Most of it stays in the reports we produce for a specific district or school. But every so often a pattern shows up enough times that it stops being “a finding” and starts being a lesson.
Here are five from this year.
① The single best predictor of how an 8th grader feels about high school isn’t social. It’s academic.
We ask outgoing eighth-graders a handful of questions in the spring: do you understand the schedule, will you fit in, do you know what to do if you fall behind, are you comfortable asking adults for help, and do you feel ready for harder classes.
Of those, one question correlates better with overall readiness and overall feelings about starting high school than any of the others combined: readiness for harder classes.
Kids are, by and large, confident they’ll fit in socially. They’re less confident they can handle the coursework. And when we isolated the small slice of students who told us flatly that they’re not ready and they’re scared, that’s exactly where their confidence collapsed hardest and more than any other measure we track.
If a building only has time for one orientation-day question, this is the one that tells you the most.
② If you want to reach the people who are drifting away from your schools, mail them something.
We talk to districts constantly about communication strategies, and the instinct is almost always digital, like another e-newsletter, another post on the socials, another email blast.
The data says that instinct is solving the wrong problem for the audience that needs it most.
Over the last five years of surveys, broader community members (the people who don’t have a kid in your schools and don’t work for you) are the one group where scores have gone down across the board, not up, not flat, down.
These are also the people least likely to be reading your e-newsletter because they were never signed up for it in the first place. They don't go looking for school information; they have to be handed it. A physical mailer, written in plain language, is still the most reliable way to reach someone who isn’t already paying attention.
It feels old-fashioned, but it works, especially for the audience that digital communication keeps missing.
③ On cell phones, parents and staff are convinced it's a bigger problem than students say it is—and a lot of them don't even know what the policy is.
We've run a good number of cell phone and personal device surveys over the last two or three years, and a pattern holds up almost every time. Ask students how big a problem phones are — in class, for bullying, for cheating — and on any given question, somewhere between 15% and a third say it's an issue. Most students land on "it's happening, but it's not really a problem."
Ask parents and staff the same question, and the perception runs noticeably hotter. Phones look like a bigger problem to the adults than they do to the kids actually holding them. But the response that should really catch a district's attention isn't "yes" or "no." It's "I don't know."
On policy questions, that's often the single largest response among parents and staff — sometimes the majority. People aren't undecided about whether the policy is working. They don't know there's a policy at all. Before a district spends energy debating the right rule, it's worth checking whether anyone outside the building even knows a rule exists.
④The closer you are to the school building, the better things look (and that gap is the story of the last five years).
Line up five years of staff, student, parent, and community data side by side, and a pattern falls out that we didn't expect going in. Staff, who are in the building every day, are doing great — almost every measure is up. Students, also in the building every day, are doing fine — a slower, steadier climb, but a climb. Parents, who are in the building occasionally, are essentially flat; technically more items are up than down, but the ones that matter most haven't moved. Community members, who are mostly never in the building, are down across every single measure we track.
Proximity is doing most of the work here. The people closest to daily life in a school feel the best about it. The people furthest away feel the worst. That's not a coincidence, and it's not fixable by hoping the next set of numbers looks different on its own.
⑤ Loving your schools doesn’t necessarily mean you vote for them.
For years, this was one of the more dependable relationships in our data: the more likely someone is to recommend their local school district, the more likely they were to support a referendum.
Satisfaction and willingness to fund the district moved together. It made intuitive sense. If you like what’s happening in the schools, you’re inclined to pay for it.
That relationship is loosening.
People who’d still happily recommend their district are increasingly saying no or not right now when it comes to actually raising their own taxes to fund it.
Gas, groceries, and everything else that’s gotten more expensive? There’s your likely culprit.
Satisfaction with a district and willingness to fund a district used to be close to the same question. Increasingly, they’re two different questions with two different answers, and a district that's only tracking one of them is missing the gap.
The School Perceptions Resource Center features the voices of our team members. This post was written by Rob DeMeuse, Vice President of Research.