COLUMBUS, Ohio - Despite efforts by state lawmakers to exert more control over the classroom, a new poll shows Ohio parents overwhelmingly trust their children’s teachers.
The poll, conducted by Baldwin Wallace University for the Children’s Defense Fund - Ohio, comes as students return to school in coming weeks.
According to the poll, 91.6% of parents agreed with the statement, “I trust my child’s teacher to: Support their academic learning and success.”
And 90.3% of parents agreed with the statement, “I trust my child’s teacher to: Be a positive role model.”
Another 89.1% of parents agreed with the statement, “I trust my child’s teacher to: Have high expectations of my child.”
These are three of 71 questions asked in the poll, taken online by 1,370 Ohio parents or guardians of K-12 students from May 9 through May 28. The margin of error is plus or minus 3%.
The parents were identified by Survey USA, which helped Baldwin Wallace on the poll, and qualified by the number of K-12 students in their care, the kids’ grade levels and the types of schools they attend. The survey was weighted to U.S. Census data for race, gender, education and home ownership in Ohio.
State lawmakers have introduced a number of bills in the past year to control the content students are learning. For instance, there are two bills in the Ohio House that ban the teaching or promotion of “divisive concepts” about racism and sexism and critical race theory, an academic study that is taught at the college level. Another bill prohibits divisive concepts and from schools using or providing instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity to young children, which is modeled after Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay,” law.
Separately, a Republican-sponsored bill would require teachers to post curricula and instructional materials online for each classroom course by July 1, so parents can review the materials.
Local school board races in Ohio in 2021 featured candidates who wanted to control how race was taught in social studies.
“Many educational debates across Ohio today give the appearance of widespread and vocal opposition among parents to what schools are teaching and how they are supporting students. What our polling of Ohio parents and caregivers with children in K-12 schools shows is that this opposition is a vocal minority, one which does not even come close to representing the views of most parents and which may not be made up of many parents at all,” said the Children Defense Fund - Ohio’s Alison Paxson.
“Over 90% of Ohio parents in our survey said they trust their child’s teacher to teach age-appropriate content and agree they feel comfortable going to their child’s teacher if they have a question about what is being taught. And this was in a survey with more Republican responses overall,” Paxson continued. “The data makes it clear: why waste time on bills for problems that don’t exist? Listen to parents, to educators, to your constituents and focus on making sure children have enough to eat, are healthy and well enough to come to schools ready to learn.”
The Children’s Defense Fund - Ohio — an organization that advocates for policies to lift kids out of poverty, protect them from abuse and neglect and ensure a high-quality and stable education — emphasized parts of the survey that support the Ohio State Board of Education’s strategic plan, called the Whole Child Framework, which aims to broaden district and school focus beyond academics to include meeting students’ social-emotional, physical and safety needs.
The survey asked parents several questions about social and emotional learning, such as whether schools should provide students instruction on getting along with people who are different than them, how to resolve conflicts, how to understand the way emotions and thoughts influence behavior, among others.
Ohio’s K-12 Social and Emotional Learning Standards aim to teach kids to acquire and effectively apply knowledge, attitudes and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, and establish and maintain positive relationships and make responsible decisions.
“We wanted to get a true, accurate measure of how Ohio parents and caregivers really perceive key components of Ohio’s Whole Child Framework, including Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), because yes, these have been targeted and opposed by vocal groups in Ohio,” said the Children Defense Fund - Ohio’s Alison Paxson. “We wanted to understand if this was truly representative of Ohio parents and their views.”
The survey found that opposition to social-emotional learning, mental health care and even school lunch nutrition are “absolutely held by a vocal minority, many of whom may not even have children in K-12 schools, and that these views do not represent what the majority of parents really want from Ohio’s education system for their children,” she said.
Many of the questions in the poll were theoretical. For instance, 93.4% of parents agreed that schools should help kids understand the ways emotions and thoughts can influence their own behavior.
That question wasn’t juxtaposed with other expectations that people have of their kids’ schools, such as teaching critical reading skills, science, technology, engineering and math and other subjects that teachers must cram into a student’s day.
Paxson, however, said that social and emotional learning don’t need to be separate from reading, writing and arithmetic. Social and emotional learning has been taught in classrooms since the 1960s. Students learn the skills in sharing circles, discussion-based activities, conflict resolution role playing, classroom leadership roles and expectation-setting.
Students who learn social and emotional skills gain confidence that helps them excel in other subject areas, she said.
“To ask a question making parents decide between whether they want STEM or SEL creates a false choice that would be irresponsible for how it inaccurately portrays how SEL is taught in schools – there is no academic subject a child learns where social and emotional skills do not factor into learning outcomes and engagement or where SEL skills are not essential in a child arriving at the right answer,” she said.