As recent highly publicized events unfolded, the share of the public who answered yes when asked whether they support “the formation of charter schools” fell from 65 percent in 2016 to an all-time low of 52 percent in the spring of 2017, according to annual polls conducted by Education Next and administered by the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance. This 13-point free fall was especially dramatic because charters had previously garnered high, steady levels of support.
But in January, the poll results reversed course. A nationally representative online survey of 4,617 adults administered by the University of Southern California’s Understanding America Study and later analyzed by the Education Next team at Harvard posed the same question asked in 2017 — and found the share favoring charters had jumped by 10 percentage points, from 52 to 62 percent. That’s nearly the same level attained in 2016, before the post-election hullabaloo began. (The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.)
