Parents are increasingly considering new schooling options for their kids, according to a survey released this month. After exploring available choices, a smaller number of families ultimately selected new schools but a majority reported wanting more information about school choice. 

Both local and out-of-district traditional public schools remained popular among school-searching families, followed by charter schools, private and religious schools and homeschooling.

The results come from that included 2,595 parents of school-aged children conducted by The National School Choice Awareness Foundation and the National School Choice Resource Center (Navigate), which run . 

They began administering this survey right after COVID hit to learn more about how the pandemic impacted parents’ views around school choice and to determine how to best support families as they navigated their options. 

“The big takeaway here is families want options for their kids,” foundation CEO Andrew Campanella said. “They’re looking at their options, but the lens through which they view choice is significantly different than the way people involved in the policy world look at it.”

Overall, about three-quarters of parents surveyed said they’d at least “considered” new schools for a child last year— a 35% increase over 2022. Ultimately, 44% of parents selected a new school. Just under two-thirds reported wanting more information about their options.

The results were released to coincide with National School Choice Week, which began Sunday and will run through Jan. 27. They also come as public schools across the nation face enrollment declines of over 1 million students, according to an , which showed lasting disengagement from public schools. 

The National School Choice Awareness Foundation defines school choice as empowering parents to select the schools and learning environments that best meet their children’s needs including traditional public schools, charter schools and private schools.

They do not identify as a policy advocacy organization and say they do not promote one schooling option over another. Campanella, the CEO, previously served in a senior-level position at the American Federation for Children, a school choice advocacy group founded by the DeVos family that heavily lobbies for directing taxpayer money toward private school options.

There are a number of reasons that parents are researching new schools, according to Inga Cotton, the founder and executive director of San Antonio Charter Moms, a non-profit advocacy group that supports parents and caregivers as they explore schooling options. 

In San Antonio, for example, she hears from parents who are frustrated that their local public schools are not offering accelerated enough curriculum to prepare their kids for college. In other cases, families of color are grappling with the consequences of redlining and discrimination. In these areas in particular, it can be harder to access advanced coursework. 

Cotton said she also supports families who have kids with disabilities whose schools might not have the resources necessary to support their needs. Finally, some families are looking for schools with values that align with their own, including progressive ideologies, classical education or religious-centered learning. 

Other advocates point to a string of Republican states adopting or expanding tax credit scholarships, education savings accounts or vouchers, which they see as siphoning funds from public schools, coupled with a wave of partisan criticism of public schools and teachers fed by volatile conflicts over remote learning, mask mandates and classroom content.

The survey results note that “traditional public schools remain popular among school searching families” with just over half of parents considering new schools reporting that they visited, asked about or researched their local public schools. Just under 30% reported the same for public schools outside of their neighborhood. The numbers were slightly lower for charter schools (28%), private or faith-based schools (24%), homeschools (20%), and full-time online schools (22%). 

“This almost fake conflict between district-managed schools and schools that are in the public sector but not managed by districts 
 is really just a function of a policy debate,” Campanella said. “And it’s not what families are experiencing when they go to make their choices.”

Yet broadening the school choice label to include more controversial items like vouchers, which let parents use taxpayer money to send their kids to private schools, is an intentional choice conservative advocacy organizations are making, according to Joshua Cowen, an education policy professor at Michigan State University.

He believes that while there’s strong bipartisan support for a number of school choice policies, “there’s real skepticism on the use of public funding for private education in the K-12 space,” outside of the conservative base he defined as “Trump dead-enders” or “long-standing anti-government types.”

The National School Choice Awareness Foundation asserted, though, that “school choice is far from partisan, at least when it comes to parents making choices.” The evidence: parents who identified as Democrats chose new schools for their children last year at higher rates than Republican parents (56% to 40%), according to its survey.

A 2022 poll from , an opinion and research journal based out of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, found strikingly different results. ​​Support for the general concept of school choice was starkly partisan, according to their data, with 60% of Republicans and only 41% of Democrats expressing a favorable position.

This is a key example of how question phrasing can impact survey results. Particularly when surveys come from advocacy groups it is important to remain skeptical of data, not because they’re “cooking the books” but because questions can be leading, Cowen said. 

“If you ask, ‘Do you support taxpayer dollars going to church-based schools?’ you’re going to get a very different number than if you say ‘Do you think parents should get to choose within a wide variety of educational options for their kid?’” he said. “Clearly, the second one is going to sound a lot better: you’re going to get more support. And if your goal as an organization is to show numbers with more support, that’s the way you do it.”

The National School Choice Awareness Foundation did not explicitly ask about vouchers in its survey, which was delivered to Survey Monkey’s National Audience panel between Jan. 2-4. Campanella said the survey was solely focused on types of schools rather than mechanisms used to access them, such as vouchers.

He noted they used the survey results to help inform the over 27,000 events the foundation supports across the country for National School Choice Week.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation and Stand Together Trust provides financial support to The National School Choice Awareness Foundation and Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

Math workbooks at a Eugene, Oregon school arrived months into the semester, delayed by paper shortages. 

Some 15 classes at one suburban New York high school were canceled last semester for lack of substitutes. 

In a Maryland high school outside D.C., new pencils were nowhere to be found when classes started in the fall, the victim of supply chain lags and no staff to order them.

Nacho cheese, reliably cheap and available, has become a mainstay on one Indianapolis school’s lunch menu as spiraling costs and ingredient shortages have led to meals on repeat.    

This is the new normal in schools across the country: Classes are back in person but day-to-day operations are a far cry from pre-pandemic norms, the lingering effects of the COVID crisis challenging everything from staffing and student mental health to school lunches. 

Compiling dozens of examples from survey responses and original reporting, Âé¶čŸ«Æ· found schools are trying to function and adapt. 

For administrators like Greg Zenion, principal at Chariho Middle School in Rhode Island, this year marks the first time he cannot fill core jobs: teacher assistants, special education teachers and social workers.

“I’m in a pretty rural, beautiful area. I’m surrounded by soft fields. My building was built in 1989. It’s a great place to work. It’s a beautiful building,” Zenion said. “I can’t get people to apply for the jobs. So I think a new normal is how do you run a building short-staffed and how do you get creative to fill your positions?”

Yet educators say necessity can indeed be the mother of invention. 

“Despite all of this adversity being talked about, our school people still got their chin straps buckled up. They’re still ready to go to work, and they’re still over there doing everything they can do for kids,” said Ronn Nozoe, CEO of the National Association of Secondary School Principals. “This year is different because folks have found all kinds of creative ways to provide.” 

Some examples: 

To ease the burden of juggling a family with teaching full-time, an Indianapolis school opened free child care for staff on-site. At one Milwaukee school, $20 gift cards are given to teachers who substitute. 

Schools, public and private are all hands on deck — recruiting drivers and other staff at grocery stores, offering bonus pay. 

But no amount of personal dedication can alleviate systemic strains. Even armored with the optimism inherent to many school leaders, they are coming to terms with a new reality and what’s at stake. 

“Our members remain dedicated to kids and excited about [school],” Nozoe said, “but they are, especially the ones who have been around a bit and can see the writing on the wall, worried about the shortages and what that may mean if we can’t augment the workforce quickly enough
”

As one teacher at a school in Delaware serving a high proportion of students in poverty explained, “the students are so burnt out and so are we.” 

To make up for learning loss, teachers at the Delaware school introduce new material on days when students also take mandatory tests. Their veteran teachers are retiring more often, leaving big gaps. One teacher now has regular panic attacks. “If it wasn’t for my incredible coworkers and admin I wouldn’t be able to do it,” the educator wrote. 

Several educators painted a picture of students changed by core social years spent in isolation in front of screens: less curiosity or interest; individual work preferred to working with peers; missed class and deadlines. Students arrive, and leave, exhausted, but are expected to catch up more than ever before. 

The concerning behavior has made school staff put students’ emotional well being first, with more of an emphasis on offering school-based mental health services. 

“The need was
far more significant than any of us realized,” said Monica Asher, a Columbus, Ohio high school principal. â€œDefinitely a new normal is
 more of an acceptance
to employ social workers, mental health professionals. Pre-pandemic, those were nice if you could get them but
now 
those are necessary.”

Pieced together, the anecdotes offer a clearer image of the American school day as the pandemic continues to have a hold on students, families and educators: 

Morning: For Many, a Transportation “Dumpster Fire”

By 5 a.m., a high schooler in a small city between Orlando and Tampa, Florida is up — sleep deprived but with a sense of urgency: He has to reach the Wesley Chapel bus hub by 5:59 a.m, to get to class by 7:06 a.m. His school now starts earlier to make up for hurricane days and remote learning. 

“Our bus situation is pretty much a dumpster fire,” his mother responded in the survey, “…this is unhealthy for those kids. And half the time the bus isn’t at the hub on time, meaning we parents have to drive the half hour one-way trip to the school
 ”

At a community school in northern Georgia, “some teachers at my school delay instruction in order to wait for the late buses. This means that some of the students who are not late to school are sitting idly. It is a huge waste of instructional time,” said a school director.  

In Omaha, Nebraska, the city’s major urban district serving over 50,000 students has begun cutting routes, increasing the living radius to qualify. 

The underlying culprit, many believe, is simple economics. 

“I hear from principals all over the country that it’s really hard because of the school bus driver pay,” Nozoe said. “These folks who drive commercially can get more money [in] other venues than driving a school bus. (And) it takes a certain kind of person to drive a school bus. You just can’t turn around and scream at the kids at the top of your lungs.”

First Bell: The Writing on the Wall

At a Milwaukee Catholic high school, social studies teacher Mary Talsky has noticed lots of empty seats. For every email about a kid out sick, she gets three to four times more about absences because of mental health issues: My kid is struggling with anxiety and can’t come in today; I’m taking my child to an appointment with a psychiatrist. 

“I have not seen numbers like this before,” Talsky said. “Maybe they’re just more willing to say that out loud than they were in the past.”  

Across the country, teachers start the day by opening up adjoining classroom walls — asked to cover for colleagues.  

Lunchtime: Same Cafeteria, Fewer Options

Brooklyn high school senior Samantha Farrow told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· students don’t come to school with COVID as often as they did this time last year. There’s more understanding from teachers if you miss school for being sick, more flexibility around work turned in late. 

And she’s noticed another change. 

“I think a lot of people don’t really sit in the cafeteria anymore, because it feels like a superspreader event,” she said. “So a lot of people eat in the hallways or go outside to eat.”

Further west, at Adelante, a K-8 school in Indianapolis, students in the lunch line see now familiar sights: yellow and plastic. Nachos and frozen items make the cut often: as is the case in , food distributors have increased the dollar price per meal. Others districts have trouble finding ingredients.

“Our food services are still
reeling from the overall cost (and) day to day shortages of what can be offered fresh and what can’t — which can result in kids having to repeat meal patterns day in and day out
” said Jordan Habayeb, managing director at Adelante. 

“We have to dip into [federal] funding,” to offset the increases in food costs, “which then means we have to kind of take the gas off of something else,” Habayeb said. On the chopping block is funding to expand after school clubs. Fifteen are offered, half as many as schools nearby. 

Afterschool: Trade Offs

Come day’s end in Snellville, Georgia, some students pass on tutoring or afterschool clubs: There is no late bus.

In New Orleans, the principal of a Spanish immersion school reviews applications for new English teachers, the need for more instructors after students spent nearly a year learning remotely and only hearing Spanish spoken at home. 

A high school administrator in Antioch, Illinois starts making calls: Their school furniture supplier has had trouble filling orders.

At the Indianapolis school with plenty of nachos and cheese, about 40 students and staff’s own kids file into a new free after care program that offers in-depth math tutoring. Fifteen families are on the waitlist. 

And in southern Florida, Haines City High School families head to dinner, part of a new “Parent University” hosted monthly on-campus. They talk about the new normal around technology, learn how to check their childrens’ grades and progress toward graduation requirements. 

“I think it is really important to remember that yeah, [the pandemic] was pretty bad,” said New Orleans middle school principal Laura Adelman-Cannon, who had to rebuild post-Katrina. “But there have been other really bad things. And we made it through, right? It’s possible.”

Nearly half of all adolescents surveyed said they felt closer to their parents after two years of disrupted learning, but a sizable group grew more distant from classmates and teachers than they were in February 2020. A strong majority also said they wished school would be delivered fully in-person from now on.

, released last week by the Pew Research Center, pointed to some of the same trends that have been on display in other public opinion data released over the last two years: A plurality of parents said they were “very satisfied” with the way schools handled online learning, but a large minority were also concerned their children would fall behind academically. Teenage respondents generally did not share that concern, but were also more likely to describe themselves as unhappy with virtual instruction at their school.

Colleen McClain, a Pew research associate and one of the report’s lead authors, said the findings offered a “complex picture” of how the pandemic affected teenagers’ academic and social realities.

“I think it really paints a nuanced perspective of what teens have been through during the pandemic, what they’re still going through, and how it varies depending on a lot of factors.”

The survey, conducted between April 14 and May 4, queried over 1,300 pairs of U.S. teens (between the ages of 13 and 17) and their parents about their experiences at school and attitudes toward learning. Responses were disaggregated by both race and family income to show how families of different backgrounds were weathering the late stages of the pandemic.

Somewhat surprisingly, only about 80 percent of students in the nationally representative sample said they had attended school fully in-person over the previous month (i.e., between mid-March and early April). Conversely, in a public letter circulated in May, “more than 99 percent of schools and colleges are open.” Both statements could simultaneously be true, with K-12 schools remaining “open” for in-person learning even as significant numbers of students studied remotely during a time of . But the large group of students either learning completely online (8 percent) or in a hybrid model (11 percent) indicates a wide variety of school experiences in the spring of 2022.

The persistent, if periodic, absence of teenagers from school campuses could help explain the impact that the pandemic has left on their personal relationships. On the positive side, fully 95 percent of teenagers said they felt as close, or even more close, to their parents or guardians as they were before the pandemic began — a notable development after long months spent in much closer proximity than was previously the norm. 

But even as it gathered household members closer together, COVID also seemed to wall off teenagers from their more peripheral social ties. This was especially true in school communities, where about one-third of respondents said they felt less close to classmates and teachers than before the coronavirus outbreak.

Across all categories of relationships, McClain reflected, most students said they were “about as close” as they were three years ago. “But when you get to friends, extended family, classmates, teachers — people that teens probably wouldn’t have seen quite as much during the pandemic — you do see these larger shares saying that they feel less close to them.”

The growing feelings of isolation from school peers are perhaps unsurprising, given the exigencies of remote instruction. Still, they are notable in the context of child socialization: The early teen years are when children typically become more free of their immediate families and more dependent on relationships with their peers. Earlier pandemic research has indicated that while depression and anxiety increased among young adults in 2020 and 2021, many found solace in connecting with their friends on social media.

The study authors did note “modest” differences in these trends, with African American students being somewhat more likely than whites to describe themselves as becoming more distant from friends.

Among the report’s other findings:

• Asked what kind of schooling they would choose in the wake of COVID-19, about two-thirds of all students said they wanted to attend classes entirely in-person. Nine percent said they would prefer completely online coursework, and 18 percent would opt for a hybrid. 

• Black students were the demographic group least likely to favor a full return to in-person schooling, with just 51 percent backing that option. Over 40 percent said they would welcome either a hybrid or fully online experience.

• A plurality of parents — 39 percent in all — said they were either “very” or “extremely” satisfied with their local schools’ approach to virtual learning. By comparison, just 28 percent of students themselves said the same, while 30 percent said they were “a little” or “not at all” satisfied.

• Just one-in-six teenage respondents said they were very or extremely worried about falling behind in school, compared with 28 percent of parents. Hispanic respondents were the most likely to voice this concern, with 28 percent of Hispanic teens and 42 percent of Hispanic parents saying they were very or extremely worried.

The Indiana bill includes a provision that would require districts to get parents’ permission before students take any survey that “reveals or attempts to affect the student’s attitudes, habits, traits, opinions, beliefs or feelings.” Parents say such surveys violate student’s privacy and could encourage students to question their mental health or sexual identity.

The legislation stems from a “parents’ rights” movement in Republican-led states across the country that has featured efforts to get and dealing with race and sexuality. Arizona was among the first states to require parent permission for surveys six years ago, but concerns from parents about prying questions have recently spread to districts in Colorado, North Carolina and elsewhere.

“Parents are saying ‘What is this intended to do? What are you doing with the data, and how do we opt out of it?’” said Dawn Lang, who has a fourth grader in the Hamilton Southeastern Schools, north of Indianapolis.

Schools use such surveys to get a read on what students think about their teachers, relationships with peers, access to weapons and, increasingly, issues related to race and diversity. Educators, researchers and others providing services to schools say it’s important to get “student voice” about topics such as substance use, mental health and student engagement. Under pressure to spend billions in federal dollars to address precisely those issues, many are relying on surveys to inform how they spend the money.

Indiana districts, and many across the country, offer parents an opportunity to opt their child out of taking surveys — referred to in the field as passive, or implied, consent. Requiring all students to get permission in advance, or opting in, would reduce participation and leave schools less informed about what students think, experts say.

“Schools often use climate surveys to get a sense of what I call conditions for learning,” said Sandra Washburn, a researcher with the Center on Education and Lifelong Learning at the University of Indiana. “Do students have input into decisions, someone at school they trust? That’s really good data. When we have 50 percent of the student population saying they’re bored on a daily basis, we take note of that.”

If the bill passes, she worries it could limit the number of districts that participate in the , which has been running for more than 30 years and asks students questions about topics ranging from drug and alcohol use to whether their schoolwork is meaningful.

With U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently issuing about increases in youth suicide attempts and substance use, Washburn said, “We need local data that tells us how our kids are doing.”

Requiring written parental consent in advance “has the potential for compromising the validity of the sample of participating students,” said Mikyoung Jun, a survey statistician at Prevention Insights, the Indiana University center that runs the Indiana Youth Survey. 

She pointed to that compared survey samples using both active and passive consent. The active consent group was less likely to include older students, as well as those with behavior problems, single parents or academic struggles. Basing decisions on such results could lead to “mistargeted” policies and programs, the authors wrote.

‘Good faith, important questions’

Lang and parent groups in other states have especially raised concerns over from Boston-based Panorama Education, which now has 1,500 client districts, including Hamilton Southeastern Schools. 

Among questions on the survey given to third-through-fifth graders are: “How often did you get your work done right away, instead of waiting until the last minute?,” “How well did you get along with other students who are different from you?” and “How often do you worry about violence at your school?” 

Surveys for middle and high school students include additional diversity, inclusion and cultural awareness questions, such as, “At your school, how often are you encouraged to think more deeply about race-related topics with other students?”

Survey questions about race and diversity are among those that Brooke Lawson, coordinator of mental health and school counseling for the district, said parents call about the most. 

The district posts opt-out information in multiple ways: the , the superintendent’s weekly video message, a district email to families and principals’ newsletters. She stressed that parents can request to see their child’s responses to the survey report.

Lang, a parent in the district, said she missed the notice about the survey last fall. “It was maybe bundled in with a newsletter at the end of the week,” she said.

Some parents are uncomfortable staff members analyzing students’ thoughts on personal matters.

“They are picking these programs because they’re being told the kids are depressed,” said Kelli Moore, who pulled her eighth grade son out of the Catawba County Schools in North Carolina. She is among those who protested the district’s contract with Panorama, which the district in December. 

Moore added that the demographic questions might plant seeds of “gender confusion” in students’ minds.

“They might make a child think, ‘Maybe I am gay or maybe I’m supposed to be a girl, or maybe I’m supposed to be a boy,’” she said.

Districts using Panorama surveys can choose to offer just male or female as options, or add a third choice for a student to “self-describe,” explained Brendan Ryan, a spokesman for the company.

But he added that districts can “modify the language or options however they deem appropriate for their students.” Districts, he added, own the data, not Panorama. District officials decide who has access to it and whether to give teachers access to an individual student’s responses. 

“There are very fair, good faith, important questions that we think parents should be asking,” he said, “and we’re trying to separate that out from the folks who think we shouldn’t be talking about Rosa Parks because it makes white kids feel bad.”

‘Falling through the cracks’

Brandan Keaveny, a data ethics consultant and former chief accountability officer in the Syracuse Public Schools in New York, said federal relief funds for pandemic recovery have likely prompted more districts to conduct surveys without first gauging parental support

“It’s like, ‘This is what we’ve decided. What do you think?’” he said, adding that districts need to ensure they communicate the purpose of the surveys, the opt-out process and how parents can request their child’s data — and do it in multiple languages. 

“Schools need to be communicating to parents all the places where data is shared on their child,” he said. “I always said to principals, ‘You really need to get people actively involved.’”

But he added that moving to an opt-in process, which he compared to voter suppression, “creates obstacles that keep families” from participating, especially if they don’t speak English or have other reasons for missing messages from their children’s schools. 

Beth Lehr, an assistant principal in the Sahuarita Unified School District in Arizona, south of Tucson, said her school has a hard time getting student perception data because of , passed in 2016, that like the Indiana proposal, requires active consent for student surveys.

Her district received this school year to implement training programs for teachers and pay stipends to those leading afterschool programs for students with additional social and emotional needs “But we can’t do the data gathering to figure out who really needs that intervention because we are required to get active consent,” she said.

Of the 1,063 students in her school, only 160 returned permission forms, she said, adding that even if parents don’t object to the surveys, many don’t read their emails or get the forms from their children in the first place. 

Parents who sign the forms “are probably already doing as much as they can to help their kids,” she said. “We’re missing the kids who are falling through the cracks, because they’re falling through the cracks for a reason.”

Panorama isn’t the only organization facing pushback for its surveys. A parent in a said she was “blindsided” by her child taking a survey created by San Francisco-based non-profit YouthTruth.

Even so, more than half of the 2,100 schools using the survey requested an optional set of questions related to diversity, equity and inclusion the organization introduced for the first time this year, said Sonya Heisters, deputy director of YouthTruth.

Parents, she added, aren’t limiting their concerns about surveys to school board meetings. 

“We’re hearing from parents who are even contacting us directly,” she said. “That didn’t used to happen.”