Public Opinion on the Role of Schooling within the Climate Crisis in the United States

• In Event: Politics and Practice of Climate Change Education

Proposal

Fostering climate resilience requires an examination of the role all our intuitions play, including education systems. K-12 schools have a responsibility to rethink what understandings students should be leaving their K-12 education with, and a responsibility to examine their own footprint and support they provide the communities they are situated within. As climate change and educational discourse remains at the forefront of the public consciousness, it is essential to assess public opinion of climate change education and the role of educational institutions through sustainability. This quantitative study explores US public opinion on understanding the role of schooling within climate resilience (n=2,019), using a newly collected dataset administered by the Teachers College Center of Sustainable Futures (Pizmony-levy et al., 2023). Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression modeling was used to assess items related to the role of schooling for climate resilience, climate concern, political ideology, and locality. We found that with our socio-demographic controls, climate concern is the strongest predictor of perceiving K-12 schools' role in climate resilience efforts as important. These initial findings have implications for how we situate climate concern in conversations around schooling, particularly for representatives of educational institutions. We see this work as a first step in a much larger effort to understand US public opinion of climate change education.

Author

• Christina Ann Torres, Columbia University Teachers College