RSS Feed MenuAs part of our Red State, Blue State research, we developed statistical tools for estimating public opinion among subsets of the population. Recently Yu-Sung Su, Yair Ghitza, and I applied these methods to see where school vouchers are more or less popular.
We started with the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey, which had responses from about 50,000 randomly-sampled Americans to the question: “Give tax credits or vouchers to help parents send their children to private schools—should the federal government do this or not?” 45% of those who expressed an opinion on this question said yes, but the percentage varied a lot by state, income level, and religious/ethnic group; These maps show our estimates:
Vouchers are most popular among high-income white Catholics and evangelicals and low-income Hispanics. In general, among white groups, the higher the income, the more popular are school vouchers. But among nonwhites, it goes the other way, with vouchers being popular in the lower income categories but then becoming less popular among the middle class.
You can also see that support for vouchers roughly matches Republican voting, but not completely. Vouchers are popular in the heavily Catholic Northeast and California, less so in many of the mostly Protestant states in the Southeast. We also see a regional pattern among African-Americans, where vouchers are most popular outside the South.
We also fit our model to survey data from 2004 and found similar results.
See here for further detail, including the maps for 2004.
balconesfault // Jun 16, 2009 at 7:51 am
Not a surprise – in the white voting blocks, you’re talking about people who traditionally send their children to private schools no matter what the quality of the local school district, either for reasons of religious education and tradition (Catholics and evangelicals), or for social status (highest income). Low income Hispanics are among the most likely to send their children to Catholic schools, as well – a lot of middle class Hispanics are much more interested in getting their children integrated into the wider community as a means of social advancement, and send their kids to the public system these days, particularly for High School.Among blacks, the poorest tend to also be subject to the worst school systems. Also, they’re the least likely to be affected by tax rate increases if voucher programs pull significant funds out of the public system (public systems tend to have a lot of fixed costs due to geographical boundaries and transportation, facilities, need to maintain excess capacity to accomodate transfers, or even failures of local private or charter schools).Middle class blacks and hispanics are more likely to live in an area where the public school system isn’t failing, and thus aren’t looking for a way to have their kids airlifted out of it … and as I said above, they’re more likely to consider integration with the white community in school settings as being the best path for their kids social mobility.
joescannura // Jun 16, 2009 at 3:00 pm
The public education system is an out and out failure almost everywhere. I live in a predominantly white area, lower mid to middle class, I guess. The school is a dump. It’s dirty, and there’s only one guard, on a campus that is completely open to intrusion at all times. The curriculum is a joke nowadays. I think we had to read maybe five books in our English class, some plays. History is completely narrow, and amazingly unspecific. Everything is simply too easy to get by in with doing the minimal work. Nothing about it is rigorous at all. In California, you need to take an exam to get out of high school. It’s meant to be taken as a senior, and I took it as a junior. I think one could reasonably say that the test should be administered BEFORE your allowed in high school, not at the end so you can get out. If you can’t pass it, you shouldn’t be allowed out of the 8th grade. And yet people complain that it is too tough, and that it stops them from getting out of high school. The whole system is a joke, and low income people are getting the worst of it. Give us a voucher system, and make it equal, and improve education at the same time. And like Milton Friedman said, subsidize consumers, not producers.