Teachers' Perspectives on Current Issues in the Swiss Compulsory Education System

In this pre-analysis plan, we register the design, hypotheses, and statistical analyses for a survey experiment on compulsory school teachers’ views on salient education policy topics in Switzerland. Teachers, who act as street-level actors in a highly decentralized education system, are central to understanding support for policy change and its implementation. Our sample of 300 teachers, distributed across eight cantons, is used to examine how information provision or framing affects support for six education policy proposals: earlier English instruction, late tracking, the use of artificial intelligence in teaching, lateral career-entry options for teachers, smartphone bans at school, and all-day schools. Five proposals include an information treatment clause, and one contrasts AI as a “support” versus “replacement” tool. For our statistical analysis, we estimate treatment effects using OLS. Results are reported in standardized units based on control group distributions. We conduct heterogeneity analyses by linguistic region, gender, and nationality, but remain cautious given sample size limitations. This study will shed light on how informational or framing cues shape teachers’ attitudes toward ongoing debates in Swiss compulsory education.