Abstract:
What do citizens of the United States and Germany think about their schools and schoolpolicies? This paper offers the first broad comparison of public thinking on education in the twocountries. We carried out opinion surveys of representative samples of the German andAmerican adult populations in 2014 that included experiments in which we provided additionalinformation to randomly selected subgroups. The paper first describes key characteristics of theU.S. and German education systems and then analyzes how information and institutional contextaffect public beliefs in the two countries. Results indicate both similarities and differences in thestructure of American and German public opinion on schools and school policies.