From the Editor
American Attitudes Toward the Public Schools
Anne Wujcik — Friday, August 27, 2010
The Obama Administration has had a rough week. Not too many people seemed happy with the final results of Round Two of Race to the Top. And though there are many interesting findings in the 2010 version of the PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools, many headlines have picked up the theme of eroding public support for the Obama Administration's education agenda. Roughly a third of respondents award the President an A or B letter grade with regard to his performance in support of public schools, down from 45% last year.
There is fairly widespread support for charter schools, with 68% of Americans saying they have a favorable opinion of charter schools. Americans also believe that a college education is essential for success in today's world. Eighty-four percent of Americans agree that all high school students should be well-prepared for college and a career. That increases slightly to 91% when the question substitutes the word "college" with "more education beyond high school."
But Americans see a limited role for the federal government, believing that education is a state issue. Four out of five believe the federal government should not have a role in holding schools accountable and that local school boards should set education standards. Given a menu of solutions for dealing with a consistently low-performing school, Americans overwhelmingly favor keeping a poorly performing school in their community open with existing teachers and principals, while providing comprehensive outside support. This finding is consistent across political affiliation, age, level of education, region of the country, and other demographics.
Americans believe that teachers are central to improving schools. Seventy-one percent of Americans say they have trust and confidence in teachers, with public school parents registering even greater confidence at 78%. Forty-four percent believe that improving the quality of teachers is the most important of the national efforts underway to improve education Thirty-eight percent ranked "having teachers spend more time learning new ways to teach" as the tactic that would have the greatest impact on improving student learning. But Americans also support some practices that teachers and their unions find less palatable. Almost three of four Americans believe quality of work and not a standard scale should determine teacher pay. Almost three of four Americans believe teacher pay should be very closely or somewhat closely tied to student academic achievement. This represents a significant increase from when the question was asked in 2000.
Once again Americans rate public schools in general as poor, but are much more positive about the schools in their community and the school their oldest child attends. Only 18% of respondents give public schools in the nation as a whole an A or B grade, while 49% assign an A or B to the schools in their community. Seventy-seven percent of public school parents grade the school their oldest child attends with an A or B.
By now you've read not only about which states won in Round Two of Race to the Top but also the various criticisms of those selections. I need to look more closely at the judging results, but it seems fairly clear that something in the process did not work well. Of course it's an enormous task to read and evaluate such complex and comprehensive plans, and the judges could only work with what they had in the actual proposal. And that may have been the biggest flaw. It would seem that there has to be some better way to take capacity into consideration. It's one thing to write an ambitious plan and something entirely different to be able to effectively implement that plan. Sure, it's always possible that a state with little history of reform-based activity could totally turn itself around under the impetus of RTTT. But it's also true that a track record tells us a lot about what is likely to happen going forward. Yes, the application asked for descriptions of what states had already accomplished and one would expect a really great proposal to make the most of the experience base the state and its schools were bringing to the table, but somehow it didn't all seem to come together.
It's more than likely that we'll not again see such an intense, high-stakes competition anytime soon. But the Administration is committed to competitive awards. The stakes will be lower, the programs will not likely require such comprehensive responses from applicants, but careful thought still needs to be given to how to make sure that competitions really work.
