My colleagues and I went out on a limb yesterday when we wrote an op-ed piece saying that teacher unions were in trouble. So I watched the news last night with a worried eye after CNN told me that the exit polls in Wisconsin showed a tight race.

Ed Next readers—or at least those who participate in our polls—are not all that different from the public at large, except that they seem to know more about the issues and are thus more inclined to take a position on them. That’s what we discovered when we asked the same questions of readers as were posed to a representative cross-section of the public as a whole in 2011.

It’s long been said that public education must achieve both public and private aims. The public, which foots the bill, has an interest in a well-educated populace. Parents—schools’ primary clients—want a strong foundation for their own children. Much of the time these two interests are in perfect alignment. But what happens when they’re not?

The new Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup survey makes clear that most adults value their children’s teachers.

For several decades pollsters have asked American citizens to grade the nation’s public schools, both nationally and within their local community. Yet we know next to nothing about how citizens go about answering.

Opinion on merit pay has yet to consolidate in one direction or another, as a lot of people have yet to make up their mind.

In polls, the way you ask the question can sometimes determine the answer you get. If the public has no strong opinion, they can be swayed by the question itself.

According to the Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll, 64 percent of all Americans “favor the idea of charters.” But according to the Ednext poll, only 39 percent “support the formation of charter schools.”

A look at the latest Ednext poll convinces me that the charter school movement needs to do one and only one thing to succeed—prove that charters can be effective in the classroom.