Teachers: more conservative than you might have thought

Via This Week in Education, the Hoover Institute has published a study of the political opinions of teachers, using data from NORC opinion polls from 1976-2006.

Here’s what they found. In general more educated Americans are more liberal in their political views than less educated Americans. Teachers, however, tend to be slightly less liberal than non-teachers with similar levels of education. Some examples pulled from the study:

[W]hen we compare teachers and others with similarly high levels of education, we find that teachers tend on average to be less supportive of free-speech rights. On the issue of free speech, teachers are progressive relative to nonteachers, but conservative relative to nonteachers with high levels of schooling.

[I]n each of the four decades, teachers are from 10 to 15 percentage points less likely than other Americans with 16 or more years of schooling to see nothing wrong with homosexuality.

Americans who place themselves in the middle or upper classes, women, and the more highly educated all tend to favor abortion being legal. But teachers are about 14 percentage points more likely to oppose abortion for any reason than highly educated nonteachers—that is, they are more conservative on the issue.

On the other hand:

Teachers’ conservative propensity does not appear to be uniform across their values. They are more liberal than nonteachers, for example, when it comes to school prayer, a stance seemingly inconsistent with their strong religious turn. Moreover, they seem to be more likely to see the world as good, and they tend to be more trusting than other Americans.

As the author points out, in our democratic society, we want our teachers to be “more on the side of freedom and equality than of censorship, coercion, and inequality,” and “we should expect our teachers to be committed to the democratic ideal as an organizing principle for our society and for instruction in their classrooms.”

The Washington Post’s Marc Fisher responds to this point,

That makes good sense to me, and certainly there’s cause for pride in the findings that teachers are trusting and optimistic and want to protect the church-state divide. But some of the other attitudes Slater reports indicate a tradition-bound rigidity in the teacher corps. Some of our best schools and teachers are deeply grounded in very traditional and highly principled foundations, and surely there’s value in both the progressive and traditional approaches to education. What these findings don’t tell us is whether teachers’ attitudes point to the kind of traditional thinking that thrives on open inquiry or to a more fearful and defensive traditionalism.

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Hmmm...this is interesting, especially in light of the NEA’s lack of a presidential endorsement and the AFT and CTU splitting their support between Clinton and Obama, respectively.  I wonder if/how the data breaks down in terms of teachers who teach in urban/rural/suburban communities.  I also wonder what the relationship is between the general level of conservatism or liberalism amongst teachers and the communities that they serve.  I’ve often wondered about the correlation between higher education and more progressive viewpoints.  I wonder why there is generally a correlation?