In this episode, we share key takeaways from our October 2020 wave of polling as reported on our EdChoice Public Opinion Tracker. For more from the full report, visit edchoice.morningconsultintelligence.com.
Mike McShane: Hello, and welcome back to another edition of EdChoice Chats. I’m Mike McShane, director of national research. And today we’re talking about the latest installment of our public opinion survey tracker. As always, the data that we’re talking about is available on the EdChoice website. So, you can check it out, with all of the stuff that we might not even have the time to get into discussing today. But we do want to take a little bit of time today to talk about some of the key interesting findings that showed up in that report, and on the line, I couldn’t think of two better people to talk about these results. We have Jennifer Wagner, vice president of communications, and making his EdChoice podcast debut, the newest addition to the research team, John Kristof. John, welcome to EdChoice, welcome to EdChoice podcasting. And, Jen, great to be with you today.
Jennifer Wagner: Thanks for being here, everybody.
John Kristof: Thank you for having me.
Mike McShane: Right on. So, for those of you that are unfamiliar, if this may be your first time listening to one of our podcasts, every month we poll a nationally representative sample of Americans. The most recent poll, the one that we’re going to talk about today, was in the field from October 12 through October 29. With our friends and partners, Morning Consult, we surveyed 2,200 members of the general population of the United States, and we did some sampling. Now, we are recording this podcast on Thursday, November 5, a couple of days after the election, in which, you know, polling got some headlines. Some positive ones, but mostly negative ones.
And so we do want to take a little bit of just a moment here, at the beginning, to kind of talk about what we do and how it works. And one of the things that I will say, for those of you that will go to our website and look at the findings, we publish this big PowerPoint slide deck that has all of the findings on it, if you scroll down to the very bottom, to the last slides that are there, we are incredibly transparent with exactly how the poll is constructed, with who we asked.
As many of you who are listening who are political junkies know, one of the reasons that some of the election polls were a little wonky was because when you do a sample, a random sample of Americans, they don’t necessarily always exactly match the demographic characteristics of the nation writ large, and so you do some weighting afterwards. So, if you say there weren’t enough women or there weren’t enough Hispanic folks, or they’re based on a variety of different demographic things. The cool thing about our survey is, in those slides, we actually show exactly what we did. So, it shows how many people we surveyed, what the raw numbers were, and then how those numbers were later adjusted.
So, you can check all of that stuff out. You can check our math, and trust us or not trust us, but we are being transparent in this. Now, I will say one thing that we try to do, as you might imagine, given the topics that we’re talking about, is we try to sample as many parents as possible. So, we’re interested in what the general population thinks, but we really care about what parents think. So, in this particular survey, we oversample, what we call oversampling, making sure that we have enough of them parents, school parents. So, we ended up in our sample of 2,200 people with 659 parents. Now, one of the things that we’ve actually talked about on the podcast before, when we looked at some of the demographic characteristics of those parents, that they didn’t exactly match the enrollments that we see in schools today.
So, how many parents were representing children who attend public schools versus private schools versus homeschooling and others. So, we talk about that a couple of times in the podcast, and, actually, for this iteration of the survey, we worked with Morning Consult because we saw that some of the public school district households were being underrepresented. So, we’ve actually weighted them more heavily. So, we’ve done some adjustment. We’ve looked at the pre-survey quotas so that the proportions were more representative across school sectors. Obviously, all of this is noted in the slide deck that’s in there, but we want to say at the beginning. So, we are striving to make this as representative as humanly possible or as statistically possible. So, with all of that throat-clearing out of the way, we should get into the results. So, one of the ones that I want to start with, Jen and John, for those of you who are following along at home, our Slide Number 5, where we’re talking about the disruption that the coronavirus pandemic has been on families, on communities, and on individual people.
So, we’ve been polling since March every month. And we’ve asked the question, “How disruptive has the coronavirus been on your community, your family, and your personal routine?” Now, these numbers peaked back in April where 56 percent of respondents said that the coronavirus had been very disruptive to their community. Forty-four percent it had been very disruptive to them personally, and 42 percent said that it had been very disruptive to their household. And ever since, these numbers have been ticking downward. So, pretty sharp decline from April to May, and then slowly ticking downward. So, now in this October iteration, only 34 percent said that it was very disruptive to their community, 28 percent to their family, and 27 percent to them, personally. So, I’m interested in tracking now that we’ve had this trend of, let me see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight months. Maybe, Jen, I’ll throw it to you first. As you look at this graph, what do you see?
Jennifer Wagner: Yeah, I mean, what I see is a nation that’s kind of gotten used to the disruption and maybe that’s just become a part of their day, that we’re not fretting over the wearing of masks, we understand social distancing. That’s at least what I’m hoping because I still think, obviously, the outbreak is happening. We reached a peak high single day of cases yesterday. Here in Indiana where I’m located, our cases are through the roof. But I think what we’re seeing in these numbers is that people are just getting used to it. For better or worse, they’re getting used to it.
Mike McShane: John, what are you seeing?
John Kristof: Yeah, I see the same kind of trend that Jen sees. I’ve seen plenty of graphs around the COVID cases over time since March. So, I see a lot of peaks and a lot of dips. And I think it’s just very interesting how steadily this graph I’m looking at here of perception of disruptiveness has declined. So, we had an initial spike back in March and April, and we see concern rising over that time as well. But we had an even bigger spike in July, and that’s actually when we saw our steepest decline yet, and it’s just kind of steadily declined since.
So, what this tells me is that people’s perception of disruption may be more connected toward government action than perception of the threat from the coronavirus itself. Because back in June and July is when we saw a lot of state governments removing restrictions, and people could move about the country a lot more than they used to, and we haven’t really seen any reinstatement of a lot of policies since then, even though cases are, right now, worse than they’ve been at any point in the year. So, this tells me that maybe people’s perception of disruptiveness is more related to government regulation than it is COVID cases.
Mike McShane: Yeah, for sure. One of the things I see, there’s been a lot of our friends, our economist friends, have been talking about this kind of K-shaped recovery. So, when people were talking back in March and April, they said, “Look, we’ll see a V-shaped recovery, which means we’ll see this terrible economic dislocation as a result of the coronavirus, and then it’ll rocket back up.” And, well, it seems to me that we’re seeing now is this thing that they’re more describing like a K-shape recovery, which is that for people on the higher end of the economic spectrum, for people with more of what we might consider white-collar jobs who can work from home, or who are less disrupted by the actual things like social distancing or any of those requirements that are put in place, they’re doing great or maybe even better than they were before, whereas the people whose industries are more affected by… So, these would be restaurants, tourism, manufacturing, so many of these sort of key industries, they’re actually doing much worse.
And so when I look at numbers like this, part of what I see is still having a third of the country saying that it’s very disruptive to their community. I mean, we live in a country of north of 300 million people. That’s like north of a hundred million people saying that this is very disruptive to them. And so part of me wonders if, yeah, that back in April was when everybody was seeing a hit from this. But as these varying sectors of our economy have come back, this is actually much more of an indication of that bottom part of the K, whereas the people who were maybe saying this back in April were more at the top part of the K. More data is always good and interesting to look at.
So, moving on, another one of these things that we’ve talked about a lot on Slide 7, again, for those of you following along at home, just asking questions about people, how comfortable they are with their children returning to school with the coronavirus out there. Here in October, we saw a majority, a very slim majority, about 53 percent of parents saying that they were either very or somewhat comfortable with their children returning to school. And, in the subsequent slide, we actually asked some other questions about, sort of looking forward to the future, when people think that it will be safe. And, again, a slim majority, 51 percent, think that if not now, at some point in 2020, it will be safe. But then, 49 percent of families say that it will take longer, that it will be after January of 2021 in order for children to be safe returning to school. Jen, when you look at those two graphs, what do you see?
Jennifer Wagner: So, I think this is the most interesting set of responses from school parents that showcases just how parents are feeling. And I say that as I sit here and I watch my little iMessage pop up, and I’ve got probably six moms who are texting right now because they’ve got a COVID outbreak at their school, which happens to be one of my kids’ old school. And they’re actually playing out what we see in these slides, which is they’re back in school in person, and they’re all comfortable with that. So, that matches up with probably that 51 percent number of folks or that 53 percent that are fine sending their kids back to school. But if you go back to Slide 6 and you look at what school parents are concerned about, you’ve got a six-point uptick from September to 82 percent of parents being concerned that their kid is going to get exposed to coronavirus at school.
I just got a notification yesterday from my kids’ school that they have a case in the K-4 grade bracket. So, this is what parents are facing. And I think it’s really important to really digest these data, not just as data points, but as feelings. And I think it is reflective of how parents, right now, are somewhat schizophrenic in the fact that they want their kids to go back to school in person, they want to feel comfortable with that, but they are also still very afraid of one or more of their students bringing the virus home and the effect that would have on their families and their friend groups.
Mike McShane: And I think too, I mean, when you look at it, we say that it’s a… I mean, but it’s 53/47. So, I mean, it’s not like it’s 80/20 saying, “Oh, parents are very clearly…” In either direction, they’re either extremely comfortable or extremely not comfortable. It’s one of these things that’s sort of split right down the middle. I mean, John, is this just another one of these things that it’s America in 2020 so everything’s split down the middle, or what’s going on?
John Kristof: It could be really split down the middle, but what I see is a lot of parity in these answers. It’s 25 percent very comfortable, 28 percent somewhat comfortable, 17 percent not that comfortable, balanced with 4 percent not knowing. And then 26 not at all uncomfortable. So, that’s a lot of parity there. And then when we ask when parents will think the outbreak will be controlled enough to send students to school, we have five options, and the options are fairly decently split. 15 percent, 16 percent, 20 percent, 38 percent, 11 percent. What I see is a lot of people just have a lot of uncertainty. Another way of interpreting a 50/50 split is maybe people just don’t know and they’re just trying to go with their gut and make the best decision that they can.
I mean, the fact that there’s so much parity there, but such an overwhelming feeling of my child can get exposed to coronavirus at school, back on Slide 6, and an overwhelming feeling of my child might miss instruction time because of a COVID outbreak at school, those are very real concerns, but people just don’t know. They’re trying to make the best decision they can. I think parents are in a really tough place right now. And I’ve joked with people before, I’m really glad I’m not in charge of anything right now, including a child’s education because these are really tough decisions, and it’s really tough to interpret a constantly changing public health environment.
Mike McShane: Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. Well, I’ll tell you two things that haven’t necessarily changed much. We’ve been asking questions about homeschooling since the outbreak started. Back in March, we asked this question, how favorable are your opinions on homeschooling and how has that changed as a result of the coronavirus? And one of these things that I think was surprising, even to us, was this sort of stepwise increase that we’ve seen in support of homeschooling. So, while back in March, only about 25 percent of folks said that they were very favorable to homeschooling, that rocketed up over the summer and it stayed pretty high. Right now, about 36 percent of respondents say that they are very, sort of most favorable option that we give them, and still a substantial proportion of that are still somewhat more favorable. So, homeschooling is very popular, north of 60 percent.
And then another thing that we’ve consistently found is we’ve asked parents, sort of to what John was talking about of dealing with the uncertainty and how parents want to cope with that, we’ve asked them this question, do you think schools should offer one approach to educating K-12 students in the fall or provide multiple learning options? And again, time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time again, we see parents saying, “We want multiple learning options.” The most recent iteration of our survey, we found 66 percent of people saying that, but that’s been very consistent throughout this entire situation.
So, I mean, Jen, is that kind of dealing with all of this uncertainty, dealing with the constantly changing landscape, and, as you’re saying, a school that is humming along one day and then it could be in the middle of an outbreak the next with this crazy incubation period where kids can be sick and we don’t know when it’s pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic, and all of these terms all of us have had to learn. It seems to me that this idea of providing options, needing that flexibility, needing those things are necessary, and that’s what parents are telling us. Am I reading their mood wrong?
Jennifer Wagner: No, Mike, you are reading it absolutely right. And I say that not just as someone who’s reading the tea leaves here, but as someone who’s the mom of a seventh-grader and a third-grader. I will say, on the homeschooling slide, I put a lot of stock in all of our data and our partnership with Morning Consult. I think they’re a great firm. I wonder, on the homeschooling piece, I believe people when they say they’re more favorable. I’m not entirely convinced that parents understand what true homeschooling is. I think there’s been a lot written about and joked about, quite honestly, since the pandemic started about how, “Oh, ha ha, we’re all homeschooling now, aren’t we.” And we’re not. Even when schools go remote, parents are not in charge of the curriculum. They’re not designing every day. They are implementing someone else’s schooling regimen.
So, while I’m heartened to see the uptick in support for homeschooling, I probably would like to probe a little deeper into what people actually think that is. That being said, when you skip ahead to Slide 13, and that’s the data on whether parents think that schools should provide multiple learning options, that to me is the key to everything. And, in fact, after this podcast, I’ll be finishing up a blog post for our medium channel on what this means for the future of the school choice movement. And I know there’s been a lot of talk about whether people will go to different schooling types after the pandemic, whether they will want to be homeschoolers, whether they will want to engage with micro-schooling or keep up with the pods, which I know we’re going to get to in a couple of more slides.
But this slide, to me, clearly shows what we all have known for a very long time in this movement, which is parents want options. They don’t necessarily want to go entirely remote or back in person but we’re talking about that in terms of the pandemic. If we broaden that out and take this slide and extrapolate it to when we get back to “normal,” what does this mean for our movement? Does it mean that we might be able to come up alongside some of these traditional public schools? That parents… We know they’re very open to the concept of an education savings account. But this slide means everything to me in terms of what this moment means for pivoting public opinion toward the idea of more choice.
John Kristof: I find a lot of interest in these homeschooling numbers as well, as, disclaimer, a homeschool graduate myself. Our description of homeschooling, I think, is very important, but I do wonder how much people understood or agreed with the definition of homeschooling. So, we defined homeschooling in this study is something like parents or guardians control and direct the curriculum content and subject matter. So, I assumed that most people would interpret that is a parent guardian controlling what the children are learning and deciding how to best teach kids subject material, whereas if you are home and you’re kind of just facilitating online learning with curriculum determined by a private school, public school, public charter, whomever, that does not meet this homeschooling definition. And, as wonderful an experience I had homeschooling, it is bizarre for me to think about nearly 50 percent of people saying it is likely that they will do homeschooling in the future, giving that definition of determining your kids’ curriculum and such.
But it does make me think of foreshadowing a little bit to Slide 21, I think. This does make me think of pandemic pods a little bit, and we see that in Slide 21. I think it’s 49 percent of respondents say that they are either in a pod or looking to form a pod, and 85 percent of parents who have kids in a pod right now, it’s in addition to and supplementing regular schooling. So, I wonder with this homeschooling response, we don’t really specify an exclusivity of this is like your primary way of doing things, but, essentially, will you direct learning at home, and some parents may interpret that as an addition to things.
And if you’re concerned about online learning, and if you’re a parent who happens to be concerned about your kid falling behind, whatever it is. Maybe you’re just a parent who’s thought a lot more about your kid’s education than you have in years before. Maybe you’re thinking about supplemental education a little bit more, and that would fall into whether it’s a pandemic pod, or you’re doing it independently, or something else, you’re in more control of that. So, interesting results, and I can think of interpreting it a couple different ways, but pandemic pods, I feel like must play into it a little bit.
Mike McShane: Yes. So, let’s get into pods. So, we asked this question, I knew it was something, for those of you that have listened to earlier iterations when we talked about this back in September, and even earlier than that, as John mentioned, and Jen, we’ve been hearing about these pandemic pods. So, again, for those that might not be familiar, it’s this idea of in the wake of the coronavirus, parents working from home but might not be able to provide full-time homeschooling so they would band together with a few other families in order to have homeschooling. And I think exactly what both John and Jen were talking about, we were really surprised. So, we asked this question like, “Oh wow, we’ve heard about these pandemic pods. I don’t know. Let’s ask people. Let’s ask parents how many people are participating in them.” And what we found this month is similar to what we found before, that 31 percent of respondents said that they were participating in a pod.
Another 18 percent said that they were looking for one. So, I mean, we looked at those numbers and said if that’s nationally representative and we ballpark that there’s, I don’t know, 55 million kids, it’s like, wait a second. Are there like 17 million kids in pandemic pods right now? I mean, that would be a like monumental largest change in education ever. So, those of us, even though we might think that pandemic pods are actually kind of a cool thing and that they’re an innovative new educational thing, and it’s great to see the parents are doing it, I think all of us looked at that with like a little bit of skepticism and said maybe. I mean, that seems crazy. When I see those numbers, it seems crazy. So, this month, as John brought up, for the first time, we actually asked the… I don’t know, I have this temptation to call them pod people, but like the pod families, the people who are participating in pods.
So, we asked them this very question because we were thinking before, it was like, well, maybe the people who are participating in these pods, it’s not that they’re doing full-time homeschooling. It’s not that the parents are rotating through and teaching them or they’re hiring some private tutor. But in all of these places where kids are learning remotely, maybe they’re just all corralling the kids in the same place so that folks can work and whatever. And it appears that that is in fact the case. So, of those 31 percent of people who are looking for a pandemic pod, 85 percent say that that is in addition to or supplementing regular schooling. So, most likely that means that kids are enrolled in what we might consider a traditional school, whether it’s public or private, but they are doing some kind of virtual distance learning, whatever. Only 15 percent say that it is a substitute for their traditional learning.
Now, it is interesting, of the 18 percent who are looking to form a pod, perhaps they are meeting with some difficulty because about a third of them, 33 percent, are actually looking for that substitute. 67 percent are looking for one. So, it could be that of that group of people, and again, it could be why they’re still looking and trying to form one, that group sees it more as a substitute. But for the people who are actually podding, it looks like the number is much smaller than what we estimated before. Jen, are you looking at the numbers the same way I am?
Jennifer Wagner: I absolutely am. And I think, again, to me, that this reinforces the idea that I think before the pandemic, parents largely viewed the K-12 education as an or. I can either go to private school, or public school, or charter school. Now, now that we’ve been forced to… Really had our entire landscape shifted underneath us, you see that parents are more likely to embrace the and. And this slide speaks to that directly. I agree with you. Earlier on, I was a little skeptical of those numbers, that we would have 16 or 17 million kids suddenly forming pandemic pods as their primary source of K-12 education. This makes a lot more sense, but, again, also provides us an opportunity, when all of this is behind us, to continue that conversation and ask people, “Look, we get that maybe you want to go back to your traditional public school. But would you be willing to also do a pod for some sort of educational opportunity that your public school isn’t providing?”
Once again, I think this is a gateway to the ESA conversation that we in the school choice movement have been trying to have for a long time, and that polls extremely well once parents understand it. The understanding has been, quite honestly, the missing link in this conversation. Once you tell people, “Oh, well, this ESA could pay for tuition, it could pay for tutoring, you can bank it and use it for higher education,” they’re extremely supportive of that. But I think the practical way of looking at that was really not something parents understood until they were forced to transform that conversation from or into and.
John Kristof: Yeah, these results do make me think of ESAs a lot because what I see in these results, like in and of themselves, is I just see a lot of adaptability. And I pair this with stories that I’ve read elsewhere about parents who have essentially made these groups like this work, whether you want to call them a pod or not. Parents who have come together to, for example, hire a certified teacher and teach the kids. And that’s a pretty privileged option, but it’s something that parents are doing. And it makes a lot of sense in a situation like this, where if your kids are going to be home, it is less of a cost to a neighborhood of families, let’s say. If there are five kids, it makes a lot of sense for parents to spend four days being able to work a normal day, and then take one day out of a week to watch five kids then do online school than it does for each of those parents to kind of have to split time individually throughout the five days of the week.
So, I think what we’re learning is that this is a way people are adapting and it’s a method of flexibility. And if people have additional flexibility with an ESA program to… Maybe if you’re not happy with how your school has done online education, which is kind of its own survey, instead of survey questions of its own, you have the flexibility also to pursue an option even further. And people like flexibility. People adapt well. People are resilient. And I think people are going to see ESAs in a new light with this is a part of my conclusion as well.
Mike McShane: Yeah. And it’s interesting too because I was doing some just kind of back of the envelope math here. So, I think maybe some people who were incredibly bullish on pandemic pods might look at these numbers and say, “Oh, it’s way smaller.” Again, this is all very rough math, and someone who knows more than this can correct me, tweet angry things at me. You won’t be the only person that does that.
So, let’s say these numbers are representative. 31 percent of parents or families are participating in some kind of pod, but only 15 percent of that 31 percent is actually doing pandemic podding the way people talk about pandemic podding. So, what is 15 percent of 31 percent? Again, my back of the envelope math is a little bit more than four and a half so it’s about 4.6 percent of families. Now, look, if we say, again, throwing around the kind of rough number that there’s about 55 million schoolchildren in America, 4.6 percent of that is still like two and a half million kids. To give a sense of scale, we think right now there’s just over 2 million kids in Catholic schools, about 2.1 percent million in Catholic schools. There’s about 2.8 million in charter schools. There are about 2.5 million who are homeschooled right now. So, conceivably, I mean, if this becomes a sector, if we think of podding, not as, oh my goodness, it’s a third of American schoolchildren, but if we do say, “look, it’s maybe about the same size as Catholic schools. It’s maybe a little bit smaller than charter schools.” Like, whoa, okay.
We spend a lot of time talking about Catholic schools. We spend a lot of time talking about charter schools. Spend a lot of time talking about homeschooling. So, if this becomes another one of those options, even if it’s only 5 percent of kids, or 3 percent of kids, or something like that, I mean, that’s not nothing. I mean, that’s still a lot of families that are into this and will be a substantial part of our landscape going forward. And I think exactly the points that were brought up is if we want that to not just be the purview of the wealthy and the well-connected, we got to talk about school choice programs that will allow them to do it.
Now, talking about expanding school choice programs inevitably will probably cause us to talk about teachers unions. Right? They are part of that discussion, public policy and state capitals all across the country. This month, we added a battery of questions. Again, for those of you that have been listening before, with these monthly polls, we ask a standard battery of questions about some general education policy topics, school choice topics, and then we have some flexibility to ask some different questions. Obviously, we’ve been devoting a lot of them to the coronavirus and its aftermath. I look forward to the day in which we can ask other questions. I hope that we don’t have to continue asking these for much longer, but I’m worried that we will. But we do have some flexibility around some other questions as well. And we devoted this month’s questions to questions about teachers unions. And I know, Jen, you played a role in crafting these questions and adding them. So, maybe, could you talk just a little bit about why we asked these questions, what we asked, and what we found?
Jennifer Wagner: Absolutely. And I think we’ve been polling since the beginning of these surveys and asking questions of, not just parents, the general population as well about who they trust to provide them information on K-12 education. And, overwhelmingly, every month we see that other parents and teachers are consistently at the top of those slides. So, what I wanted to probe a little bit more, and this comes up a lot in the public messaging arena, is okay, we know that parents and the general population trust teachers. What I kind of wanted to get at with these questions, which talk about whether or not the teachers unions either represent teachers’ best interests or are teachers unions interest groups and advocates separate from the teaching profession. And I kind of wanted to probe a little bit deeper to this idea that when people talk about teachers unions, most people generally hear that they’re just talking about teachers.
So, this set of questions came back with 57 percent of all adults saying that teachers unions represent teachers’ best interests. And 43 percent said that teachers unions are interest groups and advocates. I do want to stress, we did not put any sort of value judgment on that. It’s just, do you see the union as a separate entity that is separate from the teaching profession, or do you see it as an entity that represents teachers’ best interests? And I was interested in the results. Obviously, there’s 57 percent for the general population, but we broke it down a little bit more. Support for that first argument, that teachers unions represent teachers’ best interests, remain strong among parents at all grade levels. It does dip when you break it down by Republican or Democrat. So, when you get to that breakdown, 51 percent of Republicans see teachers unions representing teachers’ best interests, and 49 percent say that they are interest groups and advocates separate from the teaching profession.
That changes drastically when you talk to Democrats. And 63 percent of them say that unions represent teachers’ best interest and 37 percent say that they’re interest groups and advocates separate from the teaching profession. Again, I don’t know that we can draw any hard conclusions from this question when you wrap it up with our prior questions. But, to me, it’s always a cautionary tale for those folks who want to go out and make the teachers union the bogeyman in the school choice movement and say, “Oh, well, parents could have more options if only the union didn’t exist.” This set of data tells me that that may not be our most effective strategy.
Mike McShane: Yeah, Jen, I think that that’s actually really important. And we did ask a couple subsequent questions. Again, I look at those numbers and, as we do these polls and we do this podcast every month, we just keep seeing these like 55/45. I keep waiting with bated breath for like one 70/30. I’d even take like a 60/40. But there are so many of these things that we just see people are just kind of divided on. And, again, it’ll be interesting, on the website that we have launched, as we develop enough of a sample in individual states, we are populating tables and things so you can see what individual states look like. I would be fascinated to see regional variation in here, like a city, suburb, rural breakdown because, in the news, you hear lots of stuff about teachers unions, but they tend to be…
The Chicago Teachers Union that’s super powerful and the Los Angeles and the San Francisco and in Washington D.C. but, again, most people don’t live there. So, while people who observe education really closely say like, “Oh my goodness, can you believe what the teachers unions in these places are doing?” lots of folks are saying, “Well, okay, Chicago Teachers Union’s going to do stuff in Chicago and it doesn’t really affect me.” So, I look more to what’s happening locally. It is always important to think of that, and like I said, the resources are available on our website to start to break those things down at the state level. And, again, as always on the EdChoice Morning Consult website, we provide all of the cross tab information. It’s the tab in the upper right-hand corner that says Resource Downloads. You can get the whole survey instrument. You can get all sorts of data.
And as I say on every one of these podcasts, researchers out there that are listening, there are papers upon papers upon dissertations upon theses. Seniors in college that need to write a paper, there is more than enough data to write tons and tons of stuff about this. It’s all sort of open-sourced out there. Anybody who wants to use this stuff should. Well, look, there’s so much more and those of you that go look at the slide deck, I mean, there’s something like 63 total slides of information. There’s no possible way… I mean, I would totally enjoy continuing to talk to Jen and John for the rest of the day about all of the things. But I think we have to bring this in for a landing.
I want to thank everybody for listening. Jen and John, I want to thank you for participating. I do have to say, those of you who can’t see this, John, for his podcast debut, is wearing a shirt and tie. Jen and I are rocking the sweatshirts, but John really stepped his game up. And I would like to say you, our dear listeners, that is out of respect and admiration for all of you. So, I think, John, great job on your podcast debut. Jen, a pleasure as always. And everyone who’s listening, look forward to chatting with you again next time on EdChoice Chats.