Pick up the newspaper or tune in to a Sunday morning TV gabfest and you're likely to read or hear about the sizable majority of Americans who approve of voucher plans--school choice, as proponents put it. These assertions are sustained by the holy writ of the public opinion poll, rooted in random sample, buffered by margin of error, presented as mathematic (and, therefore, objective) truth. Who could say them nay?
Well, the voters could. And regularly do. The defeats of voucher plans inMichigan and California in the 2000 election brought the school choice referendumtally to zero out of 10 (not even one of these was close). Sometimes the losingside in a referendum can claim it was so badly outspent that a torrent ofunrefuted misinformation bamboozled the electorate. But in both Michigan andCalifornia, the pro-voucher forces spent slightly more than their foes did, andthey still got smeared.
So is something fishy about those polls? Are ideologues fiddling with the numbersor distorting the results to fool us into thinking that support for their petissue is greater than it really is? Certainly, the artful misuse of polling hasbecome commonplace, perhaps because it is rarely noticed by anyone and almostnever challenged by political journalists, who are increasingly dependent on thesurveys and the surveyors.
There is, for instance, the much discussed poll verdict that more young peoplebelieve in flying saucers than believe that Social Security will be around whenthey retire. But the 1994 poll from which this tidbit comes--commissioned by theantiSocial Security group Third Millennium--did not ask whether people were more certain of the one belief than they were of the other. The Social Security question came early in the survey; the one about UFOs, included largely for its public relations value, was at the end and was accompanied by a telling plea to "take this seriously." (Three years later, another poll--this one commissioned by the Employee Benefit Research Program, an organization known for its neutral research--asked whether people had more confidence in the future of Social Security or in the reality of extraterrestrial visitors. Even young adults opted two-to-one for Social Security.)
Not every survey cited by voucher advocates is concocted by conservatives.A poll conducted last year by the Joint Center for Political and EconomicStudies, a liberal African-American organization, found that a 49 percent plurality of the general population and a 57 percent majority of blacks favored voucher plans. And according to a 1998 poll conducted by the University ofWisconsinMilwaukee's Institute for Survey and Policy Research, 60 percent in Wisconsin approved of them.
Nonetheless, there is a certain amount of intellectual fuzziness in theinterpretation of this data as it wends its way through the elaborateopinion-creation machine. Take, for example, the July 2000 edition of SchoolReform News--a monthly newspaper published by the Heartland Institute, a free market think tank in Illinois--which hailed the results of a poll showing that 58 percent of respondents in Massachusetts express "overall support for vouchers." As it turns out, the poll was commissioned by the Pioneer Institute, which just happens to be another free market think tank, this one in Boston. The folks at Pioneer say they won't provide details about the polls they commission, leaving the rest of the world to wonder just what "overall support" means.
That same issue of School Reform News reported that "Kansas residents showed strong support for school vouchers in a recent statewide survey conducted by Emporia State University for the Kansas National Education Association, the state's largest teacher union and a fervent opponent of vouchers." Not exactly. According to the union's Peg Dunlap, "The university did the poll independently. We helped pay for it. We did not control the questions."
Still, if you asked the average person (as did the Joint Center pollsters),"Would you support a voucher system where parents would get money from thegovernment to send their children to the public, private, or parochial school oftheir choice?" there is little doubt that he or she would be more likely to sayyes than no.
And why not? "Choice" comes close to being a magic word in America, where folkswant their every decision to be an autonomous exercise of will. Especially nowthat fewer decisions meet that description, people are likely to welcome any hintof enhanced discretion. It's no accident that abortion rights supporters callthemselves pro-choice.
Compared with other polls, the Joint Center's survey was a model of probity. Atleast it used the less appealing word "vouchers" and did not include rhetoricabout troubled schools or falling test scores.
Consider the wording of a question about the separate but related issue ofcharter schools that was used in 1999 by Penn, Schoen, and Berland Associates onbehalf of the Democratic Leadership Council: "Charter schools are public schoolsthat are run by teachers, parents, or private companies and financed by the stateon a per pupil basis. They are held accountable for achieving educationalresults, and in return they receive waivers that exempt them from many of therestrictions and bureaucratic rules that apply to traditional public schools.Given this, do you favor or oppose charter schools?"
The vast multitudes who hate accountability and revere red tape could have beenexpected to oppose. Only 26 percent did.
Though rarely "wrong," polls are often meaningless simply because theymeasure a public opinion that barely exists. For good or ill, the American publicis not dominated by the policy wonk tribe. Most folks spend precious little timeconsidering public affairs at all, much less the finer points. In the case ofschool vouchers, we know this thanks to ... a poll. "On Thin Ice," an unusuallydetailed survey conducted by Public Agenda in 1999, concluded, "It isn't that people are undecided as much as that they are unaware. The vast majority of the public knows very little about school vouchers."
Besides, a poll has no consequences, and people know it. Telling a voice onthe other end of the phone that you favor vouchers costs you nothing--includingmuch time to think about it.
Referenda, however, do have consequences; and while it would be naive to thinkthat California and Michigan voters became experts in school policy last autumn,it is reasonable to assume that they picked up a little something during theelection campaign.
One thing they seem to have learned is that an issue is invariably morecomplicated than any poll question makes it out to be. Margaret Trimmer-Hartleyof the Michigan National Education Association said the most convincing argumentagainst vouchers in that state was that the final choices would be made not byparents but by the proprietors of private schools. Wayne Johnson, the presidentof the California Teachers Association, conceded that early polls in his stategave vouchers a lead of roughly 70 percent to 30 percent. "The numbers startedchanging when you told people that private schools could discriminate. They wereevenly divided on parental choice, which they like; but when you take publicdollars to put into private schools, they don't like that."
Even Chester Finn, the intellectual leader of the school choice movement,acknowledged that the poll results could be oversimplifying the issue. "Americanshold two values very dear," Finn said. "One is the value of freedom to makechoices for themselves. The other is reverence for a vague institution calledpublic education. When those two values are put in direct conflict with eachother and you're told you have to choose between them, you respond differently."
Of course, it's a mistake to assume that vouchers and the status quo are theonly choices. A Gallup poll taken last year for Phi Delta Kappa showed support for vouchers. But when people were asked whether they'd rather put money into a voucher plan or into improving the existing public schools, three-quarters chose the latter.
Polling is a useful tool, but one of its uses is distortion. Next time anadvocate for one cause or another blabbers about how "polls show" whatever, lookfor specifics--particularly wording and sponsors. As the voters in Michigan andCalifornia demonstrated, polls often don't show much.
