2024 Wrapped: What Polling Revealed About America’s Thoughts on Education

As 2024 comes to an end, it is a good time to hit rewind and take stock of the year. Over the course of 2024, we at EdChoice have released 15 nationally representative polls of American citizens, parents, teachers, and teenagers. In total, we received responses from about 28,800 individuals. 

So, we have a good picture of what Americans thought about education this year, and we found a few trends worth highlighting. You can also check out our most recent poll, from November.  Here’s our 2024 polling year in review. 

The Biggest Hits: Top Education Stories of 2024  

1. Morale crisis 

Americans and school parents are not feeling optimistic about the direction of K–12 education in the U.S. as we close out the year. In our most recent survey, about a third of parents (36%) and Americans (27%) said that education is going in the right direction at the national level. These numbers remain roughly the same as in January 2024. That said, over the course of the year, opinion hit rock bottom.  

In July, only 21% of all adults and 29% of school parents thought education was going in the right direction nationwide. Over half (57% and 56% respectively) said that education was on the wrong track. This snapshot is the most pessimistic mood we’ve captured in the four years since we started asking this question in January 2020. So, while public opinion seems to have recovered somewhat since the summer, public faith in K–12 education has been shaken this year.  

The same pattern is true among teachers. In our spring teacher survey, optimism towards education hit record lows, with only 19% of teachers feeling positively about education at the national level. A bleak 15% of teachers said they would recommend the teaching profession to a friend. In our fall survey, teachers’ opinions on the direction of education rebounded slightly, paralleling the general public.  

2. Absenteeism 

Another big story this year is a repeat from 2023’s top hits: absenteeism. For the last couple of years, an endless slew of articles have observed the conspicuously slow post-pandemic recovery when it comes to keeping students in the classroom. The 2022–2023 numbers are in, and an estimated 25% of students were chronically absent last year. While improvements are happening, they’re not happening quickly. 

Our polling highlighted an interesting discrepancy between parent and student perceptions of absenteeism. In September, only five percent of parents said that their child missed more than 15 days of school last year. In our August teen survey, 18% of teens self–reported missing over 15 days of school, relatively unchanged from August 2023. Our polling suggests that parents might not be not fully aware of how often their kids are missing school, lining up with what other surveys have found. 

Explanations abound for these high rates of absenteeism, ranging from transportation to mental health to issues of school safety. Teens speculate that their absent classmates find school boring or stressful. They suggest combatting absenteeism with more learning focused on building practical life skills, as well as improved access to mental health services.  

3. Cell phones in schools 

Restricting cell phones at school is a phenomenon taking the nation by storm in 2024. According to research from Education Week,18 states passed laws or enacted policies to limit cell phone use in schools—and 17 of those policies were established this year. 

It’s too soon to say how these new cell phone bans will play out. What’s already clear is that parents, teachers, and students are not on the same page when it comes to cell phones in schools.  

About two–thirds (67%) of parents support allowing students to have cell phones at school, but less than a third (29%) want cell phone use in the classroom. (These numbers are from our November 2024 poll but have held steady all year.) 

Only 56% of teachers support students having cell phones at school, and only 17% want cell phones in the classroom.  

In comparison, 90% of teens want cell phones at school and 63% want them in class, according to our August teen survey.  

If schools want to make cell phone restrictions work, they have a needle to thread between these three different stakeholder groups. 

Fresh Finds: New Trends in 2024 

1. Microschooling 

Microschooling is the latest trend in alternative learning models, and it grabbed headlines this year. The exact definition of microschooling is hard to pinpoint, partially because it’s still evolving as entrepreneurial school leaders invent new ways of starting microschools. In general terms, microschooling is an approach to education that focuses on a small learning environment and often uses an alternative schedule to the traditional five-day in-person school week.  

Earlier this year, we asked school parents about their interest in microschooling. According to April numbers, about one in 10 (10-14%) parents stated that their child attends a microschool, depending on the definition of microschool used. School parents tend to identify more with broadly defined microschooling, described simply as a small learning environment enrolling fewer than 25 students. They are less interested in microschools defined as a “nontraditional” approach to education used by homeschool, private school, and charter school students.  

Still, even with a more restrictive definition of microschooling, 10% of parents said they’re currently using it, and an additional 23% of parents would be interested in learning more. This trend is something to watch next year.  

2. Election year  

One inescapable story this year was all the fanfare that comes with an election year. For our part, this November we asked Americans and school parents how education ranked in their priorities for voting in elections.  

Both Americans and parents ranked economic matters as the top issue on their mind when voting in state and federal elections. Perhaps unsurprisingly, school parents place much more importance on education issues compared to other adults. School parents indicated education as their second top concern in both state and federal elections, whereas it was a distant third or fourth voting priority for all adults—behind healthcare and security concerns. 

3. Campus protests 

Pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses made waves this spring. Thousands of students were arrested, numbers that haven’t been seen since Vietnam War protests 50 years ago. Turmoil on campus is a complicated matter for parents of prospective college students to contemplate. 

In May, we asked school parents how the current campus protests affected their thoughts on post-high school options for their children. About one-third of parents (29%) said the protests changed their thinking completely or a lot, while 39% said that the protests had little or no impact on their plans. Similarly, parents were divided on how the protests changed their views of higher education. Twenty-one percent of parents felt more positively and 27% felt more negatively, and a majority of parents didn’t change their views on college or were unsure how they felt about the protests. 

Fan Favorites: What Parents Want 

1. School choice  

School choice support continued to be extremely consistent in 2024. School parents want options on where they send their kids to school. 

Support among parents for education savings accounts (ESAs), vouchers, charter schools, and open enrollment (when given a description of each policy) has held steady at around 70–75%. The general public is also very supportive of school choice policies, with roughly 60–65% of Americans reliably supporting ESAs, vouchers, charter schools, and open enrollment. 

As usual, ESAs continue to be the most popular school choice policy. This November, 76% of parents and 65% of all adults expressed support for ESAs. Parents also continue to show a preference for universal ESAs that are available to all families (70%) over ESAs determined by financial need (51%), though both options garner more support than opposition overall.  

ESAs also continue to be a policy that attracts bipartisan support. Taking a closer look into our survey demographics from November, three of the most supportive groups were self-identified progressives (73%), Democrats (70%), and conservatives (70%). 

2. Advanced education options 

In light of the perennial controversy surrounding advanced or “gifted” education programs, we polled parents to gauge their feelings on advanced education options.  

As of May 2024, about half of school parents (45%) reported having at least one child taking an advanced, gifted, or honors class at school. That’s a significant proportion of families who are personally affected by whether gifted education programs are made available in schools. An even greater two-thirds of parents (64%) said that it was very or extremely important for their child’s school to offer advanced academic classes.  

Most strikingly, over a third of all school parents (34%) and over half of private school parents (52%) said they would be extremely or very likely to move their child to a different school if their current school eliminated advanced education options. Parents want advanced academic classes at their child’s school, and a sizeable number of parents are willing to back that up by switching schools if necessary. 

3. Trustworthy education decision–makers 

Especially timely in an election year, we asked school parents who they trust to make good decisions on education. By far, this November, parents reported trusting teachers the most (88%) to make decisions about education. This is closely followed by other parents (83%) and school principals (82%).  

School parents tend to trust governmental decision-makers about 10 points less, with roughly 70% of parents saying they trust state departments of education, district superintendents, local school boards, and the U.S. Department of Education. In dead last is state legislatures/governors, garnering trust from only 59% of parents. 

One key distinction here is that these percentages combine parents’ responses that they trust these groups “a lot” or “some.” If we only include where most parents place “a lot” of trust, the field narrows considerably to mainly teachers (46%) and parents (40%). In short, school parents want decisions about education to be made by the people closest to their children’s learning. 

To sum things up, it’s been an eventful year in the world of K–12 education. Thanks for sticking with us through it all. In 2025, there are definitely up-and-coming stories to keep an eye on. Overall mood towards the direction of education hit some serious lows in 2024, and we’ll have to wait and see how Americans and teachers feel next year. Other stand-outs include the growing wave of states adopting curriculum content restrictions, as well as declining public school enrollment. As always, we’ll be here to cover how Americans, parents, teachers, and students feel about the latest issues in K–12 education.  

Visit the EdChoice Public Opinion Tracker site to access past reports, crosstabs, questionnaires, and our national and state dashboards. All are updated monthly. We also provide a more in-depth description of our research and survey methods.  

Our K–12 education polls archive is updated on a rolling basis, roughly a few times each month. Please don’t hesitate to let us know if we are missing any surveys, or if there are accidental errors.