Is Seeing Believing? How Americans and Germans Think about Their Schools. Program on Education Policy and Governance Working Papers Series. PEPG 15-02

Program on Education Policy and Governance. Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government, 79 John F. Kennedy Street, Taubman 304, Cambridge, MA 02138. Tel: 617-495-7976; Fax: 617-496-4428; e-mail: [email protected]; Web site: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg

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53

Governance; School Policy; Educational Attitudes; National Surveys; Comparative Education; Context Effect; Institutional Characteristics; Foreign Countries; Cultural Context; Cultural Differences; Educational History; Organizational Culture; Government Role; Local Government; Educational Quality; Educational Finance; Equal Education; Teacher Recruitment; Teacher Education; Teacher Salaries; Teacher Evaluation; Teacher Persistence; Preschool Education; Achievement Tests; International Assessment; Secondary School Students; Tenure; Expenditures; Academic Achievement; Elementary Secondary Education; Public Opinion; Secondary School Teachers; Advanced Placement Programs

Germany; United States

Program for International Student Assessment; Advanced Placement Examinations (CEEB)

What do citizens of the United States and Germany think about their schools and school policies? This paper offers the first broad comparison of public thinking on education in the two countries. We carried out opinion surveys of representative samples of the German and American adult populations in 2014 that included experiments in which we provided additional information to randomly selected subgroups. The paper first describes key characteristics of the U.S. and German education systems and then analyzes how information and institutional context affect public beliefs in the two countries. Results indicate both similarities and differences in the structure of American and German public opinion on schools and school policies. Contains a Methodological Appendix. [Paper prepared for the conference on Public Opinion and the Political Economy of Education, Munich, May 9, 2015. Financial support was provided by the Leibniz Association.]

As Provided

19

2017

ED574543