Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.
Poll(s) of the week
Being a parent is hard enough — but being a parent during a pandemic is even harder. With many schools physically closed to prevent the spread of COVID-19, parents are now balancing their omnipresent concerns over their children’s education, development and emotional well-being with their own lives and careers. And the stress of that has bubbled over to the point where reopening schools is now a major political issue.
But despite the increased volume of the debate, public opinion on reopening schools is complicated. The issue is not as black-and-white as many are depicting it, and the variations in wording that pollsters use to ask about it can produce different results. Here’s what the polls over the past month do say.
When you ask Americans a binary question about reopening schools, support for reopening appears high. For example, a Jan. 28-30 poll by RMG Research for Just the News found that 53 percent of registered voters thought schools in their area should be open for in-person learning, while just 31 percent thought they should remain closed. And according to a Feb. 12-15 Morning Consult/Politico survey, 57 percent of registered voters thought it was a good idea for K-12 schools to reopen in fall 2021, while just 26 percent thought it was a bad idea.
Add an option for hybrid learning, however, and the nation is more ambivalent. According to a YouGov/HuffPost poll conducted Feb. 3-7, adults were evenly divided among the three options. Twenty-seven percent thought schools should be completely reopened, 29 percent thought schools should be partially reopened and 30 percent thought they should be closed or online-only.
In addition, the issue has been simplistically framed as pitting parents against teachers (with the latter resisting the former’s calls to reopen). But polls indicate that, despite being personally affected by