Polling finds strong support for educator strike among Oregonians
A recent poll conducted by GBAO Strategies found Oregonians are strongly inclined to stand with educators as they work to address the many challenges facing public schools in Oregon. Respondents expressed concerns about many issues facing public schools and a large majority say they would support educators if they needed to strike to advocate for these issues.
Key Findings
- Oregonians express concerns about a range of issues facing public schools, including teacher shortages and teacher burnout, teacher salaries, inadequate funding, and a lack of mental health supports.
- Oregonians would support educators if they went on strike to advocate for a range of issues, especially hiring more teachers, reducing class size, increasing compensation, and increasing support to reduce disruptive learning environments.
- Support for teacher strikes is high across the state, including all four districts we oversampled. It’s especially high in the Portland School District. In the Bend-La Pine district, support is highest for strikes about recruiting and retaining highly-qualified educators, while in the Eugene district it’s highest for lowering class sizes.
These findings are from a poll of 1,000 registered voters in Oregon—600 voters statewide with oversamples of 100 voters each in the Portland, Salem-Keizer, Eugene, and Bend-La Pine School Districts, conducted via landline, cellphone, and text-to-web, September 14-19, 2023. The margin of error is 4.0 percentage points at the 95-percent confidence interval.
86% of respondents felt that teacher shortages are a serious issue facing public schools. Other top issues were teacher burn out (84%) and student-teacher ratio (84%).
89% of respondents said they would support educators going on strike to advocate for recruiting and retaining highly-qualified educators. 87% said they would support educators going on strike to advocate to reduce the number of students per class.
Support for teacher strikes in the Portland district is especially high, with 91% supporting striking to invest resources in recruiting and retaining highly-qualified educators and 87% support striking to hire more teachers to reduce the number of students per class/lowering class size to increase the amount of support students receive.
