No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was based on an assumption, that our public schools were in serious trouble. But one can legitimately ask if that assumption was either correct or shared by the public the schools serve. You may well ask how we can know what the public thinks.
Phi Delta Kappan is a publication dedicated to educational issues that annually runs a poll on public perceptions of schools and related issues. The 2005 edition is the 37th such poll and may be viewed, along with previous polls back to 1995,
`here. The site will provide not only links to polls (both in html and pdf format), a press release on the current poll, and also video streams with Dr. Lowell K. Rose, the poll's director, on a variety of issues, including NCLB.
I will, in the extended entry offer several remarks. Some will be highlighting portions of the press release. Others are from an email summary distributed by Dr.Monty Neill of Fairtest (www.fairtest.org) through the Assessment Reform Network and other lists .
I see little point in trying to outdo Monty's analysis, which begins
The latest Kappan poll results show that people in the U.S. oppose the high-stakes uses of standardized tests, fear the educational damage caused by high-stakes uses, and increasingly disagree with the test-based school "reform" strategy embedded in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law. On NCLB, the summary might be, to know it is to dislike it.
The opening paragraph of the press release is as follows:
A nationwide survey released today reports that an increasing number of Americans say they know a fair amount about the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. But the more they know about it, the less they like it. According to the 37th Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools,the public likes NCLB's goals but rejects the strategies used to implement those goals. The concern rises to the level where,if a large number of schools fail to make the mandated adequate yearly progress,the public is at least as likely to blame the law as it is to blame the school. "These results tell us that the public hasn't turned its back on NCLB but is likely to do so if the law's strategies are not tailored to commonsense approaches,"reports Lowell Rose,the former executive director of PDK International and co-author of the poll. "Policy makers would be well advised to listen."
In other words, all the spinning by Secretary Spellings and others notwithstanding, the public at large, using common sense, does not accept the basic approach that the law proposes (high stakes testing) and is as likely to blame the law for failure of large numbers of schools to make Annual Yearly Progress as they are to blame the schools. This is very important, because as I and others have previously noted, the way the law and its regulations are drafted, an increasing number of schools - eventually the vast majority - will of necessity fail to make annual yearly progress. We have in fact argued that such is precisely the intent of the law on the part of many of its supporters - to thereby delegitimize public schooling. But as this poll shows, the public may not be willing to drink that koolaid.
There is general acceptance of a need to close the achievement gap shown by minority students, and regardless of the cause, the public believes that the responsibility for so doing falls primarily on the schools. But note the pool results in the 2nd paragraph of the press release:
When asked about NCLB's strategies,68% of the public do not think that a single test provides a fair picture of how well a school is doing,and 80% do not think testing students on only English and math provides a fair picture of whether a school needs improvement. And when it comes to the option of transferring a child from a school identified as "in need of improvement,"79% say that they would rather see additional efforts made in their child's present school.
There is an interesting phenomenon disclosed in the poll -- that a large number of respondents do not know much about the law. Here let me again quote Monty Neill:
Slightly more than half the respondents said they knew enough about NCLB to have an opinion on it; of those, they were split 28%-27% favorable-unfavorable. The unfavorable vote has grown form 13 to 27 percent in three years while the favorable vote has grown from 18 to 28. Among those who say they have a great deal of knowledge of NCLB, 57% view it unfavorably and only 36% view it favorably
In other words, the more someone feels they know about the law, the more hostile to it they are likely to be. This seems to indicate that the administration's attempts to shape public perception on the law has not been successful. It may also be an artifact that some of the opposition has come from state officials in places otherwise supportive of the president, such as Utah and Virginia. albeit sometimes for reasons having more to do with issues of state sovereignty than of sensible educational policy.
One group whose scores is most likely to result in a school not achieving AYP are special ed students and English language learners. Here Monty's summary is especially potent:
As with last year, only 3 in 10 respondents think special ed students should meet the same academic standards as all other students. About 1/3 of respondents (and fewer of those who profess to know a great deal about the law) believe the standardized test scores of special ed students should be included "in determining whether a school is in need of improvement." However, closer to half (but fewer of those in the know) also say that if special ed students are the only group in a school that does not make AYP, that school should be designated in need of improvement.
Other highlights of the poll include a mixed picture on English language learners -- 3 in 5 think they should learn English before enrolling in regular classes, which is an increase from 46% 12 years ago (1993). Meanwhile there is decreasing support for instruction in students' native languages, dropping from 2W7 to 16%. Were I to interpret these two statistics, I would say that there is resentment towards tax dollars going towards such instruction because the vast majority of Americans believe that those who immigrate here have a responsibility to learn English and thereby become more completely absorbed into America. We have already seen this reflected in things like referenda votes against ESOL instruction and in support of English language immersion.
Let me offer a final snippet from Monty:
On the most important issue facing schools, 4 responses were noted, though they added up to only half the responses. The top two: 20% said lack on money and 11% said overcrowded schools (which presumably will require money to solve). Lack of discipline (10) and use of drugs (9) are the other two listed.
This seems to reflect a public understanding that additional resources are needed if schools are to do their jobs and be held accountable. Since respondents prefer to give additional resources to help problem schools rather than have children be allowed to transfer, this seems to be a basic rejection of the Bush approach, an approach which does nothing to fix the school whose scores are low, but (a) punishes it further by removing resources, and (b) potentially lowers the scores in the school to which the students transfer, as those transferees will will arrive at the higher performing school with less knowledge and skill and ability to perform.
Please note -- the public is not hostile to the use of tests or to accountability in general. There seems to be little hostility to requiring the taking of tests, as the public is willing to see some increased testing, but the public is split down the middle as to how the results of those test should be used, particularly with respect to teachers.
Let me offer a few comments of my own before I invite reader responses. I have been saying for some time that education is a critical issue for the future of this country, at times calling it ground zero in the battle for the future of this nation. NCLB was a deliberate attempt by the Bush people to defuse an issue on which traditionally Democrats had a big advantage over Republicans. From the perspective of politics, that has the real potentiality of backfiring, if it is played correctly. The public has not, after several years, bought into many of the basic assumptions of the NCLB approach. Press coverage is beginning to reflect this as we increasingly see stories that explain how eventually almost all schools will fail to make AYP. We see schools marked as effectively failing because one group in one grade is considered not to have made AYP even though the rest of the school is doing superbly. Sometimes (not enough) we even see explanations of why this method of evaluating schools gives a distorted representation. In other words, there is ample opportunity for Democratic candidates and officials who want to separate themselves from NCLB to do so without significant political risk. In my eyes, too many Democrats have approached this issue as in 2002 they did Iraq - not wanting to risk appearing to oppose a "popular" president. In other words, they were unwilling to be leaders. I would note that we can perceive a further commonality between Iraq and NCLB - in both cases the DLC advocated not opposing the president so that one could move on to other issues without taking fire on these. Finally, in order for the neocons to be able to staff their militaristic endeavors, there has to be a supply of people for whom the only real opportunity is to enter the military "voluntarily." Delegitimizing public schools is part of this process. Also related is the issue of true educational policy.
The approach that NCLB tries to force will not prepare many children to do much more than "pass" relatively low level examinations. They will lack the skills and background to immediately pursue higher education. Further, things like increasing time in school - either by lengthening school days and school years, or by requiring test prep sessions on weekends - will decrease the time secondary students will have to work jobs to accumulate the funds necessary for higher education, except at state funded institutions whose curricula can be far better controlled than those of the elite private institutions. Thus there is a hidden but important connection between NCLB and the attempts of people like Horowitz, Lynne Cheney, et al, to bash colleges and universities for their supposed hostility to conservatives. NCLB is born of a mindset that believes in a transmission approach to education, what Paolo Freire called the banking method - the teacher basically pours the acceptable knowledge into the mind of the student who is to accept it without questioning. It is not supportive of any instruction of critical thinking processes, which are not evaluated on most of the tests required (although they could be included except it costs much more to test for them).
I acknowledge that my remarks go beyond what is included in the PDK survey. You may well disagree with my conclusions. You may note that "good liberals" such as George Miller and Ted Kennedy have been supportive of NCLB in the past, and that we hear rhetoric from possible presidential candidates like my own Governor (Mark Warner) wherein their opposition to NCLB is because they think their own testing regimen is better, not that the entire approach is educationally flawed. I intended to be provocative. If enough people read this and respond, perhaps we can engage in meaningful intellectual discourse on the subject of education as a policy issue and also as a possible political wedge issue.