Please note: This transcript was automatically generated. We have reviewed it to ensure it reflects the original conversation, but we may not have caught every transcription error.

Chris Saldaña: Hi, everyone. I'm Chris Saldana, and this is the National Education Policy Center's education interview of the month. This month, we're interviewing Dr. David Houston about partisanship and polarization in education policy. Dr. Houston is an assistant professor of education in the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University. He's the director of Ed PolicyForward: the Center for Education Policy and the survey director of the Education Next poll at Harvard University. In this month’s podcast, Professor Houston delves into the complex landscape of partisanship and polarization in education policy, offering a nuanced perspective on how these forces shape public opinion and policy decisions. He explains that while many education issues have become increasingly divided along party lines over the past two decades, others still maintain bipartisan support.

Chris Saldaña: When we think about ideas or concepts like partisanship or polarization, what do those things mean, and why should we care about them in education policy?

David Houston: Great question. And thank you again for inviting me. This is really quite a privilege to be able to join this conversation. So what, when we're saying things like partisanship and we're saying things like polarization, these are, these are words that political scientists have fairly specific definitions for but they've entered the mainstream conversation in ways that basically just, you know, read as bad or controversial or, you know, angry or bitter or uncompromising, and you know, the connotation has sort of taken over the definition. But bipartisanship, what we're talking about is an enduring relationship, an attachment, a psychological attachment, to a political party. It can take the form of the conventional survey question for asking about political party affiliation. Comes from the American national election study, and I have to paraphrase, because I don't remember it word for word, but it goes something along the lines of like, lines of like, would you I would you call yourself a Republican, a Democrat, an independent or something else? And folks respond if you say a Democrat, there's a follow up question that says, Would you think of yourself as like a strong democrat or a not very strong Democrat? If you answer independent or something else they often the follow up question is, do you lean towards one of the two parties? You know? If you know, if forced to choose, would you know? Would you think of yourself as closer to the Republican Party or the Democratic Party? And there's a long history of research showing that folks that explicitly identify with the party, as well as their counterparts, who merely say that they lean towards one party the other, behave in really similar ways. They tend to hold similar views. They tend to vote in similar ways. And so in most empirical analyzes of political partisanship, oftentimes we group together folks who explicitly identify with a party. Last time I checked it was a, you know, it was about 25% of Americans. I'm getting the number a little bit wrong, but it's about a quarter of Americans who identify with the Democrats, about a quarter of Americans who identify with Republicans, in a really large and growing chunk that identify as independents or something else. But in fact, it's about 90% of the American public that at least leans towards one party or the other, and that affiliation is quite predictive of their views and behavior. When we talk about polarization, polarization is even more elusive of a concept than partisanship, because we really just use polarized in mass media context to say bad but political scientists define polarization a little bit more narrowly. So to be polarized means that views on a given subject gravitate towards the poles of a distribution, as opposed to the center, so that there's a great deal of disagreement along some axis. In the United States that access is the intersection between party affiliation and political ideology. Are Republicans disproportionately taking conservative views? Are Democrats increasingly taking liberal views? And Is there less is the is the mass of opinion less concentrated in the middle? Is it? Is it getting skewed towards the polls, or is it getting skewed towards the center? And that's more specifically, more technically, what we mean when we talk about polarization.

Chris Saldaña: So I don't have to remind you, but we're currently in the midst of a highly competitive and increasingly contentious presidential election, and as has been the case for decades now, education is once again an issue, things like vouchers, vaccine mandates, funding racial and social justice in curriculum and school practices. So when we think about all of these issues that have come up on the campaign trail, what do we know about the level of partisanship surrounding some of these issues?

David Houston: So there's this widespread sense that debates over education policy divide more clearly along party lines today than they did 10 years ago. And I think that's right, but that pattern could be conflating two different phenomena. First, is it just that the these current issues that are that are dominating contemporary discussions, you know, questions of vouchers or education savings accounts as they're sometimes referred to, or how to teach about race and racism in K 12 classrooms, or the rights of transgender students. Is it that these debates are just simply more aligned with our pre-existing partisan divides than the debates that we were having a decade ago about charter schools and teacher evaluation? Is that what we're seeing or is it the case that nearly all education issues are getting sucked into this broader partisan conflict that defines so much of American public life. My answer, which might be infuriating to our listeners, is a little bit of both and a little bit of neither. So let me, let me walk through that so on the first issue about the culture war issues. But yes, absolutely, some of these emerging issues tap into really deep disagreements about race and sexuality that define the two modern American political parties. The folks who have done the best polling work on this are my colleagues at USC - that's Morgan Polikoff, Anna Saavedra, their team, and they reveal these just gargantuan partisan divides on things like classroom instruction about structural racism or gender identity. And at the same time, some of my recent research shows that it's not just about the emergence of these new hot button issues. So as researchers, we often wear many hats, and one of my hats is the survey director of the annual education next poll. And a few years back, I pulled the data on every survey item that we asked in the same or basically the same way, year after year after year for at least 10 years, between when the poll started in 2007 to the last survey administration before our current hiatus in 2022 and I show that for most of these issues, the partisan gap, that is the average difference in opinion between Democrats and Republicans, has been expanding a non-trivial, fairly consistent rate over the last two decades. That it's not just the culture war stuff, many of our education policy debates are increasingly defined by party affiliation. But here's the wrinkle, and so that, like if I stopped there, I think I would paint a little too dire of a picture, because not every education issue divides along party lines. When you ask folks about the broader purposes of public education, when you ask folks about you know, should our public schools be oriented towards teaching the core academic subjects or preparing students to enter the workforce, or preparing students to become active and engaged citizens in our democracy? The partisan divides on those sort of larger purpose questions are modest. When I ask about spending in general or teacher salaries in particular, there are partisan divides to be sure, Democrats are more likely to say we should increase spendings. Republicans are somewhat less likely to say so, but a majority of the public does is favor increased expenditures. Interesting note on teacher salaries in particular, in the next poll, we often ask two different versions of the question. One just asks about spending in the abstract. One asks, you know, first provide some information about local spending levels or local average teacher salaries, and then asks the question over the last couple of years, even when you provide people with information about current average teacher salaries, they look at that number and they go, yeah, that's too low. We should be spending more on teachers. So I view that as a fairly robust finding that public support for higher teacher salaries cuts well across party lines, and there's a pretty strong constituency for it. At the beginning you mentioned vouchers, or education savings accounts, as they're sometimes referred to. And this one's tricky, because the elite partisan. The Elite politics are very partisan, Republican officials, Republican activists strongly pro-voucher. Democratic officials, democratic activists, strongly anti-voucher, but the mass politics are much more muddled. You see intra party debates on that issue within both parties. So to summarize that, like, yes, we're in this moment with these extremely heated, hot button issues, these bombastic political personalities. You know, stoking the fire. But we're also in this much longer. The roots of this go deeper. We're in this longer trend towards many of the debates about education policy getting enmeshed in this broader partisan current that's sort of shaping a lot of American politics, but partisan conflict on Education Policy is neither universal nor is it maximal. There are there are exceptions of plenty to the rule.

Chris Saldaña: So I want to ask you two follow up questions. One is about politics, and one is about practice. So you mentioned that there are even divides within maybe the elite politics and those that might be happening closer to the ground. When you think about the individuals who are espousing the rhetoric, who are making the claims about things, making the arguments, how do folks respond to, for example, presidents or presidential candidates when they make arguments about education policy, culture war issues. Does it motivate a base? Does it make folks more polarized, more partisan? How have you found that relationship between individuals and the body politic to work?

David Houston: So if you're listening to this podcast, I think it's probably a safe bet to say that you're really tuned into the details of education policy, right? That is not a particularly good description of most Americans who, if given the choice, would generally allocate their scarce, discretionary time to other pursuits. And I don't blame them for that, having dedicated my professional life to studying education policy, let me tell you, sometimes I think twice about what I could have done otherwise and so. But most Americans are not steeped in the details of education policy debates when it comes to what political scientists refer to as low salience issues, which I think other than the really big picture stuff about public education, I think most of the sort of technocratic education policy debates would fall into that bucket. The importance of elite opinion leadership is paramount. Folks are not coming to these debates, in most cases, with sort of deeply embedded, deeply foundational core beliefs about charter schools or about merit-based teacher pay or vouchers or things like that. Hearing the cues from political leaders are really important, and there's a long tradition in political science showing the importance of elite messaging on public opinion, especially among the subset of Americans who are really, you know, engaged and involved. And, you know, regularly consume news, and, you know, watch read the newspapers and watch cable news and are engaged in political debates in on social media. And in fact, it's that portion of the public, of the public that is, in fact, most dramatically shaped by elite messaging. So I just came out with one of my excellent graduate students - her name is Alyssa Barone, a working paper that looked at the effects of education policy cues that is information about their position on Education Policy from US presidents. To make that a little bit more concrete, I'm the survey director of the next poll. Since before I entered that role, beginning in 2009 the poll regularly included these, these cool little experiments. Half the sample, for example, would be asked, you know, what do you think about charter schools? The other half of the sample would be randomly assigned to say, as it turns out, Barack Obama supports charter schools. What do you think about charter schools? And we've done this a bunch of different times with different issues, different queue givers across a long period of time, Alyssa and I gathered 18 different experiments conducted over 12 years to look at the average effects of receiving information about, you know, the policy positions, the education policy positions from an extremely high profile partisan figure, the President, in this case, Obama, Trump and Biden. As it turns out, the average effect of those policy cues is zero, nada, nothing, zip. But that null, average effect masks an enormous amount of partisan polarization. So to put it simply, when you hear about Obama's views on a subject, it brings along members of his own party, and it pushes away members of the other party, sort of regardless of the ideological valence of the position. So learning about Obama's support for merit based teacher pay, you might consider sort of a centrist or center right position, but it brought Democrats along to that position, and it pushed Republicans away from that position simply because it was associated with Obama. The polar opposite happened with Trump, of course. And so you know, when high profile partisan officials adopted these, what Alyssa and I call these cross party cues, they effectively serve to depolarize the. Public a phenomenon that was pretty darn common in the 90s, early 2000s and 2010s and fast forward to 2024, is less common now. So we're not exactly in a political moment that favors these kinds of cross party queues. And I don't really know where to shake out on the normative implications of that, right? I think it's pretty non obvious. I don't have a grand theory about whether that's fundamentally a good thing or a bad thing. You know? If so, to stick with the example of charter schools, if you were a charter school advocate, then it was a wonderful thing that Obama was included in that coalition. That was a very useful persuasive tool. If you were opposed to charter schools, then that really put a dent in your efforts to form an alternative vision for education reform, and I leave that to the audience to figure out, you know, how they where they shake out on that that's not really my place to tell them. But I do think there are some policy implications to these current partisan impasses that are that are worth noting, and I think they're going to matter, and I think they've already begun to matter. It shakes out differently at different levels of our political system. This looks really different at the federal level than it does at the state level. At the federal level, we're in this moment of competitive parity for Congress and the White House. Every election partisan control of Congress and partisan control of the White House is up for grabs. This is a circumstance that does not incentivize compromise. This is a circumstance that incentivizes gamesmanship and doing your darndest to make the other side look bad, because you might, by virtue of them looking bad, win control in the next term. And there's real power that comes with that. And so to be fair, I would say Biden did an unexpectedly good job at finding opportunities for bipartisan work, but they were not on the issues for which the public was divided by party. It was a very strategic and selective choice of the issues on which to pursue bipartisan legislation. And at the federal level, level, we're really in a place where major reform is limited to this very small subset of issues that don't prompt this polarized response. But there's a totally different phenomenon that's happening at the state level. So we're not at competitive parity between the two parties at the state level. At the state level, it's much more common for one party to have total control of the legislative and executive branch, and it reliably prompts a different phenomenon, not stalemate, but divergence. And so we are in this moment where we're seeing this, this really important divide between red states and blue states in terms of the kinds of education policies they're passing. It began a few years back, if not earlier, and I think we're accelerating into it.

Chris Saldaña: That's what I wanted to ask you about practice is when we think about some of the polarization, and so where there isn't polarization and where there might be on issues. What does it mean, for example, that folks in red states and blue states might all agree on a statement like, does public education matter, but disagree on issues that on issues of gender or issues of race or issues of sexuality, or what does that mean for what schools will look like? Do we know what that might mean for demographic shifts in our country like our I know one of the things that often, one of the claims that's made is that if you, if you don't like where you are, you could leave but that just isn't a reality, really in our world. So what does that mean that we are, we are becoming essentially a 50 state education, or a 50 state educational system, where within those 50 states there's so much division and polarization?

David Houston: I it always, I'm glad you brought that up, this notion of that, like, well, you should just vote with your feet, and you should move to the place where you want to be. Like, that's a real nice thing to say for a talking head on CNN. Or, you know, even you and me, you know, as professors at high profile institutions that like, would that be difficult, sure, but would it be possible? Yes, that is not true for most people who are enmeshed in professional and social and familial environments that like leaving that state is just not that's not a realistic thing for people to do, and also deeply unfair that they would not be able to have access to the same sort of public services simply by virtue of their, of the address on their, on their, on the envelope that you, that you write to them. You know, the degree of divergence is yet to be seen. I do think we are on a trajectory, you described it as a 50 state system, and the American public education system has always been a 50 state system. It's always been fragmented, always been decentralized, even more so than that, 13,000 different school districts. But increasingly, I worry, and I sort of stay awake at night thinking about a dual system, which I think is there are huge disadvantages and advantages to our fragmented, decentralized system. I think there are bigger disadvantages to a dual system. You know, the you can think of sort of really easy to capture, emotionally resonant anecdotes of this. If you're in Florida, you're no you're no longer able to take a class in AP African American Studies. If you're in California, pretty soon, you are required to take an ethnic studies class to graduate from high school. But and so those that's like a high profile example, but in lots of little ways, I think we are on the verge and at the risk of diverging into a notably, tangibly different public education system in red and blue states, and that worries me a great deal.

Chris Saldaña: What does this mean for something like local control when you have when you might have some tensions between a school district that has certain beliefs, the school board has certain beliefs about issues, and that disagrees with the state?

David Houston: Oh, it's a great question, right? Because local control is wrapped up in so many of our core political debates about education. You know, local control the ascribed virtues to it, are this the opportunity for greater responsiveness to local needs and local conditions. But local control is also the institutional infrastructure that creates and reifies the inequalities between districts, the racial, ethnic and economic segregation between districts. Local Control is a real double-edged sword, but it is a rallying cry for every political cause that makes use of it. If you are a red community in a blue state, you appeal to local control. If you're a blue city in a red state, you appeal to local control. And for obvious reasons, and I think we're going to see a lot of important debates and a lot of important values get contested along these lines. I think we've seen some examples in the last couple of years. So during the height of the covid pandemic, we saw a lot of intrastate battles over mask and vaccine mandates. We also saw intrastate, you know conflict about the rights of transgender students, whether or not students could adopt a different pronoun without automatically notifying their parents whether they would have access to bathroom facilities or athletic opportunities that align with their gender identity. And you would see individual districts within that that wanted to go one way on these policies in a state that decidedly wanted to go another way, setting up this real important conflict for students civil rights in these inner district or, sorry, intergovernmental politics. I wish I had a like, clear answer to you about like, which way this is going to shake out. I really don't know, but I do think it's going to be the source of a lot of political tension in education policy over the next couple of years.

Chris Saldaña: I want to switch gears a little bit when, when you think about the way that people form public opinion, for us as researchers, we are… we hold this very cool position where we get to help our society, our communities, understand more about various issues. What do we know about, for example, the role that research plays in the formation of public opinion, in being able to speak to some of these issues? And then, in addition to that, given that role, how should we engage as researchers?

David Houston: Oh, it's a big question, and one that probably has a disappointing answer to many researchers out there, that the link between a research finding and, you know, policy making, the actual decision making that happens at the at the policy level, let alone public opinion, is long and indirect, and we, myself included, am sometimes guilty of inflating the likelihood that my big new paper is going to have a real ripple in the in the conversation, but even if we adopt more modest claims about the likely effects of  research on policy making and public opinion. Oftentimes, it's not in the form of like, if I read this paper, then my opinions will change, sort of in a linear way. Or if I'm in a position of influence and I'm trying to make a very specific decision, will I have the time capacity, and, you know, and staff necessary to canvas the available literature and make a particularly well-informed decision based on the empirical research. What often happens is the body of research on a subject sort of creates a community of knowledge, and it can help raise the salience of an issue or the salience of potential policy solutions to long standing problems when there's a moment in the political environment where you know the conditions are right to try something new. Folks in positions of authority often appeal to the research community, to anyone who can wield authority, and research often confers authority to get a sense of the available solutions. So, you know, the research conversation happens in parallel to the policy and political conversation, and at important junctures it can intersect. You know, a nice example of this potentially is at the depth of the pandemic, when the when the extent of lost learning became clear, this was also the moment where there was some really compelling research that had clarified the magnitude of the effects of one on one and small group tutoring, and sometimes the conditions under which that would be more or less effective. I think that's like a really clear instance where the research conversation intersected fruitfully with the policy and political conversation. But it's not always that neat. More often than not, we do our work in in the hope that those moments occur and are sometimes disappointed. I would say more broadly, though, you know, policy researchers are sometimes called upon to put on their advocacy hat. You know, based on our expertise, based on our findings, there are opportunities for us to weigh in to the public debate and use that expertise in a constructive way. I would say one of the findings, one of the potential takeaways of my recent work, is that, yes, sure, there are opportunities where it's really valuable to have a high profile political figure take up your cause, but to be really conscious of the very real downsides to that, the partisan backlash is very predictable, and then, if you're trying to move public opinion, there's real advantages to finding politically unexpected spokespersons for your views. That's not always possible, particularly in our contemporary polarized environment, but there may also still be wisdom in avoiding some of the most polarizing figures in your own party, which can rapidly increase support for your position within your party, but fairly reliably reduce support for it in the other party. And if should you be in need of that other party on the margins, you can really create unnecessary obstacles for your agenda.

Chris Saldaña: Dr. Houston, thank you for being on this month's podcast. As always, we hope you're safe and healthy and remember that for the latest analysis on education policy, you should subscribe to the NEPC newsletter at nepc.colorado.edu.