The new organization called Democrats for Public Education commissioned a poll, and it brought good news, reported here by Politico.com:
NEW POLL DATA BUOYS PUBLIC ED ADVOCATES: With a month to go before midterms, the activists at Democrats for Public Education are urging candidates to speak up – loudly – about their support for neighborhood schools. DPE gave Morning Education a sneak peek at new poll data that shows voters strongly back liberal priorities such as increasing funding for public schools, lowering class sizes and expanding programs to help low-income children overcome the disadvantages of poverty. Voters also express strong support and admiration for public school teachers – who have been popping up in candidates’ campaign ads for months, precisely because they’re seen as such trusted emissaries. Read more: http://bit.ly/ZvgcxK
– The national poll of 1,200 active voters, conducted by Democratic polling firm Harstad Strategic Research, found that 79 percent of Democrats, 57 percent of independents and 45 percent of Republicans support increasing funding for public schools. By contrast, voters express serious doubts about reforms such as online learning, private-school vouchers, parent trigger laws and handoffs that let private companies take over management of public schools.
– Candidates across the country have already been playing up education as a theme; the adequacy of school funding is a key issue in the gubernatorial races in Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan and in the U.S. Senate race in North Carolina. DPE President Steve Rosenthal said he hopes more candidates take the poll data to heart and start beating the drums for public education. “This information could, and should, be used as a road map for those who want to speak out loud and clear in support of neighborhood schools and public schools.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
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This is consistent with nearly 3 decades of the KDP/Gallup Poll. Americans are often convinced that other peoples’ schools are failures, but by the same margins, they tend to think that the schools their own children attend are quite good. The relentless failure narrative we’ve been subjected to since 1983 has never quite been able to convince us that the schools we know best are failing.
In education, familiarity breeds respect rather than contempt.
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Actually, when PDK breaks out responses, which it has not done very often, there is substantial concern among some racial groups about the public schools their children attend.
Many public schools and advocacy have told parents again and again how great they are. So parents and others have received a variety of messages.
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It would be interesting to see the actual questions and the responses. That’s one thing that Gallup and Phi Delta Kappan do that I respect. Their recently released poll has some similar and some different results.
I’d classify PDK as an organization that strongly supports traditional district schools and opposes some of the things that this new group opposes.
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I’d also like to see the details. The press release states:
So one-third of Americans disagree with the statement that taxpayer money pay for education and “not for corporate profits, CEO bonuses, or advertising budgets”?
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The fact is that corporations have been selling all kinds of things to school districts for decades. So tax $ are going to companies. But this poll is not intended to be neutral. It’s designed to promote certain ideas and attack other ideas.
It’s perfectly legal – but not nearly as neutral, for example as Gallup.
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Joe, do you have this many questions for Gates paid for surveys?
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Yes, Linda, I’m constantly questioning surveys, regardless of the source. I think all of us should look at the original questions and responses of any survey or poll that is presented to us.
As you and others have noted, there is a lot of effort from a variety of individuals and organizations to promote ideas via polls.
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This will NOT stop the oligarchs and the other greedy fake Pub-Ed reformers who want to make a profit off taxpayers, children, parents and destroy teachers and their unions.
Narcissists/Sociopaths care nothing for what anyone else thinks, and they can justify everything they do to support their goals and agendas.
To stop the PubEd Carpetbaggers, there has to be a majority of elected representatives at the state and federal level who are not their puppets, and who want to get re-elected—-to actually serve the American people. This usually means progressives in each party.
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I agree with Joe Nathan: release the data, the questions, the cross tabs!
“Teachers should be held accountable by principals, supervisors, and parents…” I’m intrigued! In what specific, actionable ways does this organization propose for parents to help hold teachers accountable?
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Tim,
You question: “I’m intrigued! In what specific, actionable ways does this organization propose for parents to help hold teachers accountable?”
It was my experience that most parents who held teacher accountable were usually only concerned about boosting their child’s self esteem, and if that child’s grade wasn’t high enough to boost that self esteem, they blamed the teacher for asking the child to do the classwork, home work, read and study. Some of those parents would go so far as to demand that their child be moved to an easier teacher where grade inflation was in full bloom. Consistent pressure applied over a long period of time by mean parents will break down good teachers to get rid of that pressure. In addition, administration almost always sided with those parents.
The kids have their own grapevine so they know who the easy teachers are and then they nag their parents to get them out of the class where a teacher expects them to do the work to learn. In fact, it was my experience that these self-esteem driven parents outnumbered the parents who wanted their child to have a teacher who expected the children to work and learn by a HUGE margin.
But self-esteem isn’t the politically correct movement today, it’s rigor and grit—-at least from the top down. Maybe many of the parents are still stuck on boosting self-esteem, and if this is the case, teachers will be squeezed harder than ever in that vice between the rigor and grit at the top and the self-esteem driven parents.
Boosting self esteem by grade inflation as demanded by those politically correct parents will collide with top driven rigor and grit in an IED explosion, but the only causalities will be the teachers and the children.
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Man, my experiences in fairly mixed-SES-status traditional NYC DOE public schools could not be more different. Parents across the board are anxious to get the best / toughest / most challenging teacher.
In any case, do you know for sure that they accountability this group is proposing involves giving parents a choice of teachers, or allowing more latitude to switch classes if it isn’t a good fit?
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Tim asked, “Do you know for sure that the accountability this group is proposing involves giving parents a choice of teachers, or allowing more latitude to switch classes if it isn’t a good fit?”
In California, parents have this sort of power or had it when I was teaching. I can’t speak for the other states. Laws and Ed Codes are not the same in each state.
During my 30 years as a teacher, most of the parents [and the number was not that significant compared to the total] who requested their children be transferred to another teacher, made the request so their child would earn easy A’s or B’s that would boost their self-esteem. The HS counselor used to tell parents earning a C in my class was equal to an A or B in most of the other English classes. I ran in to one mother several years later who said she had been wrong to transfer her son out of my class to boost his self esteem, because now her son was having trouble in college.
Out of more than 6,000 students that I worked with over thirty years, I know of only one family who requested the toughest teachers in the school, and that boy landed in my English class. Their 9th grade son had been home taught by his over zealous, religious parents, but at 14, he demanded that he be allowed to go to a public school where he could be with kids his own age instead of isolated at home.
Before his 9th grade year ended, I recruited him into the one journalism class I taught and when he was a senior he was the editor-in-chief of the school paper. Last time we had an e-mail exchange, he was a network anchor for a TV station in a moderate sized Southern California city.
What do you mean by a good fit? To some of the children I worked with, this might mean a kid who doesn’t want a teacher who writes them a referral for breaking the class rules and disrupting lessons, or a kid who wants to have the freedom to eat candy and drink Coke in class or play video games instead of working even if it is against the school rules.
Easy teachers who caved in to parent pressure were very popular with kids who weren’t there to learn, but there weren’t enough of these teachers for the kids who wanted in to their classes, because most of the teachers refused to cave to the politically correct self-esteem movement of the time, and we were often called in the office by administration to defend the number of children earning poor grades for not doing the work and studying, which was about the only way to earn a poor grade—by doing little to nothing but warm a seat and struggle against the rules designed to create a learning environment so they could socialize.
Don’t read what I wrote wrong. In every class I taught, there were always good students who cooperated, and they almost always had parents that supported this effort. Not every parent was obsessed with boosting their child’s self-esteem—especially among Asians.
And research reveals that Asians tend to have the lowest self-esteem but the highest HS graduation rate, the highest average GPA, the lowest drug use, one of the lowest suicide rates, the lowest teen pregnancy rate, the lowest unemployment rates as adults, the highest college graduation rates.etc.
Thanks to Confucius, Most Asian cultures value education.
To be clear, I taught 1975-2005. When I left in 2005, the self-esteem movement was still going full steam ahead. I have no idea if that popular, politically-correct movement has eroded in the last nine years.
Maybe California’s parents have reversed the trend to move their children to easy teachers and away from those who demand the kids do the work to prove they are learning what was taught.
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“California parents” vs “New York parents” may not say it all, but it sure fits the stereotypes, excluding of course Asian parents.
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Instead of making unsupportable claims about parenting differences, maybe it would work better to compare the on-time high school graduation rates of Francisco versus New York City and throw in the national average for 2012, so we get a snapshot of a west coast city versus an east coast city in relation to the nation.
Let’s let the facts speak for themselves.
In New York City, 78.9 percent of white students graduated versus 60.4 percent of black students and 59 percent of Hispanic students. Asian students led all groups, with a graduation rate of 82.9 percent.
http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20120611/new-york-city/graduation-rate-up-19-percent-since-2008-city-says
San Francisco Unified School District’s (SFUSD) graduation rates rose in 2012, showing significant increases for African American and Pacific Islander students. Overall, SFUSD’s graduation rate increased from 81.8 percent in 2010-11 to 82.2 percent in 2011-12. …
The graduation rate for African-American students increased by 7.2 percentage points and is now 70.8 percent, up from 63.6 percent the year prior. African American graduation rates for SFUSD have increased 13.9 percentage points in the last two years. The graduation rate for Latino students was 67.5 percent. … Socioeconomically disadvantaged students are near the district average with an 80.3 percent graduation rate. Asian was 91.7%.
http://www.sfusd.edu/en/news/current-news/2013-news-archive/04/san-francisco%E2%80%99s-graduation-rates-on-the-rise.html
National rate for 2011-12 school year:
85% white
68% black
76% Hispanic
93% Asian/Pacific Islander
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_coi.asp
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Tim and Joe unite. This can’t be true. We must keep spreading fear and lies to survive!
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You disagree and think the actual poll questions and data on the sample shouldn’t be released?
That’s your lookout, I suppose, but runs counter to the practices of reputable pollsters.
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“the adequacy of school funding is a key issue in the gubernatorial races in Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan and in the U.S. Senate race in North Carolina.”
Who knew that supporting the schools 90% of people use would be popular? Not Democrats, apparently.
Are they embarrassed they have to poll on this to “push” Democratic lawmakers to support public schools by appealing to their political self-interest? Here I was thinking that was part of their job, no matter how distasteful they may find it.
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Democrats debate whether to support public schools or not. Clearly they’re on the fence, but I think this poll will push them right over the top. Or maybe not!
I shudder to think what might happen if elected Democrats got a bad poll on public schools. Do they still have to do the jobs they’re paid to do, or would they just completely abandon ship? I’m not sure that would be a bad thing, at this point. Might be better off going it alone.
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I can not believe that we are thinking of returning to neighborhood schools when the urban areas of the country are so racially segregated which does not promote diversity and interactions of other cultures in the formative years of students lives. What we will have is perpetuation of the same stereotypic mindsets and fears of our forebears. I think that parents should have the right to send their children to any public school they qualify and there space availability.
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Glad to see several neoliberal profiteers here expressing their “concerns” about the poll’s validity. Note these selfsame trolls are never “concerned” about poll results from American Enterprise Institute, Center for American Progress, or John Birch Society recommending further austerity and privatization.
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A real profiteer would probably be very encouraged by a poll that purports to show that 33% of active voters believe that taxpayer money should not pay for children’s education, but rather should pay for corporate profits, CEO bonuses, and advertising budgets.
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I’m a neoliberal profiteer??
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXtah1oJ7Io
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The selfsame.
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Ted Strickland was a good public ed governor, actually, but I don’t “count” the rest of the Democrats for Public Education (those who aren’t currently in office) because there’s no political risk for them.
I do admire this, though: “U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis”
Good for her.
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The polls show the good news. The bad news: politicians listen to the people who buy their votes.
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Too bad the President didn’t get the memo about how Democrats support public education. He is personally responsible for some of the mess in the Chicago schools. The only time he has a kind word for public education is during an election. His basketball buddy, Rahm, isn’t delivering the goods. The public schools just out performed the charters. In NY, Gov. Cuomo must have missed that memo too.
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Exactly what was on my mind. It’s interesting that Democrats for Public Education are showing popularity for something their party isn’t delivering, and disapproval of what their party has delivered.
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Jamieliz,
Democrats for Public Education are showing their party where the voters are. Hopefully Democrats will start opposing privatization and stop undermining public education. It is too late to expect something different from President Obama or Arne Duncan, but the rest of the
party should pay attention. We are fighting for the future.
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In order to be effective inner city schools would need—how much, 5 times what the society has appropriated now, or 10 times as much, and even that might not work given the deficits of children from poor families. I don’t hear any politician advocating what would really be needed, not even Democrats. They support public schools that are solvent out in the boonies and suburbs, but if they supported the funding appropriate to the real needs they would lose their elections. I doubt the votes are there if they told the truth.
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In the NY governor’s own words,
“I knew what I was doing when I did not cater to the teachers union,” Mr. Cuomo said, noting he did not have the NYSUT’s endorsement for his 2010 run. “I know what it means to be at odds with the teachers union, I know what it’s like to be at odds with the public employees union.”
Read more at http://observer.com/2014/09/cuomo-blames-weaker-primary-showing-on-unions-and-11-people-voting/#ixzz3F2NiUpPO
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