Poll reveals conflicts over educating children of illegal immigrants, school vouchers, teacher evaluations, and which presidential candidate will most positively influence public education
PDK, ARLINGTON, VA. — Americans have a number of conflicting viewpoints in their preferences for investing in schools, going head-to-head on issues like paying for the education of the children of illegal immigrants, according to the 2012 annual PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools [Complete survey results available at this link].There are clear partisan divides over whether children of illegal immigrants should receive free public education, school lunches, and other benefits, with 65% of Democrats versus 21% of Republicans favoring it. Overall, support for providing public education to these children is increasing — 41% favor this, up from 28% in 1995.
Americans are also more divided across party lines than ever before in their support for public charter schools, with Republicans more supportive (80%) than Democrats (54%). However, approval declined overall to 66% this year from a record 70% last year. Additionally, the public is split in its support of school vouchers, with nearly half (44%) believing that we should allow students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense, up 10 percentage points from last year.
Though Americans clearly have opposing stances on many education issues, when the poll . . . asked Americans whether they believe common core state standards would provide more consistency in the quality of education between school districts and states, 75% said yes. In fact, 53% believe common core state standards would make U.S. education more competitive globally.
The public agrees (97%) that it is very or somewhat important to improve the nation’s urban schools, and almost two of three (62%) said they would pay more taxes to provide funds to improve the quality of urban schools. Eighty-nine percent agree that it is very or somewhat important to close the achievement gap between white students and black and Hispanic students. [Note; no evidence of a gap was provided to those polled.]
And though Americans are almost evenly split in their support for requiring that teacher evaluations include how well students perform on standardized tests, with 52% in favor, they are in agreement about increasing the selectivity of teacher preparation programs. In fact, at least 75% of Americans believe that entrance requirements into teacher preparation programs need to be at least as selective as those for engineering, business, pre-law, and pre-medicine.
“While Americans are divided on many issues regarding the direction of our education system, they stand united in agreement on some very important issues,” said William Bushaw, executive director of PDK International and co-director of the PDK/Gallup poll. “Most important, it is reassuring to know that, despite the recognition that our schools need improvement, more than 70% do have trust and confidence in our public school teachers.” . . .
Other key findings:
- Balancing the federal budget is more important than improving the quality of education. Sixty percent of Americans believe balancing the federal budget is more important, even though they said funding is the biggest problem facing public schools.
- Schools should discipline children for bullying. Three of four Americans believe that bullying prevention should be part of a school’s curriculum, and 58% believe schools should investigate and discipline students when bullying occurs outside of school, including over the Internet.
- Parents want more control over failing schools. Seventy percent of Americans favor giving parents whose children attend a failing school the option to mount a petition drive requesting that the teachers and principal be removed.
- Americans view their local schools more favorably than the nation’s schools as a whole. Consistent with recent years, almost half of Americans give the schools in their community a letter grade of A or B, while almost 50% give a C to the nation’s schools. [Local bias toward accepting lower performance in one's own school system continues.]
Phi Delta Kappa International (PDK), a global association of education professionals, has conducted this poll with Gallup annually since 1969. The poll serves as an opportunity for parents, educators, and legislators to assess public opinion about public schools. The 2012 findings are based on telephone interviews conducted in May and June 2012 with a national sample of 1,002 American adults. For findings based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is 4 percentage points; in the case of sub-samples, the margin of error is higher. In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls. [The PDK/Gallup Poll did not identify a verification process used to determine that the "Americans" surveyed were both adults and legal citizen of the United States. Thus, the bias and error in the survey results may be far greater than a survey of only legal U.S. adult citizens. ]
Dr. Bill Smith, Editor, ARRA News Service has been a member of PDK for over 37 years. He has a PH.D. in Education and additional post-doctoral studies. He extracted and abbreviated the PDK/Gallup press release and inserted the highlights and comments to facilitate the readers review.
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