Public opinion and the acceptance and feasibility of educational reforms

In education policy, as in many other policy fields, well-designed policy reforms may fail to get enacted because policymakers may suddenly become confronted with a public backlash against their reform agenda.

Thus, understanding the dynamics of public opinion is important in order to be able to assess the chances of successful reform. There is a large scholarly literature based on ample survey data about the public’s attitudes towards the welfare state, but the policy field of education has until recently been neglected in this literature. 

This report summarizes the findings of a recent and growing literature studying the dynamics of public opinion on education policy, based on original and new survey data collected in various research projects in Europe and the United States.

Authors

Marius Busemeyer, Philipp Lergetporer and Ludger Woessmann

Cite as

European Commission: Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture, European Expert Network on Economics of Education (EENEE), Busemeyer, M., Lergetporer, P. and Woessmann, L., Public opinion and the acceptance and feasibility of educational reforms, Publications Office of the European Union, 2016, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2766/028567