The Class of 2024 — students and their schools — began its high school and college experiences dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Social distancing, online learning and uprooted peer connections were markers of an unprecedented, sudden and tumultuous shift in education. In response, in 2020, Congress approved the first of three infusions of , enabling districts to invest in technology, mental health support, infrastructure improvements and greater access to tutoring and enrichment programs. Now, as that $190 billion infusion draws to a , education leaders must plan future budgets without that assistance, and must prioritize responses to voters’ priorities for dealing with new financial constraints.

What are those priorities? Though hot-button issues such as parental rights, book banning and school choice dominated education headlines during the pandemic, an online of 1,300 likely 2024 voters — including parents of school-age children — conducted by The Hunt Institute in summer 2023 found Americans now value very different things. In summarizing the survey’s findings, the institute issued a report titled to bring clarity about what voters agree are the top priorities related to public education. Among those that should guide district and school leaders’ decisions:

Safety

Nearly of voters agree that ensuring schools are free from guns and other physical violence is a top priority. Little learning takes place when students and teachers feel unsafe. Not only did gun violence in schools between 2020-21 and 2021-22, but bullying and unhealthy buildings also . When young people feel unsafe, they are to focus during class than their peers who feel safe — or may skip school altogether. Teachers and staff must be trained to identify warning signs of student disengagement and to employ intervention techniques. But with ESSER money no longer available, states and districts must find local sources of funds. For example, expanded its Behavioral Health Care Professional Matching Grant Program to cover school behavioral health services and provide access to health care for school communities. Wisconsin for school-based mental health programs in its 2019-21 state budget, aiding 120 public school districts with counseling and related services.

High-quality instruction

An overwhelming majority of voters prioritize ensuring that all students have access to well-trained and highly qualified educators and can read at grade level. Some of survey respondents said hiring high-quality teachers is very important, while stressed training and support for educators in the classroom. At a time when nearly of schools had vacancies that went unfilled or were hard to fill in the 2020-21 school year, promising solutions — some started with ESSER funds — are underway. and the District of Columbia are implementing or supporting teacher residencies with promising results. Similarly, Arizona and North Dakota governors issued executive orders creating task forces aimed at identifying promising practices, including data-informed retention programs.

Literacy

Achieving grade-level reading is essential for learning recovery. Though of voters in the survey prioritized literacy, fourth-grade reading scores on the continue to decline. After third grade, students must transition from learning to read to reading to learn, which is crucial for academic success. Fourth-grade reading proficiency correlates to lifetime employment and earning potential — making literacy a priority not only for voters, but for the nation’s economic development.

Research indicates that adults with higher literacy skills are to have better job opportunities and earn higher wages than their less literate peers.

States have aligned legislation with research-based literacy practices. In 2023, implemented policies focused on the science of reading, particularly in teacher training. Research-based literacy instruction benefits not only reading but also math, as the same areas of the brain are for skills in both. For example, high-quality literacy instruction can help students because, as University of Buffalo researcher Christopher McNorgan , the brain’s wiring for reading significantly impacts how it functions in relation to math.

Though federal ESSER funds must be allocated by September, the benefits and new practices that they paid for must continue. The U.S. Department of Education should consider compiling and sharing promising practices begun with ESSER investments, including teaching support, high-dosage tutoring, school safety, mental health and social services integrated with schools, so local policymakers can consider these examples and build on them.  

Education leaders would benefit from using this opportunity to align long-term goals with voter values, ensuring students have access to quality teachers in a safe learning environment so they can gain the skills they will need long after graduation. 

Dozens of seats remained empty when classrooms fully reopened in the 2021-22 school year. Approaches to absenteeism in the 22,000-student district were failing, and administrators were forced to rethink how they could bring children back to school. 

The job was assigned to Shadae Harris, the district’s chief engagement officer. Harris and other staff decided to prioritize family engagement instead of using punitive measures — such as referrals to the juvenile justice system — to increase attendance.

“In order to really improve student attendance, we had to make sure that we were designing a system of engagement that really put families at the center,” Harris said.

Lack of family engagement is a national issue, as nearly 1 in 4 students are chronically absent. found that many parents don’t think chronic absenteeism is a problem and are unaware of how often their child misses class.

The poll, released in May by the National Parents Union, surveyed roughly 1,500 public school parents around the U.S.

“They haven’t been told [chronic absenteeism] is a problem,” said Keri Rodrigues, the organization’s co-founder. “They haven’t really defined what it is for them, so they’re not seeing that this is a major issue.”

The poll, which was distributed to parents in March, showed that 16% of respondents had a child who missed six to 10 days of school during the 2023-24 school year. Another 4% said their child missed 10 to 15 days, and 3% said their child missed more than 15 days.

Still, 82% of parents said they were unsure about whether chronic absenteeism existed at their child’s school or didn’t think it was widespread.

Students are considered chronically absent when they miss at least 10% of school, or roughly 18 days in most districts, according to , a national nonprofit. These students are more at risk for struggling academically, falling into poverty or dropping out of high school.

Only 8% of parents surveyed said they thought their child was absent more often than most students. Harris said the Richmond district found out through its own research and discussions with families that not only were parents unaware of what chronic absenteeism was, they didn’t think their children were skipping class as much as they actually were.

“You may have a family who thinks they’ve only missed three days, but it’s actually 13,” Harris said.

In response, Harris helped launch several family engagement initiatives in the 2021-22 school year. The district created an on its website, and teachers began to make home visits to families who had absent children. So far, the district has completed more than 40,000 home visits.

Through “that building of trust, that prioritizing of relationships, we were finding out what the root causes were,” Harris said. “There were issues around health, medical needs, transportation and housing

When Richmond staff found that several families were living in motels because they couldn’t afford rental deposits, they secured grant funding to help those students get stable housing. More than 130 families have been moved to better accommodations through this program, Harris said.

The district deployed school officials to work with parents distrustful of the school system, calling them family liaisons instead of attendance officers, which implied discipline instead of cooperation. Harris created a “We Love You Here” campaign to help families feel supported instead of judged for their children’s absences. 

If the district did need to get law enforcement involved because a student’s attendance failed to improve, court hearings were held in one of Richmond’s middle schools instead of at the courthouse. 

Harris said the middle school’s gym would be filled with booths, each one offering a community resource or service.

“Instead of ordering [the families] to do something more punitive, [the judge] orders them to see every single service,” Harris said. “So they have a little card and they visit the service. Then the judge will give them a certain amount of days to improve attendance.”

The most common reason for absences in the parents’ union poll was physical illness, followed by medical or dental appointments, weather, family emergencies and vacation. When asked why they think students are chronically absent, nearly 30% of respondents said it’s because they don’t want to attend school. About 26% attributed absences to illness and 21% to parents who don’t care.

More than half of respondents — 56% — said parents should face legal consequences if their child misses too much school without an approved reason. But Rodrigues said people need to focus more on why students don’t want to come to school.

“The only thing that’s going to solve their problem in a meaningful way is getting to the reason why kids don’t want to be in the classroom,” she said. “Part of that is because of the mental health crisis and social anxiety. The other piece is that we don’t present compelling reasons for them to actually want to be there and create that [fear] that they’re going to miss something if they don’t show up every single day.”

In the poll, 11% of parents said making school more engaging or fun would improve attendance, while 8% said children should be given incentives for showing up and 6% said schools need to engage with parents more.

Harris said she feels family engagement was the biggest reason why Richmond Public Schools has improved its chronic absenteeism rate, which was at 25% during the 2022-23 school year and at the end of 2023-24 had dropped to 19%.

“If you prioritize your relationships with families and students, you’ll actually get the information you need to find out, like, what are the things that motivate them? What are the things that give them joy?” Harris said. “Families actually already know. We just have to be quiet and listen to them and help shift some of the power to them. Because they’re the experts of their children.”

The top takeaways mirror what Anna Saavedra and Morgan Polikoff found in a 2022 survey that confirmed the ideological divide fueling the so-called culture wars — but also revealed widespread uncertainty about what students are exposed to in school. Wanting to better understand this seeming disconnect, in September and October 2023 the pair asked a nationally representative sample of 4,000 households to respond to dozens of hypothetical in-class scenarios involving race, LGBTQ topics and opt-out requests. They then correlated the answers with respondents’ more general beliefs about education.        

Nearly 9 in 10 of those surveyed say teaching basic academics is a very important purpose of public education, with smaller pluralities agreeing that protecting democracy, teaching about government and civics, and providing a free education are priorities for schools. Three-fourths prefer spending to improve the quality of public education over paying for low-income children to attend private schools.

From there, however, ideological gaps begin to appear. Teaching children the importance of embracing differences, for example, was very important to 74% of Democrats versus 35% of Republicans. And while 9 in 10 respondents want children taught to treat people equally regardless of skin color, just 14% of Republicans say it is all right to assign a lesson on U.S. policies benefiting white Americans, versus 46% of Democrats. 

The biggest partisan differences involve LGBTQ topics. Most Democrats — 80% to 86%, depending on the scenario presented — support instruction in high school, a rate that falls to 40% to 50% in lower grades. Republicans, by contrast, are comfortable with LGBTQ topics less than 40% of the time at the high school level and less than 10% in elementary school. 

The bottom line, Polikoff said in a recent interview, is that in order to find a path forward, Americans need to have more detailed conversations about what children should learn, why and when. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. 

I’m curious why you started your report with information about people’s support for education.

We really felt people’s views on the purposes of education do shape their answers to all the more detailed and specific policy questions. For instance, we asked a first broad question about the purposes of education, gave people a bunch of options for answering and asked them to rank their top three. 

It’s obvious but not obvious. The top finding when you ask these kinds of questions is almost always something about the basics of teaching children reading, writing and math. Most people, when they think of school, that is what they think of first.

But by and large, we didn’t see lots of partisan differences, except on one item of teaching children the importance of embracing differences. When we looked at the relationships between the purposes and people’s ratings on other items, we saw that that question was the most predictive. 

You found fewer divides on market forces and choice in education than one might expect, with widespread preferences for spending public money on public schools, 4 in 10 saying competition makes public schools better and a slim majority agreeing that it pushes them to make better use of resources. Why is the partisan gap less stark on these issues?

The average voter doesn’t know very much about education policy. For Republican politicians or people who are in the Republican ecosystem, school choice is their education issue. It has been for a long time, but it really is now. For the rank-and-file voter, it’s not all that salient.

On average, Republicans are somewhat more supportive of choice policies, but those gaps are not really that large because I think lots of Democrats support some of these principles, too. The idea that if your neighborhood public school is no good that you should be forced to stay there forever — it’s not a very appealing argument. And then there are lots of Republicans who like their local public schools and believe in public schools. It just doesn’t cleave very neatly, the way, you know, feelings about trans people do.

That’s a tidy segue. You used scenarios to tee up detailed questions about what, specifically, should be taught about race and LGBTQ people. Why?

In 2022, when we asked questions about LGBTQ topics in the curriculum, we asked very general questions: Should schools teach about sexual orientation? Should they teach about gender identity? But the real question on the table is, what should children be taught and when? 

This time, we tried to craft scenarios that range from very easy — meaning we think most people would be fine with them — to very difficult, meaning we think few people would be fine with them. And to cover a full range of ways in which LGBTQ topics might come up. We have stuff about sex, which is a thing Republicans like to fixate on. And then things we think might be more banal, like a teacher being gay or trans or having a pride sticker on the wall. 

There are enormous partisan differences, compared to race and sex. Gaps in support between Republicans and Democrats on these items are sometimes as large as 50 points. There’s not a single one of the 24 scenarios we asked about that include LGBTQ issues where Republicans support even high schoolers having access. Republicans are so opposed to virtually all these scenarios that something like 20 of the questions have 10% support or less.

Democrats are pretty mixed about elementary school. They support family-related items, like the teacher having a picture of their same-sex spouse on their desk or the book about same-sex penguin adoption, . But on a lot of items, majorities of Democrats aren’t in support in elementary grades, whereas at the high school level they are definitely in support of all items.

Trans-related items are the ones with the largest partisan gaps at the high school level, with Democrats still not over the moon — 67% support — but Republicans very, very opposed. 

Did you identify possibilities or opportunities for a path forward?

I would say we didn’t. But we can draw some conclusions that could inform a path forward. Respondents really seem to have read the items in our survey and thought about them because you see a big range in terms of what they support and what they oppose. That’s important information. We really do need to have a discussion about what’s age-appropriate, what parents want and kids need. And that’s probably not going to be one conversation. That’s probably going to be 50 conversations, one in each state. Or maybe 13,000 conversations, one in each district.

You can’t just say what’s right is the Republican approach, the [Florida Gov.] Ron DeSantis approach, which is to ban this stuff altogether, don’t talk about it at all, which is not really tenable. But the Democratic approach — which is not super clear but seems to be something like, “Let teachers do what they want and if you have concerns, you’re a bigot” — that strategy doesn’t seem to be particularly useful.

People need something to grab onto. We need some reasonable folks to propose different ways of including LGBTQ issues in the curriculum. 

The other thing our results point to is this issue of how schools actually deal with parent concerns. We asked a series of questions about that, and the one-sentence takeaway is people haven’t really thought about this. 

Parents’ right to opt their kids out is easy to support because of course parents should have that right. But the reality is, how are schools supposed to deal with the fact that, with very few exceptions, every classroom is a purple classroom, meaning it has Republican parents and Democratic parents? You could easily have people wanting to opt out on one side or people raising concerns on another and it quickly spirals into ridiculousness. How are schools supposed to deal with this? 

I’m comfortable with some reasonably constrained opt-out provisions for material that parents don’t want their kids exposed to. I think that’s not a crazy relief valve for these particularly hot-button issues. But we need to come up with policies that are actually implementable, that aren’t going to be incredibly onerous on teachers, aren’t going to have kids missing half the days of the school year, that are reasonably constrained in terms of what they allow and don’t allow.

You tested two ways of asking about opting out. What did the results tell you?

We looked at the opt-out question a few ways. We asked people what they thought were reasonable responses from parents who disagree with the content of a lesson and gave, like, 10 different options. Pretty much everyone thinks it’s reasonable to talk about these issues, to voice your disagreement either to your child or the teacher or even at a school board meeting.

There’s much more of a mix in terms of whether you think it’s appropriate to ask the teacher to change the lesson. Relatively few people think that more extreme examples, like un-enrolling your child from the school or organizing a protest, are reasonable responses. 

We asked a question about how people think schools should react when parents express concern. Again, we found that people don’t really have a great answer, because once you start to get down to brass tacks about how you’re going to handle these, it gets really complicated really fast. 

Democrats are more likely to say the school should teach the lesson as planned if a parent objects, but not even a majority of Democrats — only 48%. We asked how, if multiple parents disagree, should the school make a decision? Again, we got a lot of mixed answers. Mostly, though, people say educators or school boards should be the final deciders on these issues.

Then we did this cool little experiment. We wanted to see whether we could affect people’s views about opt-out by giving them some information about what the potential impact could be. So we randomly split the sample and gave half of them a paragraph with a little scenario that said the teacher believes all students should participate because learning about content they might not otherwise hear helps them see a new perspective, learn to be a critical thinker or simply learn a new important fact. And it can be hard for a teacher to accommodate every parent’s wishes for every lesson for every child.

And then we asked people who did and did not get that paragraph whether they supported opting out. We saw that exposure to an argument about the potential negative effects of opt-out actually pretty substantially reduced people’s support for opting out.

What I think this tells us is not about the specific language of that proposal, but that this is an issue where people’s minds aren’t 100% made up. Supposing a school had an opt-out policy and gave parents messages about why they think that, “Yes, you can opt your kids out, but we don’t think that’s a great idea for XYZ reasons” — that actually would affect people’s actions. 

People’s views on this are pretty malleable. And people haven’t really thought through the practical consequences. So there is potential to shape attitudes and actions.

It reminds me of the retrenchment that LGBTQ advocates did , where in 2009 voters overturned a law allowing gays and lesbians to marry. To prepare for the 2012 vote that re-legalized same-sex marriage, social scientists figured out that framing the issue as one of rights did not move the needle. But asking a prospective voter, “What does your marriage mean to you?” actually changed the conversation.

Republicans are really good at message discipline and Democrats are not. These are not like sure-thing issues — especially on trans issues. A lot of people don’t understand trans issues and are uncomfortable with them. A lot of people are uncomfortable with having to use different pronouns and things like that.

I’m a real believer that there are ways that you can change people’s attitudes based on how you talk about things. I think the strategy of, “if you don’t do things perfectly then we’re going to ostracize you and call you a bigot” — that’s not a winning strategy. You need to change hearts and minds. 

We did it with same-sex marriage for the most part, though you know lots of Republicans are still opposed to that. But we won the policy battle, at least for now. And I think that we can do that on some of these LGBT- and race-related issues in schools. But again, it’s not clear.

There are arguments you can make on some of these topics where it’s not clear there’s a right answer. Another example would be schools getting information about a child and hiding that from the child’s parents. That’s an issue where I certainly can understand why schools might feel the need to do that. At the same time, I can understand why parents will be very upset If they learned that that was happening. There’s just lots to unpack here.

But to get back to your question, yes, the messaging clearly matters. You need to figure out what messages are resonating with people, what arguments will work to persuade them. I’m sure they exist.

In a  conducted in the 2021-22 school year by  and the Loyola Marymount University , parents expressed the need to close learning gaps caused by the pandemic with access to high quality tutoring and emotional enrichment programs. 

The poll — first conducted by GSPN on  in the 2020-21 school year — indicates the majority of Black families were not committed to keeping their students enrolled in L.A. Unified schools. 

Parents said they wanted expanded summer school instruction, more college/CTE courses and better access to high-quality tutoring programs.

“This year’s poll was an opportunity to revisit the goal of strengthening their influence on the decisions our educational leaders make about the future of students and Los Angeles schools,” the report stated. “We dove back into questions we asked the previous year to see how families’ perspectives changed after returning for a full year of in-person learning during the ongoing pandemic.”

Here are five key findings from the report:

1. Parents showed increasing support for social-emotional learning:

After a full year of pandemic learning, 47% of families reported wanting tools to meet students’ emotional and mental health needs. Last year, just 26% of families expressed interest in social-emotional learning tools.

2. Families of color were less likely to report having access to individualized tutoring and more likely to want more tutoring:

Only 59% of families of color report having access to individualized tutoring, 18 percentage points lower than white families. Additionally, 27% of white families and an overwhelming 73% of families of color report wanting to see one-on-one tutoring provided at their school. 

3. Black parents were less committed than other parents to keeping their kids enrolled in LA Unified schools:

When asked whether they planned to keep their children in Los Angeles Unified schools longer term, 82% of families said they were very or extremely likely to stay in the district. But there are slight differences when families of different groups are asked this question: compared to 90% of white families, only 67% of Black families were committed to staying. This news comes after , losing students who moved out of state because of the rising cost of living in California; and students switching to non-LAUSD schools with looser COVID restrictions. 

4. Transparency on curriculum is a priority:

Across families of different income levels and racial backgrounds, there was a 22 percentage point increase in the number of families that want more access to information on what is being taught in their schools and a 13 percentage point increase in the number of families that want to see information on their child’s access and progress on grade-level, high quality curriculum. 

5. New Superintendent Alberto Carvalho needs to be held accountable and be evaluated:

91% of families agree the superintendent should be evaluated on the new strategic plan. The plan prioritizes providing students with the support, knowledge, and skills to reach their full academic potential, graduate college and be career ready. 

This article is part of a collaboration between ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ and the USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism.