Years of federally driven testing reform and a botched rollout of sweeping, federally incentivized standards have tried the patience of the American people. On their minds now: Downsizing the federal government’s role in education and shifting autonomy to states, school districts, and parents.
Those are some key findings from a pair of polls providing the public’s pulse on K-12 education. No more classrooms manacled by mandates; the American public has a new directive — for choice, flexibility, and local control.
Queried about which unit of government should be most responsible for education, Americans overwhelmingly say decisions should be made by state or local officials. The 47th annual “Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools,” published in September, is unambiguous: Most respondents believe school accountability should be handled by states (44 percent) or local leaders (33 percent). Similarly, most think determinations about the amount of testing should be made at the state (42 percent) or local level (31 percent). Only one in five favors a major federal role.
Disenchantment with the federal government’s leadership is pervasive. In another recent poll, the “2015 Schooling in America Survey” released in June by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, 77 percent rate the federal government’s management of education as “fair” or “poor.”
A top priority moving forward: reclaiming classroom time for teaching. Sixty-four percent of PDK/Gallup respondents say there is too much focus on testing. And 54 percent oppose Common Core; just one out of four favors the national standards guiding what’s taught in local communities.
The most fundamental way to localize control, of course, is to give more of it to parents. Americans know this, and largely support school choice: 64 percent of PDK/Gallup respondents favor allowing parents to decide which public school their child attends. A similar percentage supports charter schools.
Not all forms of choice elicit comparable support, however: 57 percent of PDK/Gallup respondents oppose vouchers. Some opposition may arise from the wording of the poll’s question: “Do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense?” Stanford University professor and political scientist Terry Moe long has suggested this question is biased.
Does wording make a difference? The Friedman poll — which defines vouchers as a system of allocating tax dollars to parents to pay tuition at a school of choice, including private religious or nonreligious schools — shows that wording matters quite a bit: 61 percent of these respondents favor vouchers.
Public consensus also is coalescing around customization and choice through education savings accounts. ESAs enable families seeking alternatives to public school to use public funds for certain educational expenses — such as private school tuition, online classes, or tutoring. Sixty-two percent of respondents in the Friedman poll favor ESAs.
So far, five states have implemented ESAs. Arizona passed the nation’s first ESA in 2011. Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Nevada have since followed suit, generally targeting students with special needs. However, Nevada’s program, signed into law in June, offers universal eligibility — the first in the nation to do so. Scheduled for a 2016 launch, the program is now, unfortunately, mired in court challenges. Stay tuned.
What about federal overreach? It soon may be curbed. This summer the U.S House and Senate finally passed bills rewriting the No Child Left Behind law. Both bills would limit the federal role in education, shifting power back to states and school districts. The bills diverge in other areas, however, so a conference committee will attempt to reconcile differences this fall.
Let’s hope they do. The American public is counting on it.
Kristen Blair is a Chapel Hill-based education writer.