By Mac LeBuhn, Policy Analyst
Originally posted on Teachers for Education Reform
It’s been a noisy summer so far. As Congress debated ESEA reauthorization, newspapers weighed in on ‘testing mania,’ and advocates parsed a new report on teacher preparation from the National Center on Teaching Quality, a group of pollsters worked quietly through late June and July asking parents about their thoughts on America’s public schools.
The Associated Press and a University of Chicago research institution (known as NORC) reported the findings of this survey earlier this week. The results underscore the difference between the issues raised by education policy folks and the issues that are most important to parents with students actually attending school. The controversy over the use of standardized tests barely registers among the parents’ responses, while the issue of high school disengagement appears several times–though you would be hard pressed to find mention of this in the national policy discussion. Three aspects of the report stood out.
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Parents support a number of education reform priorities by significant margins. According to the survey:
- Low-income and minority parent concerns align with ed reform goals – Parents, particularly low-income and minority parents, identify “inequality in funding among school districts” and “getting and keeping good teachers” as “extremely or very serious problems” at their child’s school, with “low expectations for student achievement” being the most commonly identified serious problem.
- Parents support pay tied to performance – Exactly 50 percent of parents surveyed supported teacher pay based on a combination of student performance on tests and classroom observations.
- Parents are largely satisfied with standardized testing – 61 percent of parents think their student takes an appropriate number of standardized tests and 11 percent think their child takes too few tests. Moreover, 75 percent of parents say that their child’s performance is measured well or very well by the tests they take.
Before ed reformers start patting themselves on the back, the survey also reveals a gaping hole in the work of education advocates.
The Not-so-Common Core Standards: The survey sends up a red flag on parents’ understanding of the Common Core: 52 percent of parents say that have heard “only a little or nothing at all” about the Common Core. This stat underscores the importance of continued outreach to parents by states, schools districts, and teachers so that they get reliable, useful, and timely information about how Common Core will affect classroom instruction.
High school slump: What’s going on in US high schools? While the Obama Administration directed some resources towards a high school redesign project, there’s not much talk of high school policy in the national education conversation. Yet according to the survey, parents report levels of heightened disengagement as the years go on.
- Parents feel their influence in school diminish over time – While 48 percent of parents with a student in elementary school report having a great deal or a lot of influence over their child’s education, just 33 percent of parents with a student in middle school and 37 percent of those with a student in high school report the same.
- Parents contribute less as students get older – It could just be that surly middle and high school students are much less enjoyable to be around than elementary students, but parents donate and volunteer at a higher rate in elementary school than middle or high school. Similarly, the percentage of parents who have not volunteered in the classroom rises from 26 percent in elementary school to 56 percent by high school.
- Student-parent collaboration on homework wanes – While 96 percent of elementary school student parents help with homework on a daily or weekly basis, the figure drops to 57 percent of parents of high school students.
Of course, it makes sense as to why an eight-year-old needs more help than an eighteen-year-old on their homework, but there’s not as clear of an explanation for why engagement and donation rates would fall over time.
If the most important stakeholder in the conversation about schools is the student, the parent is surely second. As parents send their students back to school this week, the poll provides a useful snapshot of parents’ attitude towards American schooling.
Mac LeBuhn is a policy analyst at Democrats for Education Reform (DFER). Before joining DFER, Mac was a fourth grade teacher at Rocketship Si Se Puede, a charter school in San Jose, CA. He became involved in education policy through internships at the offices of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and Colorado State Senator Mike Johnston.