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Survey: Education cuts favored by Americans include teacher salary freezes, administration cuts

As school districts suffer from increasing costs and not enough cash, only 11 percent of Americans are willing to pay more in taxes to fund communities’ schools, according to a new report [1] released Thursday, the Huffington Post reports. Instead, almost half (48 percent) said that the best approach to fixing a school-district deficit would be “dramatically changing how it does business,” and 26 percent would “change as little as possible and wait for times to get better.”

But that doesn’t mean they don’t recognize the school funding problem. Seventy-seven percent said they expect their school districts’ financial woes to last beyond the current crisis, according to the survey, commissioned by the right-leaning, Washington, D.C., think tank the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.  And many would close that gap by reducing or freezing teacher pay to plug budget holes.

“It’s striking how willing the public is to make teachers pay for the cost of the downturn,” said Michael Petrilli, Fordham’s executive vice president. “They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to just pay the workers less and have the same services.”

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