Education policies and public opinion (Report)

What role does education play in people's expectations of the state?

This is the question addressed by the European Research Council-funded project Investing in Education in Europe: Attitudes, Politics and Policies (INVEDUC) across eight European countries: Sweden, Denmark, the UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy.

Several interesting points emerge from a report published in 2017.

• There is no clear divide between generations or income levels regarding desired public investment in education.
  
  Education and health are the areas where public opinion is most in favor of public investment; this propensity diminishes as soon as tax increases, debt increases or budget cuts are mentioned, although 48% of those surveyed said they would be prepared to accept a new tax to fund an educational area.
  
  
• The variable that seems to be most correlated with investment expectations is political orientation, confirming the extent to which ideological debate can exacerbate the context of educational reform.
  
  
• To the question "where to allocate the funds" - with only one possible answer - education is chosen by a relative majority in Germany (41%) and Italy (27%). Other countries give priority to health, while others focus on the job market and professional integration.
  
  
• Greater investment is desired in vocational education and training, "to be promoted more as an alternative to higher education".
  
  
• Public opinion would also appear to favor reforms linked to the governance of the education system, particularly with regard to school choice (71%) or decentralization/autonomy; the promotion of competition between schools, on the other hand, is not unanimously supported.
  
  

The second part of the report takes a closer look at the current political debate in three countries, drawing on the results of three opinion surveys: in Germany, theIfo Education Survey ( since 2014); in Switzerland, the three surveys (2007, 2012 and 2015) conducted by the Swiss Coordination Centre for Research in Education; in the USA, the Program on Education Policy and Governance (since 2007).

In both Switzerland and Germany, we discover a desire for children to be cared for over a full school day, and an expectation of standardized or nationally comparable school tests. 79% of Germans are in favor of repeating a year.

In the United States, particular attention is paid to online education, which in Europe remains limited to higher education: 46% of Americans would be in favor of credit recognition for online courses in secondary education.

While this information deserves to be placed in the specific context of each education system, a more "general" point can be made:

" the acceptance of reforms crucially depends on the extent to which the public is informed of the relevant facts about the proposed reform".

A few examples from the report show that informing respondents can have consequent effects on their preferences, such as more accurate information on actual levels of educational expenditure, or the communication of research findings showing, for example, the importance of investment in education from the earliest age.

References

European Expert Network on Economics of Education (EENEE). Public Opinion and the Acceptance and Feasibility of Educational Reforms (2016).
https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/a29f75ba-dc81-11e6-ad7c-01aa75ed71a1/language-en

INVEDUC project: https: //www.polver.uni-konstanz.de/en/busemeyer/research/current-projects/erc-project-inveduc/
(Last consultation: October 2017)