Teachers in the News includes findings based on an analysis of a random sample of news articles about K-12 education in the United States: 1,296 articles from national newspapers Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, USA TODAY, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post; and 1,020 articles from local newspapers The Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville), The Gazette (Colorado Springs), New Haven Register, The Salt Lake Tribune, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 

The project also has findings from a nationally representative survey of 3,130 adult Americans aged 18 years and older, including teachers and parents, conducted by Public Agenda. NORC at the University of Chicago fielded the survey from November 18 to December 1, 2020, in English and Spanish, by telephone and online. The sample includes 2,684 respondents who were randomly sampled from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak panel: 256 were K-12 public school teachers, including charter school teachers, and the rest were the general public. Another 446 K-12 public school teachers, including charter school teachers, were sampled from Lucid, a non-probability opt-in panel.

The general public sample was demographically weighted to the 2020 Current Population Survey, and the teacher sample was weighted to the 2017-18 National Teacher and Principal Survey. The margin of error for the total sample is +/–2.8 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence interval. For the teacher sample, the margin of error is +/–5.8 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence interval. For parents, the margin of error is +/–5.1 with a design effect of 1.65. Please reference Public Agenda when citing these findings.

For more details about how this research was conducted, download a complete methodology, the survey topline, or email [email protected].