As Newtown, Conn., students begin classes for the new school year, more than eight months after last December’s massacre of 26 teachers and children there, U.S. parents of school-aged children appear to be no more at ease than they were immediately after the incident. Thirty-three percent of K-12 parents say […] Read more »
Big Public Disconnect Between Views on School Testing, Push to Common Core State Standards
At a time when 45 states and the District of Columbia are phasing in new Common Core State Standards and the student tests that go with them, the American public increasingly does not believe that extensive standardized testing is improving public schools, a new survey shows. Most of those surveyed […] Read more »
AP-NORC Center Poll: Demographics divide views of schools
… Overall impressions of the nation’s schools and teachers are similarly positive among all groups of parents, but deep demographic differences emerge in the details of how parents see teachers, schools and even their own roles in their children’s education. The divisions fall along the familiar fault lines of income, […] Read more »
AP-NORC Poll: Parents Back High-Stakes Testing
Often criticized as too prescriptive and all-consuming, standardized tests have support among parents, who view them as a useful way to measure both students’ and schools’ performances, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. Most parents also say their own children are given about the right […] Read more »
Meritocracy or Bias?
… Frank L. Samson, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Miami, thinks his new research findings suggest that the definition of meritocracy used by white people is far more fluid than many would admit, and that this fluidity results in white people favoring certain policies (and groups) over […] Read more »
AFT Poll: Parents don’t support many education policy changes
Most parents with children in public schools do not support recent changes in education policy, from closing low-performing schools to shifting public dollars to charter schools to private school vouchers, according to a new poll to be released Monday by the American Federation of Teachers. The poll, conducted by Democratic […] Read more »