Teachers as Elites: Populism and the Erosion of Trust in Public Schools

• In Event: Teachers and Education Politics

Abstract

Populist-fueled political challenges to the public K-12 school system have escalated, including with recent laws requiring the removal of books from public school libraries and prohibitions on lessons about sexual orientation. In this paper, we present findings from an original dataset demonstrating the relationship between right-wing populist political attitudes, defined as a combination of anti-elite sentiment, support for governance by regular citizens, and anti-immigration sentiment, and support for public school teachers, librarians, and leaders. Our data is drawn from the Grinnell College National Poll, a 1,000 person telephone survey of the United States conducted by Selzer & Co. First, we provide evidence that distrust of teachers is correlated with anti-elite sentiment. Democrats and Republicans trust different groups of community figures to solve important problems. Factor analysis shows that Republicans group public school teachers with “elites” including college professors, scientists, and members of the news media, and distrust their ability to solve important problems. Distrust in public school teachers is also correlated with support for populist political leaders including Donald Trump. Second, we report the results of a survey experiment investigating whether respondents would support a public school library keeping a book on sexual orientation in its collection. We find that an endorsement from a public school teacher about the educational importance of exposing students to a wide variety of materials in a library increased support for the book among non-populists, but not among populists. In short, populist attitudes negated the effect of the teacher’s endorsement. Together, our findings show that the populist swing in American public opinion has undermined trust in public schools in part because populists view school leaders as distrusted elites.

Authors

• Peter Hanson, Grinnell College

• Ishai Melamede