One recent Gallup poll, however, did identify certain characteristics that tend to correlate with the kind of school in which parents opt to enroll their kids, some of which are obvious: Affluent families are far more likely than low-income ones to choose private education, for example, with twice as many families with yearly incomes above $75,000 doing so (13 percent) compared with those whose incomes are $30,000 or less; the breakdown is similar for families that attend church weekly compared with those who have no religious preference. The report also found that “Republicans and conservatives are among the groups least likely to have a child in public school,” a trend that it speculated could do with their greater tendency toward religiosity as well as toward disillusionment with the public-school system. A separate Gallup poll found that just 39 percent of Americans who are or lean Republican consider public schools “great” or “excellent,” compared with about half of respondents who are or lean Democratic.

Perhaps more revealing than his own schooling is the fact that Kavanaugh, according to his testimony in his 2004 Senate confirmation hearing, previously helped spearhead school-choice-related outreach efforts for the Federalist Society, a legal organization of conservatives and libertarians. He was also one of the attorneys tapped in 2000 to represent then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush in a long-drawn-out lawsuit that sought to end a highly controversial state school-voucher program that Bush had spearheaded. (The Florida Supreme Court in 2006 ruled that the program was unconstitutional, a decision that observers predicted would have major implications for similar initiatives elsewhere in the country.) According to Politico, Kavanaugh also said in a 2000 TV appearance that he anticipated the U.S. Supreme Court would one day uphold school vouchers.

Should he be confirmed to the Court, his views on these matters could be hugely consequential for the country, in part because of how much influence the Court has over education. “The public school has served as the single most significant site of constitutional interpretation within the nation’s history,” Justin Driver, a professor of law at the University of Chicago, argues in the introduction of his forthcoming book The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind. “No other arena of constitutional decisionmaking—not churches, not hotels, not hospitals, not restaurants, not police stations, not military bases, not automobiles, not even homes—comes close to matching the cultural import of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence governing public schools.”

A slew of education cases could make their way up to the nation’s highest court in the (near) future, and in particular, affirmative action is almost certain to get another hearing. In its most recent consideration of the issue, the Court found in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin that higher-education institutions can consider race as one factor among many in admissions decisions. But the issue is, as my colleague Adam Harris has written, far from settled. There’s a pending lawsuit against Harvard that accuses it of discriminating against Asian American applicants, as well as Trump’s recent decision to rescind guidance issued by the Obama administration encouraging educational institutions to consider race as part of efforts to diversify their student bodies, both of which make the future of affirmative action all the more precarious.