RALEIGH – To say I was surprised would be to put it mildly.
As part of a survey the John Locke Foundation commissioned last week among likely Wake County voters, we asked a series of questions about plans for a November referendum on a school-bond package approaching $1 billion. Such a plan would certainly require higher property taxes, so I can’t say I was surprised to find overwhelming opposition to it (even among parents with children, 54 percent were against it). Nor was I shocked to learn that a scaled-down package of school-construction bonds, not to exceed the $625 million trigger for higher taxes, enjoyed strong support among likely voters. They obviously recognize that meteoric growth in enrollment requires a sizable building program as well as other policy responses but want priorities set and existing tax dollars used more wisely.
However, on the related matter of Wake County’s proposal to convert more schools to a year-round schedule – a strategy that would save dollars on school construction by accommodating more students at each facility – I was shocked to find that it made very little difference to voters whether year-round would simply be available to more parents as an option or mandatory at most schools. Our sample supported the idea regardless.
Specifically, 71 percent of Wake likely voters favored a policy of mandatory year-round schooling. When I discussed the preliminary results with local politicians and school officials on Tuesday, they suggested that perhaps this reflected a huge majority of non-parents in favor and a majority of parents still opposed. Nope. When I subsequently got the cross-tabulations, I discovered that 59 percent of households containing children under the age of 18 also favored the mandatory policy. Statistically, only a handful of these could be enrolled in the charter, private, or home schools exempt from the policy. Thus virtually all have children in the Wake County public schools or expect to enroll them in the next few years.
The next question in the survey asked if respondents favored or opposed expanding the year-round program on an optional basis. The support was certainly larger, at 77 percent, but not significantly so.
Previous surveys in Wake County, including one JLF commissioned after the 1999 defeat of a $650 million school bond, found that mandating a year-round schedule was not a popular idea. So how can the latest finding be explained?
One possibility is that the poll is screwy. When you commission a random survey and report the results, you select a confidence level and that, in turn, determines the margin of sampling error. We made the typical choice of a 95 percent confidence level, yielding a margin of plus or minus five percentage points at a sample size of 400. That means that 19 out of 20 times, the true sentiment of the population being sampled would have provided responses within that margin. Obviously, then, one out of 20 times, it won’t. That would, in technical terms, be a screwy poll.
I doubt that’s the explanation here. In virtually every other respect, the poll seems to reflect voter sentiment fairly accurately, at least when compared to previous efforts by various pollsters. The demographics are also close to the usual for a Wake sample. My guess is that the results are pretty close to where Wake voters are at the moment.
Several factors likely explain the shift. An increasing share of the population is familiar with year-round schooling, having used it themselves or knowing people who have. It’s less scary a concept than it used to be. Also, many with misgivings about mandatory year-round may still prefer it to either big tax increases or overcrowded schools. Other alternatives to costly construction plans, such as expanding the number of charter schools in Wake to help accommodate enrollment growth, also enjoyed strong support in the poll.
I don’t agree with the public here – choice is still preferable to mandates in my book, on so many matters – but I guess in retrospect it’s not so hard to understand the sentiment.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.