What About Advertising in K-12 Public Schools

An article in yesterday's USA Today about a growing trend of advertising in the hallways and facilities of financially-struggling K-12 schools seemed to get a lot of attention on Twitter. It got our CEO wishfully-thinking that maybe we could raise more operating capital by selling ads in our kitchen and bathrooms for video games and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But I digress...

So last night we loaded a question about this controversial topic in our system and saw some interesting results. A sample of 1,338 respondents was weighted to represent the US population. 

Clearly, opposition (59%) for in-school advertising is much higher than levels of support (24%), with a full 50% strongly opposing the practice. Seen in the chart below, men are significantly more likely to support in-school advertising than women. 

 

One fascinating observation was how the results broke down by income level. Support for in-school advertising was over 2X higher among respondents making more than $100,000/year. (Sorry, our income cross-tab table is too big to copy into this blog). This might suggest that higher-income people are grateful for any measure that reduces their school taxes, though it was also interesting that the results were largely unaffected by political party ID.