the findings: 

• Participation in tutoring rose from 19% to 24%, with the income gap nearly cut in half, from nine percentage points to five, but low-income families still struggle to get their kids tutoring, largely because of cost and transportation;
• 86% of parents now favor free tutoring, while 80% support free summer camps; 77% back open enrollment and universal ESAs;
• 49% of parents want their children to get a four-year degree, but only 38% believe it’ll happen, with college affordability a huge sticking point; 
• While more high-income children participated in summer camp, overall participation dropped two percentage points; among low-income kids, it dropped three points; kids from high-income families are now twice as likely to attend, 61% vs 27%.

On the summer camp statistics, Porter Magee said, “My takeaway from that is there’s still a need, and high-income families are really leaning into that. But low-income families are getting hit with affordability.”

Responding to the findings, Keri Rodrigues, president of the , said, “Parents are fighting for a school that works for their kid, but when higher-income families can buy tutoring and summer learning while everyone else gets waitlists and paperwork, that’s not choice, it’s rationing.”

She noted that the union’s polling shows that just 48% of public school parents say their child is “definitely academically prepared for next year”; 31% say schools didn’t even tell them what skills their child needs.

As for satisfaction with mental health support, a 2024 found that 65% give schools an “A” or “B,” but that 31% give schools a “C” or worse. 

She said her group’s findings on parents’ priorities are clear: “Make tutoring, mental health supports, and quality learning time universal and easy to access, especially for low-income families. If we’re serious about outcomes, we have to be serious about access.”

ESA support rising across political lines

Among the most significant findings, parents across the political spectrum are now increasingly interested in ESAs — 46% of Republicans, 49% of Democrats and 43% of Libertarians and Independents say they “strongly support” the idea, and among self-described members of the Green Party or , support climbs higher, to 57%. In most state-level debates on ESAs, political conservatives are their biggest supporters.

ESAs, as well as open-enrollment policies, which allows students to attend the public school of their choice, now command more support than charter schools, and by a wide margin: 46% to 36%.

Porter Magee said ESAs merit attention as an “anti-majoritarian” school choice policy that appeals to many different kinds of parents, for different reasons.

“If you’re on the far left, you probably don’t feel like your traditional public school and school district represents you and your values perfectly,” he said. “And it’s the same when you’re on the far right. A lot of times, the people who are most attached to traditional school districts are moderates — wealthy, suburban moderates. So it kind of does make sense.” 

Porter Magee said he knows of no other parent polls that break out political beliefs like this, suggesting that conservative policymakers who favor ESAs and other school choice proposals should consider “a strange-bedfellow strategy” that invites Green and DSA-aligned parents. “Maybe they are better allies on some of these issues than we think.”

More broadly, he said, “We should not be writing off the left or the right when we’re trying to figure out the coalition that would actually pass these things.”

Kids who are ‘just not doing a lot’

The survey also broke out responses by about 1,000 parents who are K-12 teachers. It found that they’re significantly more likely to be very satisfied with their children’s school, and that their kids participate in summer programs, sports, community service, dual enrollment, and Advanced Placement/International Baccalaureate courses at higher rates. “They’re just more engaged,” Porter Magee said. “They’re getting more out of their time as students.”

Asked about their children’s grades, parents with kids who get mostly A’s reported that their children were more likely to do 30 minutes or more of homework, spend time with friends in person and read for fun — “all the things we want them to do,” Porter Magee said. D and F students were more likely to play video games, scroll on their phones and access social media, their parents say. 

They also drop out of sports at higher rates, he said. “They’re just not doing a lot.” 

The difference between how “A” and “D” students spend their time isn’t generally addressed in public policy, he said, “partially because we haven’t had the data, partially because we don’t know what to do about it. But I do think it’s an issue, and I think parents see it as an issue.” 

Overall, Porter Magee said, the main finding from the survey is one of slow, incremental progress for kids, whose parents now feel that they have greater access to different kinds of opportunities. But the fact that much of that progress is largely enjoyed by high- and middle-income parents, he said, is problematic.

“How would you create the public systems to make a more equal world, where all of those opportunities are available to everyone?” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to do, and [what] the survey is helping us track.”

put forth a list of close to 500 strained schools as a “wake up call” for districts to plan interventions such as family engagement, high dosage tutoring and address specific community concerns before they “find themselves pushed against a wall” and forced to close schools, said author Sofoklis Goulas, a fellow with the Brookings Institution who built on his prior enrollment research in this latest study with Fordham. 

The study cautioned districts against using the list as a strict guide or framing it as a “bad schools list,” rather, as a starting point for interventions and discussions.

School closures are often and can lead to distrust in the system, particularly when plans target campuses, most often elementary schools, with predominantly Black and brown children.

The study is the first to correlate school performance with enrollment declines, revealing the drops are far from random: Among schools identified as chronically underperforming by their states, those in high-poverty, urban areas, and charter schools lost the highest proportions of students, those “grappling with systemic challenges and resource constraints,” the report stated. 

Goulas’s latest findings suggest family dissatisfaction with schools is outpacing other known drivers such as . 

“Families are essentially rejecting schools that are not serving them well,” Goulas told The 74, adding solutions won’t look the same across all districts – some will be forced to close schools while others may not. He urged leaders to address, “the core problem, which is the disengagement, the sentiment of dissatisfaction from traditional public schools.”

California and New York, hosting the nation’s largest school systems by population, both have about 40 schools on the list of 500. Overall, roughly 5,100 of the nation’s 98,000 schools, or one in 12, lost substantial numbers of students. 

Five are underperforming Los Angeles Unified schools which have lost between 22 and 55% of their enrollment as of 2022-23. Pio Pico Middle School, for instance, lost 261 students since 2019, more than the 212 who remain enrolled. 

Alongside Illinois and New York, California experienced one of the largest heading into 2023. Los Angeles Unified, the second largest district in the country, has established a new office to better support schools’ recruitment and retention. 

But, as spokesperson for LAUSD told The 74 by email, “there are stark realities confronting Los Angeles Unified that transcend what a school system can address such as cost of living, job prospects and statewide economic challenges that are forcing families to leave the city and state.” 

“Our students represent some of the most fragile in the city and are particularly impacted by financial pressures… School closures or consolidations are a measure of last resort which have little to do with finances and more with the type of offerings schools are able to provide.”

In Washington, a multimillion dollar has been credited with bringing back 2,000 kids. Given the financial strain the declines are already placing on districts across the country, some like and have already announced or enacted closure plans. 

Researchers relied on a federal guideline to determine which schools are low performing, using states’ required Comprehensive Support and Improvement schools lists, those with the lowest performance and graduation rates. They caution this metric is not completely reliable, given the variation from state to state, with some updating every year while others only every three years. The CSI lists don’t often account for year-to-year academic growth either, which may be strong and indicate a thriving school community. 

Researchers also did not determine whether students attending these schools have nearby high-quality alternatives in the event their schools close. 

“This is an exposition of the situation… There’s no horizontal solution across the board that we need,” said Goulas. “District superintendents need to find the solution that meets the needs of their community,” he said, adding student demographics, year-to-year growth, transportation and strength of alternatives are some measures that cannot get lost in closure conversations. 

, children whose schools close .  At the same time, when students are moved into larger schools, it means more financial resources, and with them, more extracurriculars or specialty course offerings. 

The best of the worst case scenario is to be honest with families about consolidations or closures and provide 5- and 10-year plans, former Chicago schools chief told The 74 earlier this year.

“I hope that the research that people like me provide can help the districts plan ahead,” Goulas said, “because the less runway you have to make a plan and be prepared, the harsher the decisions you end up making.”