Preparing America for the 21st Century: Values that Work in Promoting Education Reform

This report details the results of an experimental survey of more than 1,800 registered voters and explores the extent to which alternative values elevate public support for a wide range of education reforms. The report demonstrates the power of using the value of Future Preparation in communications about education reform, examines the performance of this value across several different types of cognitive tests, and provides guidance to advocates about the wisdom of combining messaging across different levels of the educational system. Our results on the latter suggest that advocates should be careful about combining communications about preschool with those related to education at the K-12 and higher education levels.