There's great suspicion of reformers who look down on first taking care of school safety, discipline and the basics.
According to a recent survey, there is widespread agreement among the American people on a number of important educational issues. On some issues, the public supports education reformers, governors and businessmen, but there are also huge differences. The survey, "First Things First: What Americans Expect from the Public Schools," was conducted by Public Agenda, a non-partisan, citizen research group.
The biggest issue for the public is that "too many public schools are not providing the minimum prerequisites for education -- a safe, orderly environment and effective teaching of 'the basics."' Focus groups revealed that parents were not merely responding to media coverage of violence but to their own children's experiences. Seventy-six percent of those polled, including 83 percent of African-American parents and 84 percent of white parents, support the permanent removal from school of students possessing weapons or drugs.
Safety is another major concern. "Most Americans are not convinced that schools adequately enforce the standards of behavior and cooperation that allow teachers to teach and children to learn." Eighty-eight percent say that "emphasizing habits such as being on time, and being dependable and disciplined would make a great deal of difference in how much students learn." Seventy-three percent say "taking persistent troublemakers out of class would be a very effective means of boosting academic performance in the school. ... People see order as a prerequisite to learning.
The third major concern is that there's not enough emphasis on the basics, such as reading, writing and math. The public is not saying that students shouldn't learn more than the basics or shouldn't get challenging courses, but there's great suspicion of reformers who look down on the basics and emphasize team skills, critical thinking and higher-order skills.
The message the public is sending is loud and clear. Higher standards and more challenging school work are supported strongly, but the public doubts reformers who have all sorts of plans for "innovations" without first taking care of school safety, discipline and the basics.
The public, including both African-Americans and white parents, also believes that "schools should hold students accountable for doing their best." Eighty-eight percent "support not allowing students to graduate from high school unless they demonstrate they can write and speak English well, and 82% support setting up 'very clear guidelines on what students should learn and teachers should teach in every major subject."'
These views do not reflect a desire to return to the "good old days." Americans favor making learning enjoyable and reject spanking. But they're wary of some of the new methods proposed by reformers, such as allowing students to use calculators before they can add, subtract, multiply and divide mentally or to write compositions without paying attention to spelling and grammar.
Another big difference between the public and most educational reformers is that only 34 percent of Americans believe that heterogeneous grouping helps students learn. Even when presented with arguments in favor of it, most remain unconvinced. Opposition to heterogeneous grouping is as great among African-American parents as among whites.
While education experts say tracking is bad because students in low tracks are stigmatized and are rarely challenged, the public views it differently. Seventy-two percent believe that in heterogeneous classes, teachers spend the most time and effort on the fast and slow learners; they see tracking as "the way for average learners to get just as much attention as fast and slow learners."
When Public Agenda probed this issue in previous research, it found that "people's doubts about heterogeneous grouping also stem from their own experiences in school or at the workplace. People recalled incidents when they suffered from being in a class that was too advanced for them, or when they watched someone else fall further and further behind because his skills were just not equal to those of the rest of the class. People often cited differences in the needs of their own children as arguments in favor of grouping students by skill level and tailoring teaching to their level of advancement. In short, heterogeneous grouping makes no intuitive sense to people and seems to fly in the face of their real-world experiences."
There's much more in the Public Agenda study. I'll return to it in a future column. But it's clear from this picture that reformers will only get the credibility and public support they need to succeed if they accept the public's agenda as part of their own. The overwhelming majority of teachers and others who work in public schools should have no difficulty in doing so since these public concerns are theirs, too. This could be the basis of a powerful alliance between the American public and teachers.