Back to School Poll Finds School Parents Hopeful
With autumn rolling around, students are heading back to the classroom for a new school year. Back-to-school is an opportune time to take stock of how school parents are feeling. This fall, most parents are feeling hopeful about the future, and their optimism towards K–12 education is rebounding slightly after hitting serious lows throughout the summer.
In partnership with Morning Consult, EdChoice surveyed a nationally representative sample of American adults 18 and older (N = 2,252) from August 2-6, 2024. With additional sampling, we obtained responses from 1,290 parents of children currently in K–12 education.
We included a range of questions asking adults and school parents about their outlook on K–12 education and the future, including their priority issues in federal elections. We also introduced new questions about how school schedules align with parents’ work schedules and parents’ opinions on how education savings accounts should be used.
Read the full report here.
A new school year signals a fresh start. Looking ahead, 64% of school parents feel hopeful about the future. A majority of parents also feel a sense of purpose (56%), optimistic (54%), and happy (52%). Across these measures, parents expressed more positive feelings about the future—by about 10 percentage points—than non-parents. Compared to August 2023, school parents feel similarly positive at the start of this school year. Non-parents are 5-8 percentage points more optimistic than last year across all metrics.
In August, a larger proportion of parents reported feeling very satisfied with their children’s experiences in school. Among district school parents, 36% were very satisfied with their child’s school experience, up from 33% last month. This uptick is even more pronounced among private school parents. In August, 63% of private school parents were very satisfied with their child’s school, up from 54% in July.
Similarly, parents’ positivity about K–12 education at the state and national level has finally slowed its freefall after declining since April. 35% of parents believe that education is going in the right direction at the national level (compared to 29% in July), and 44% feel positively about education at the state level (compared to 38% in July). As usual, more parents feel positively about their local schools, with half of parents (50%) saying their local schools are going in the right direction.
With November’s elections on the horizon, we also asked both adults and parents to select their top three issues for state and federal voting. While both groups selected economic and health care issues as two of their top concerns, parents placed much higher importance on education issues. 59% of school parents picked education as one of their top three voting issues for federal elections, compared to only 36% of all adults.
Reflecting on these findings, it’s clear that school parents are feeling a bit more hopeful about K–12 education now that the school year has kicked off. Additionally, education will be a key issue for parents when they head to the polls in November.
Read the full report here.
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.
