Suchergebnisse

Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, the decision to reopen schools for in-person instruction has become a pressing policy issue. This study examines what overall factors drive public support for schools re-opening in person and whether members of the public are willing to comply with school re-opening decisions based on their own preferences and/or the level of government from which the order comes. Through two rounds of national surveys with an embedded experiment, I find consistent evidence that 1) trust in information from elites - not contact with COVID - best explain preferences for reopening, 2) political ideology and racial and class identification help explain preferences as well, and 3) the President of the United States is best positioned to generate compliance with a school reopening mandate. This study suggests that politics - not public health - drives public support for schools reopening and compliance with government orders to reopen.

Teachers have become important actors in national, state, and, especially, local politics. Most research on the political behavior of teachers focuses on their relationship with public-sector unions. While extremely useful, little is known about how teachers form the evaluations of schools and districts that motivate their political behavior. I propose and test a new theory of how teachers form evaluations of school satisfaction that centers on deliberative democracy. I argue that, in addition to student performance, teachers factor in how "deliberative" school districts are when expressing satisfaction. Using two separate survey analyses, this article finds that teachers of districts with a stronger deliberative culture are significantly more likely to feel satisfied with the schools in their districts. Moreover, in districts with a stronger deliberative culture, teachers and students are more likely to be included in decision-making at the school level. This latter relationship holds true even for teachers in districts with high levels of student poverty.