Blowback or Buy-In: Public Opinion in Response to Charter School Penetration

This paper investigates the politics of school choice, specifically examining the patterns of public support for charter schools in response to growing enrollment at these schools within local school districts. The study links opinion data from annual national samples from the Education Next surveys to data on charter school enrollment as a proportion of total combined traditional and charter school enrollment within the geographic boundaries of survey respondents’ own local public school districts. Additionally, the study leverages the time frames of the surveys across a period when the two major national parties took increasingly distinct positions on charter schools to examine how the role of local context in shaping opinion shifts as the issue became more polarized at the national level. Results indicate that greater charter school enrollment is not associated with either greater support or greater opposition to these schools, on average. Instead, the pattern varies by individuals’ partisanship, such that the gap between Democrats and Republicans shrinks with greater enrollment. This pattern appears confined to the earlier period of the study when charter schools had stronger bipartisan support in political discourse. By 2020, a time when the party leaders were more divided over charter schools, local charter school enrollment does nothing to mitigate partisan gaps in opinion.