This document is a report of a jointly-sponsored project between the Appalachia Educational Laboratory (AEL) and the Ohio department of education. The project was a statewide survey to determine how the Ohio public informs itself about public education and to identify factors contributing to the public's trust and confidence in education. The project included a review of the existing literature on how the public gets information about schools, design of a survey instrument for identifying how the Ohio public informs itself, and a statewide telephone survey of households. The report includes the results of the review and of the survey, and AEL's recommendations to the Ohio department of education about how to use the results. Perhaps the most important finding was that the strongest supporters of public education are the parents of children in the public schools. Since people without school-age children now outnumber parents of school-age children, it is argued that the primary task is to achieve more effective communication with the part of the population that does not have school-age children. (Author/IRT)