The new PDK/Gallup Poll had some amazingly good news for those parents and educators who have been fighting the movement to test, standardize, and quantify every last child, as well as to destroy public confidence in public education.
What this poll shows is that the public is not buying what the U.S. Department of Education and the corporate reform movement are selling.
They like their teachers and their schools. They don’t believe that standardized testing has helped their school. They don’t want test scores used to evaluate their teachers.
The message: Corporate reform lacks a popular base.
Here are some key findings:
*Only 22% of Americans “believe increased testing has helped the performance of local public schools.”
*A majority (58%) “reject using student scores from standardized tests to evaluate teachers.” This is a reversal from last year, when 52% approved of this obnoxious idea. The more people see that it mislabels teachers and disrupts schools, the less they like the idea.
*A majority (63%) oppose publishing teacher ratings in the media. This is a reversal from last year, when 51% favored this humiliating idea.
*A decisive majority (72%) “have trust and confidence” in teachers in the public schools. When the question is asked of people under 40, who are likeliest to have school-age children, the proportion grows to 78%.
*A bare majority (52%) supported the right of public school teachers to go on strike.
*A huge proportion (88%) of public school parents say their child is safe at school. Their greatest concern is not intruders but other students.
*A majority (68%) support charter schools.
*A large majority (70%) oppose vouchers for private schools. This is a very large increase from 2012, when only 55% opposed vouchers.
*Almost two-thirds of the public have never heard of the Common Core standards.
*Of those who have heard of the Common Core standards, most say they will either make the U.S. less competitive or make no difference.
*More than 90% of Americans “believe activities such as band, drama, sports, and newspaper are very or somewhat important,” with 63% saying “very important.”
Bottom line: The American people like their public schools, respect their teachers, do not like standardized testing, and do not want teachers evaluated by test scores.
They want their children to have a well-rounded education.
All common sense.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We have to share this far and wide!! I doubt the media is going to lend us a hand!
Guess this is bad news for the Associated Press who is busy right now re-vamping the pretend survey it published just a few days back. Go get ’em Gallup!
I’d like to see if this is on the front page of my local newspaper like the last “survey” was.
My thoughts exactly. It has got to get beyond PDK.
*A decisive majority (72%) “have trust and confidence” in teachers in the public schools. When the question is asked of people under 40, who are likeliest to have school-age children, the proportion grows to 78%.
Teachers are way more popular than the politicians who are attacking teachers.
Any of the “reform” politicians would LOVE to have a 72% trust/confidence rating, and not one of them would get that.
Hell yeah! An educational system without standardized testing is the best educational system everyone wants.
I’m sure it’s just a mistake that 68% of the respondents support charter schools (67% supported a charter opening up in their own district), and 60% support making teacher performance review data available to the public.
On a slightly less snarky note, I’m always fascinated by the huge discrepancy in the opinion people have of their own home district and the one they have for the nation’s schools in general: here only about 20% rated the nation’s schools as high as B. I realize that parents (who wants to admit their kids’ schools have serious flaws) and residents (so much of small-town and suburban identity, not to mention property values, is tied to schools) are biased, but that doesn’t explain the size of the gap.
Here’s my take on the discrepancy… Citizens have hands-on knowledge and access to their local schools; they can formulate an accurate opinion of them. Unfortunately, the only exposure to national education issues (at least for most people) are promoted by the corporate-backed media and politicians who have ties to privatization.
Tim, it’s odd the way you’ve phrased this:
“I realize that parents … and residents … are biased, but …”
By hiding behind the dependent clause, you can present your own bias against community control of schools as though it were based on an external truth, which you are wise enough to recognize. That way, you edge around actually examining the truthfulness of your own assumptions.
As to “charter schools”, the public still thinks they mean Ted Sizer or Deborah Meier-type experiments, not the pillage that’s actually going on. I’d welcome real experiments myself if we could throw the money changers out of the temple first. The problem with the privatization hucksters is they steal language (like the word “reform” itself) from more honest folk.
you rock.
I don’t have any bias against community control of schools. I just don’t happen to have a bias against choice, either, whether it’s an unzoned school like Deborah Meier’s Central Park East, a charter school, a selective school, etc. Note that this is not the same as a blanket endorsement of all charter schools.
All I meant by my comment is that I believe there is a certain degree of “buy-in” in communities that strongly identify with their schools. I find the same is true of people who spend huge amounts of money to send their kids to private school. Given that we are overwhelmingly an urban/suburban nation and the basic framework of our public schools doesn’t vary all that much from place to place, I find the poll’s national/local perception gap to be striking.
And I strongly disagree with point about the general public’s idea of charters. I doubt any of the respondents know about Shanker or Sizer, and I suspect they are far more likely to associate charters with “no excuses” or even “virtual” than they are the “alternative school” concept. It’s more plausible to me that they either live near a charter, the nearest big city has a lot of charters, and/or they have been influenced by the media as Mike Turner suggest above (and those stories are mainly about “no excuses” inner city miracle schools).
They may not support high stakes testing, but the next question that needs to be asked is if these same parents would demand an opt out option. If these tests are to end I suspect we need a majority of parents to demand that their child not take the tests and that the schools provide an alternative activity during the tests so they can still attend school on test days.
Exactly. I’ve posted this statement before. I believe that when parents see their child’s score reports, there will be a demand for action.
Public opinion is not a measure of what is right and wrong. Using high stakes testing, to quantify teachers, schools and students is wrong-headed, period. No matter what the public believes.
To us the exciting thing about this poll is that it shows some movement in public opinion away from so called “ed reforms.” And you, Diane, have played a large part in getting the word out. Thank you and keep it up.
That’s a good point.
Exactly right, Students Last. The public may be misinformed about many things–by a well-orchestrated media campaign. The great news in the poll is that the public is turning away from the reformy strategies.
The movement to reclaim education is making headway!
The percentage who support charters would likely go down if they were aware of the profiteering shenanigans that go along with too many of them. Even working knowledge of what CMOs and EMOs are and how they turn a profit would be enough to sink that approval rating.
Would be interesting to have the raw data (as always), to see how responses broke down in states with higher percentages of charters, or higher percentages of for-profit charters, etc.
Ron, the public will learn about the charter schools–the good, the bad, the ugly, the greedy, and the incompetent–when they read my new book.
“They like their teachers and their schools. They don’t believe that standardized testing has helped their school. They don’t want test scores used to evaluate their teachers.”
Was this an opinion pull of public school parents, or a broader set?
I see now it was a broader set of both public school parents and others.
Interesting stuff. I’m sure it’s going in the PR flack file at US DOE.
I have to say, the presentation of this document is just horrendous. It would be easier to get a sense of the survey from an unformatted Excel spreadsheet.
Looks like a pretty standard ed magazine format.
I don’t think Associated Press is scrambling to correct any misimpressions it may have caused with its careless reporting of the AP NORC poll. Here’s an example of the overheated overreach it’s generated:
http://scholasticadministrator.typepad.com/thisweekineducation/2013/08/quotes-poll-results-expose-parents-real-views.html
My guess is, they’ll use it to confound and confuse the discussion. Since the Gallup Education Poll release was scheduled, I suspect the pre-muddied water is deliberate.
Diane, do you think Mercedes (or another statistics adept) might co-author a very calm and academic summary of this Gallup poll with you? You could get it up on on Huffington ASAP, and your byline would call attention to it.
The article you cited, Chemteacher, quotes Sandy Kress, the architect of NCLB. he has been valiantly fighting to salvage high-stakes testing as the anti-testing movement grows stronger, in Texas and across the nation. He is a registered lobbyist for Pearson. His own children attend a lovely private school in Dallas where there is no standardized testing.
Yeah, Kress has made a whole career of it, hasn’t he? He caused me to go back and look for the public’s actual opinion of “accountability”, as reported in both polls.
It might be helpful (in another Huffington blog?) to clearly outline the history of the accountability doctrine, in terms of schools and individual children being held accountable to business interests through legal sanctions imposed by the business interests themselves, through lobbyists like Kress.
Then, if we do get stuff out to examine discrepancies and overlaps between the two polls, people can make more sense out of them.
We said last year that we had a lot of hard work to do, to inform and educate the parents we work with, to organize communities and form effective coalitions of resistance…We said it was going to be a herculean task. For the past year we each have been busy doing just that. (I held a series of advocatcy workshps for parents at my school, with my principal’s blessing) We have been relentless promoting our cause in the media and on the internet…constant unrelenting communicating and informing, always learning. Knowledge is power.
Now we discover that since last year, the percentages have shifted in favor of teachers, teacher concerns and Public Education. I ask you, “Who said American public educators are not effective teachers?” Just look at what we have accomplished in a year!
We are AMAZING educators and incredible motivators…Congratulations everyone (((cheers))) (((applause)))…
Now we need to keep at it until every classroom in our great nation is FREE of the corporate influence. Keep active educating other teachers and supporting parents and encouraging students to organize…the battle is shifting in our favor and it is a battle, but the war is far from over. We can do this!
Yes WE can…and we WILL! Opt your kids out. Just as at Garfield H.S. (I believe the %age was 97%–NOT taking their tests)–not enough kids took any tests to produice reliable data! Keep doing that all over the country–we’ll see the end of testing, the end of AYP, the end of VAM and the beginning of going back to where we need to be and keeping our public schools open, our children actually taught again and our real teachers (not TFAs) teaching. Thanks, Diane, for all you have done, are doing and will do to make your promise a reality!
The nail in the coffin will be PARCC. Once the suburban scores go down all hell will break loose. The revolution is coming to a suburb near you.
BTW, even Rick Hess, who told us the reform crowd was dying for public education money once the suburbs found out how bad their schools are following the anticipated low PARCC scores, is now raising the red flags on Twitter. Here’s what he said: “If reformers alienate suburban parents, they’re toast. So this wk’s edupoll-apalooza results should raise red flags. @arotherham @juscohen”
As long as the tide lowers all boats at the same time, the suburbs won’t care–it’ll be the same old story, just calibrated a little differently.
Many ways to interpret the poll. There are some things that are changing, some things that are saying the same. Looking at a few trends:
* For a number of years, families have had a more positive view of schools in their own community than of schools nationally.
* There was a 11 point drop in the last year in % of people supporting a state requirement that teacher evaluations include how well a teacher’s students perform on standardized tests (table 8)
* For a number of years, more than 70% of people polled have supported pre-school programs for low income students. (Table 44)
* For a number of years, the majority in this poll have not supported vouchers. This year support dropped for the idea. (Table 27)
* Since 2009, support for the charter public school idea has varied from 64% to 70%. This year it was at 68%