So far, common-good advocacy has been concentrated in big, Democratic cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon. In a of 772 teacher strikes between 2007 and 2023, researchers found that most job actions centered on pay and classroom issues, with just 1 in 10 featuring common-good demands on issues such as housing, immigration or social safety nets.

What would it take for suburban and rural locals to take these issues on in contract talks? Part of the answer may lie in whether unions believe that doing so will help them win over the public.

To better understand public opinion, I embedded a survey experiment in the , a large, nationally representative survey of U.S. adults. In the experiment, respondents were randomly assigned to read about one of two hypothetical teacher strikes in their community — one common good, the other focusing on bread-and-butter issues.

In the bread-and-butter version, respondents were told that teachers unions “went on strike to fight for higher salaries and more generous benefits for their members.” In the common-good scenario, teachers walked off the job to “fight for more affordable housing and better mental health services for the local community.” Although almost all unions make salary demands during real-world strikes, the experiment deliberately highlighted a single set of issues to see how these two different kinds of appeals resonated with different segments of the public.

The results showed a striking partisan split. Respondents who identified as Democrats were overwhelmingly supportive of both types of strike campaigns, with more than 7 in 10 backing teachers. Those who described themselves as Republicans, however, drew a sharp distinction: Nearly 4 in 10 said they would support a strike in their community for higher teacher pay, but when the union’s rationale for striking shifted to broader progressive policies, GOP support collapsed — fewer than 1 in 5 respondents approved of the hypothetical strike in their community.

What’s more, the framing experiment carried over to people’s broader opinions about teachers unions when they were asked a different question later in the survey. Specifically, Republicans who had been primed to think about common-good strikes were 11 percentage points more likely to say teachers unions have a “generally negative effect on schools” than were Republicans whose hypothetical strike vignette was focused on pay and benefits alone. Democrats, by contrast, grew even more enthusiastic when they were primed to think about the union’s broader progressive advocacy: 1 in 3 strongly agreed that teachers unions “have a positive effect” on schools after reading the common-good vignette, compared with just 1 in 5 when unions were described as striking for pay and benefits.

Two implications stand out.

First, unions in progressive cities face little risk in embracing common-good bargaining. Their members and voters are aligned, and the strategy can energize their base. For instance, United Teachers Los Angeles in August for protections for immigrant families — building on its 2019 that placed common-good demands front and center.

At the same time, these efforts are unlikely to work in politically mixed communities. With Republican voters repelled by common-good strike campaigns, unions would command less community support in negotiations with local school boards if they leaned into common-good rhetoric.

Second, these findings are consistent with one explanation for why, at the state and national levels, unions have doubled down on progressive political advocacy despite the Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus v. AFSCME decision. Janus made it harder for unions to raise revenue by requiring them to persuade non-members, who no longer paid fees, to join. In theory, that could have encouraged moderation, leading them to appeal to teachers who are moderate or conservative by focusing on bread-and-butter issues.

In practice, however, unions may see greater returns from mobilizing their most progressive members, since those are the ones most likely to contribute time, money and energy to unions that champion a broader political agenda like common-good bargaining.

The National Education Association’s 2025 Representative Assembly illustrates this shift. Delegates voted to sever ties with the Anti-Defamation League, citing its “weaponization” of antisemitism. The move reflected the growing clout of progressive caucuses such as Educators for Palestine and underscored how unions are staking their futures on being credible champions of progressive causes. Post-Janus, that may be a rational base-building strategy. But it also risks making teachers unions ever more isolated and partisan — stronger in blue enclaves, weaker outside them.

The published Feb. 5 found that 73% of 1,005 adult respondents were dissatisfied with the quality of public education in the U.S. It’s the highest dissatisfaction rate since the survey began, and a 5-point increase from last year’s rate of 68%. In 2001, dissatisfaction was at 57%.

The survey’s respondents, who were polled from Jan. 2 to 15, weighed in on 31 topics including the nation’s security, race relations, gun policies and health care affordability. 

People were most content with America’s military strength and preparedness, with a 63% satisfaction rate. Overall quality of life, the position of women in the nation and the opportunity for people to get ahead by working hard followed.

The quality of public education fell near the bottom of the satisfaction list. Only the nation’s moral and ethical climate and its efforts to deal with poverty and homelessness ranked lower.

Though the new poll didn’t delve into specifics, a asked why respondents were dissatisfied with K-12 education. The top five answers were poor or outdated curriculum, poor quality education, lack of teaching basic subjects, political agendas being taught and students not learning life skills.

Previous Gallup surveys over the past two decades parents of school-aged children are much more likely to be satisfied with the quality of their own child’s education than with the nation’s education system overall. Last year, found that 70% of parents of K-12 students said they were either completely or somewhat satisfied with the education their oldest child received.

In the new poll, Americans’ average satisfaction among all the topic areas was at 38%, down from 41% in January 2021 and 48% in 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The survey found that members of both political parties were also dissatisfied with the quality of public education in the U.S. Only 16% of Republican respondents and 30% of Democrats said they were satisfied.

“Americans’ persistent low satisfaction with national conditions may be hard for the nation’s leaders to address,” says. “However, the rank order of concerns resulting from this poll offers [President Donald] Trump and officials at all levels of government guidance on where the public might appreciate them focusing their efforts.”

The , released in August by and research firm surveyed 900 Missouri voters about politics, schools and LGBTQ topics in education. Nearly a third of voters (29%) rated Missouri public schools as poor, markedly more than the 17% who did in June 2020.

Gary Ritter, dean of the university’s school of education, said the fact that Missouri voters are losing confidence in their schools isn’t a surprise — it’s also a finding that is reflected  

Ritter said like others across the U.S., Missouri voters saw their faith in education erode through the pandemic, as districts have struggled with remote learning and academic loss.

“We’ve had a peek into what goes on in crisis-mode school, when you’re trying to figure out how to deal with a pandemic,” Ritter told ����Ӱ��. “So folks are slightly less confident in school performance and school quality, just as I think any of us would have guessed. Missouri looks like the country in that way.”

The poll, which began in 2020, is conducted online about every six months with U.S. residents who have registered to participate in YouGov web surveys. It has a plus or minus margin of error of 4 percentage points. Most questions are similar each time and are about issues that are top priorities to Missourians.

The latest poll included more questions about teachers in general, said Ashley Burle, chief of operations and research fellow at Saint Louis University. 

“One thing that I tried to connect is some of the issues related to teachers and more broadly connecting it to the teacher pipeline issues,” Burle said. “We know that there are issues that need to be addressed. There are things that need to be done to help the teacher pipeline get back on track, so I’d love to see us kind of make that more clear connection between a lot of those points in the future polls.”

Just over half (51%) of voters said they have “a great deal” or “a good amount” of trust and confidence in Missouri’s public school teachers. Less than one-third (28%) of voters said they had some trust while the remaining voters either said no or weren’t sure.

About 54% of voters viewed the K-12 teacher shortage as a problem in their community and a strong percentage of respondents (81%) think teacher salaries should increase. 

But only 35% said they would advise a young adult to become a teacher, while 45% said they wouldn’t and 20% weren’t sure.

The poll also conveys a slight openness to charter schools with 55% of respondents saying they believe charter schools should operate in all areas of the state and 52% saying they want them to operate in their own district. 

Ritter said currently most charter schools operate in the Kansas City or St. Louis metropolitan areas because of that controls where the schools, which are publicly funded but independently run, can be located.

Burle said she was surprised about the results regarding more controversial topics in the classroom, such as gender identity and sexual orientation.

More than half (56%) of voters said they approve of the discussion of sexual orientation in high school compared to 18% in elementary school. These results were similar for the discussion of gender identity. Roughly half of voters also opposed the banning of books that feature LGBTQ youth.

Missouri grappled with of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill during this year’s legislative session. The bill would have banned the discussion of gender identity or sexual orientation in schools, but it failed to pass.

“It was interesting to see the gradation in responses. We kind of think this is an all-or- nothing issue — either we teach these things in all the schools or we don’t teach them in any of the schools,” Burle said. “In fact, voters think, ‘Hey, actually, for older kids, in high schools in particular, we actually think it’s OK.’ I think it just shows you there’s a little bit of an area of gray.”

Ritter said he hopes policymakers will use the results to inform themselves about what Missouri voters find important. While Saint Louis University researchers are still analyzing the latest poll results, people can on the university website.

“We’re going to be digging in to say, what question should we double down on in the next poll? What do we want to learn?” Ritter said. “So we’ll be trying to figure out again how we can find interesting trends.”

Despite headlines about anti-CRT protests and legislation, the poll’s findings “suggest a vacuum of knowledge — especially among lower-income individuals and those with lower levels of education — into which partisans on either side may be able to influence people’s understandings and beliefs about what CRT is,” the researchers state. “Additionally, it calls into question what exactly Americans are reflecting on when they express their beliefs about the role of CRT in public schools.” 

Acceptance of some elements of the theory, they also found, cleaves along party lines: “The idea that racism is central and fundamental to the U.S. experience, perhaps the most central tenet of CRT, was highly divisive by political identification, with 69% of Democrats in agreement, compared to just 24% of Republicans.” 

The poll was administered by researchers at the university’s Rossier School of Education and Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research in August and September to 3,751 individuals as part of the , a decade-long effort tracking economic and social conditions and children’s COVID-era educational experiences. The USC team, which includes curriculum expert Morgan Polikoff, designed the survey to test how representative the “loud voices — and the news coverage amplifying them” are of parents and voters.

The poll found broad agreement that students should be taught controversial topics involving race, gun control, gun ownership rights and abortion in high school, but not elementary grades. Majorities also favored teaching high schoolers about LGBTQ rights and culture, albeit in lower numbers and more likely along partisan divides. Depending on the specific topic, as many as 86% of Democrats supported high school students learning about LGBTQ topics, compared with 30% to 39% of Republicans. 

Support for exposing students to topics involving sexual orientation and gender identity was much lower than for other subjects, states the report: “Despite substantial gains in social acceptance and rights for LGBTQ individuals, these results indicate the fragility of those gains and the precarious place in American schools of LGBTQ students and teachers as well as students with LGBTQ parents.” 

There is little appetite for teaching younger students about sex or sexuality, gender or violence. Eighty-six percent of respondents said elementary pupils should be taught about the Founding Fathers; 85%, patriotism and the contributions of women and people of color; 84%, critical thinking; 75%, the history of slavery; and 61%, racial inequality. Those polled were evenly divided on immigrant and voter rights.

In general, however, respondents do not think elementary students actually are being taught about the subjects they oppose. And most acknowledged they don’t know which topics are, in fact, taught — a finding that held true regardless of whether a household had school-aged children. 

“On most topics, Republicans and Democrats agree about whether students should learn/read about them or not,” the researchers write. “These findings suggest that efforts by Republicans to target the early-grades curriculum are politically shrewd, given the widespread belief that young children should be sheltered from these issues.”

Those polled differed on which books should be assigned by teachers versus which should simply be made available. Most Americans oppose students of any age being assigned books with LGBTQ topics, profanity and depictions of violence or sex, though there is broad support for high school students having access to books on almost all the topics surveyed. 

“Considering these findings, recent laws stifling the teaching of controversial topics in high school run counter to the overwhelming views of Americans of both parties that these topics should be taught in balanced ways,” the researchers note. 

There is widespread agreement that parents should have more control over the curriculum than they currently do, and high support among Republicans that parents should be able to opt their children out of content with which they disagree. 

“Majorities of Americans from all racial/ethnic, income and education groups support parents opting their children out of lessons with content they disagree with (as do just under half of Democrats),” says the report. “Should this level of opting-out materialize, it would be a logistical nightmare for already overburdened teachers and schools.”

New polling on the American education system shows widespread approval of local schools — along with ominous signs of dissatisfaction among both parents and the public at large.

In by PDK International, a professional organization for teachers, over 1,000 adults expressed higher levels of faith in their community’s public schools than have ever been recorded in the survey’s 48-year history, with 54% giving them an A or B. That figure represents an 11-point increase from 2018 and a robust show of support given the extraordinary challenges of post-COVID learning recovery.

But respondents also showed only modest trust in educators to deliver capable instruction on potentially controversial subjects like race, gender and sexuality. In keeping with other recent public opinion data, that result was split across partisan and ideological lines, with Democrats showing greater trust than Republicans. And the percentage of respondents saying they would want their own children to become teachers fell to just 37%, a record low.

Teresa Preston, PDK’s director of publications, said the perceived desirability of the teaching profession had been declining in recent years and that its current low might reflect public recognition of the hardships inflicted by COVID.

Observed Preston, “2018 was the first year when we had a majority of respondents say that they would not want their child to become a teacher, and now it’s an even higher percentage. It suggests continued awareness of how tough teaching is, especially during the pandemic, and all the pressures that teachers have been under.”

Poor compensation was the most commonly listed reason for the negative reaction (cited by 29% of respondents), followed by workplace demands and stress (26%) and lack of respect (23%). Across 13 previous polls that included a version of that question, an average of 60% of respondents favored the idea of their children working in classrooms.

Perhaps more concerning was the low confidence in educators to teach sensitive subjects. Although fully 72% of public school parents said they had faith in their community’s teachers, compared with 63% of the full adult sample, far fewer members of the general public trusted teachers to “appropriately” handle politically contentious issues. 

Only in the case of U.S. history and civics did bare majorities believe teachers could do this (56% and 50%, respectively); in five other areas — social-emotional growth (48%), racial and ethnic diversity (46%), media literacy (46%), gender and sexuality (38%), and how the history of racism affects America today (44%) — fewer than half of respondents said the same. Among parents, who generally thought more highly of teachers’ capacity to navigate dicey subjects, just 44% said teachers would handle gender and sexuality appropriately.

Those figures dovetail with findings from other recent surveys. from October showed a six-point dip in trust for teachers between 2019 and 2021. More recently, a survey released this week by the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education a majority of state residents wanted parents to be able to opt students out of content that they found objectionable.

Notably, stark divisions existed in which demographic groups trusted teachers in their community most (though margins of error were higher for these subgroups, given their smaller sample sizes). Black respondents in particular said they trusted teachers less than their white counterparts with respect to every controversial subject. Just one-third said they believed teachers would handle gender, sexuality or racial diversity appropriately.

A partisan disparity prevailed as well. While Democrats said they trusted local teachers by a nearly 50-point margin (73%, versus 27% who said they did not), the spread among Republicans was less than half that (60%/40%). Just 58% of independents said they had confidence in local teachers, compared with 42% who didn’t. 

Preston noted that respondents did not list reasons for their assessment of teachers — it is possible, for instance, that African-Americans want much more intensive instruction in racial diversity than is currently offered, she said.

“I think it does speak to the fact that Americans have a lot of questions about what’s going on in their local schools and schools across the nation,” said Preston.

That view was shared by others in the education community.

Shannon Holston, the chief of policy and programs at the National Council on Teacher Quality, an advocacy group that favors strengthening teacher preparation and classroom standards, said it was “heartening” that parents and the public gave high marks to their local schools. Still, she added, the declining prestige of the profession was a major concern that could be driven by the perception that “teaching doesn’t require specialized skills and knowledge.” 

“The significant increase in the number of people who wouldn’t want their child to become a teacher is concerning,” Holston said in a statement. “To elevate the status of teaching so that we can attract and retain the strong, diverse teacher workforce our children need, we must set a high bar for entry into the classroom and provide teachers with comprehensive support and the competitive salaries they deserve.” 

The poll’s full sample was 1,008 U.S. adults, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points.

Correction: Shannon Holston is chief of policy and programs at the National Council on Teacher Quality.