Missouri K-12 & School Choice Survey: What Do Voters Say about K-12 Education? Polling Paper No. 19

The "Missouri K-12 & School Choice Survey" project, commissioned by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice and conducted by Braun Research, Inc. (BRI), measures Missouri registered voters' familiarity and views on a range of K-12 education topics and school choice reforms. The author and his colleagues report response levels and differences of voter opinion, as well as the intensity of those responses. Where do Missourians stand on important issues and policy proposals in K-12 education? A randomly selected and statistically representative sample of Missouri voters responded to more than 20 substantive questions and items, as well as eight demographic questions. This project also includes one split-sample experiment. A split-sample design is a systematic way of comparing the effects of two or more alternative wordings for a given question. The purpose of the experiment was to see if providing a new piece of information about education can significantly influence opinion on salient issues in state politics and education policy discussions. This polling paper has four sections: (1) a summary of key findings; (2) "Survey Snapshots," which offers charts highlighting the core findings of the project; (3) the survey's methodology, which summarizes response statistics, and presents additional technical information on call dispositions for landline and cell phone interviews; and (4) the survey questions and results ("topline numbers"), allowing the reader to follow the interview as it was conducted, with respect to question wording and ordering.