Education

It's hard to find any American who isn't touched in some way by the public schools as a student, parent, taxpayer, employer, or any combination of the above. And by almost any measure, the schools are one of the public's top concerns.

Test scores indicate the problems are not as bad as when the landmark federal report "A Nation at Risk" was released in 1983, warning of a "rising tide of mediocrity" in education that could undermine the nation's competitiveness. Even so, public confidence in public schools has declined dramatically over the past 30 years. International comparisons show American students to be consistently average, if that, on a worldwide scale in math and science, prompting considerable hand-wringing from leaders every few years.

In the last few years, the education landscape has been dominated by the No Child Left Behind Act, the federal government's effort to require states to bring all students to math and reading proficiency by 2014. The central goal of the law focuses on the persistent and troubling "achievement gap" between minority and white students. Black and Hispanic students are less likely to graduate from high school or college and do less well on standardized tests than white students. Educators say this is because minorities disproportionately attend troubled schools, particularly in urban areas.

Under the law, passed in 2002, states are required to implement testing to measure student progress. Schools that don't make progress on student achievement must offer additional services like tutoring, and if they continue to fall short could be forced to restructure, taken over by state authorities, or even be closed. To date, the program has identified more than 10 percent of U.S. public schools as failing, a figure rising every year. The law was supposed be reauthorized in 2007 but in the face of bitter debate over the law's effectiveness, Congress is unlikely to take action on it until after the presidential election.

The law has been intensely controversial in education. From the beginning, teachers' groups opposed the law because they disliked the emphasis on testing, which they say focuses the classroom on the basic skills needed to pass the test and nothing else. From the beginning, local officials also said there wasn't enough federal money behind the law to make it work. Other state and local officials chafed at the additional federal control over their decisions. Several states have sued the federal government to have various provisions overturned, and at one point the Utah Legislature ordered schools to ignore portions of the law.

States have complained they don't have adequate means to fix all the schools labeled as "failing" – and in some states significant numbers are on the failing list. In California, more than 1,000 of some 9,500 public schools face sanctions. Some states are becoming overwhelmed or unable to implement significant change. Further, the sanctions in the law lump together the nation’s worst schools with others that may be doing a fair job despite some problems. The Bush administration acknowledges this is a problem, and has said it would relax the law’s provisions for some states to allow them the flexibility to distinguish among schools with a few problems from those that need an overhaul.

Students across the nation have performed better on state reading and math tests since the No Child Left Behind law was enacted, according to a comprehensive report from the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy. The study also concludes that the achievement gap between black and white students has narrowed in many states. But experts weren’t able to say whether or not these improvements are directly linked to No Child Left Behind or caused by something else.

Reforms For A Diverse System

The No Child Left Behind law illustrates the complexities of trying to impose federal standards on our nation's education system. In the United States -- unlike other countries where the national government makes most of the decisions about education -- most school issues are almost always settled at the state or local level.

Local control allows districts to experiment, and keeps problems in one district from spilling over into another. At the same time, local control means that good ideas spread more slowly and that voters may feel they can ignore problems in the community down the road. This diversity makes progress harder to measure -- for example, there are three different nonprofit groups that attempt to rate states by their academic standards, each with their own rating systems.

As one might expect, all those local districts have produced a wide range of possible solutions to the problems found in some public schools. But reform efforts do tend to fall into four broad categories: standards, methods, money and market forces.

For many, the right strategy emphasizes higher standards for students and more accountability for schools. The more you ask of students, the more you will get from them, this theory goes. If a school is failing to produce results, the administration should be held accountable. Nearly every state has made some effort to set higher standards, often requiring students to take "high-stakes" tests to graduate. Supporters say standardized tests motivate students and help improve academic performance, but critics say schools end up "teaching to the test" at the expense of other skills.

A second set of reformers argues that the key to successful schools lies in teaching children how to think, not just a set of facts. A student who gains a lifelong love of learning and knows how to solve problems will go further than a child who has only memorized facts, these advocates contend. Fierce debates have ensued between partisans of various teaching methods, such as "whole language" reading versus phonetics, or over the use of calculators in math classes.

A third perspective argues that the biggest problem in education is inadequate funding for public schools, particularly poor urban and rural school districts that simply can't raise the needed money. This funding gap ensures the neediest students in the poorest school districts get the worst education, reformers say. Changing the formula for school financing, however, is often difficult politically. Although some states have been relatively successful, others have seen the debate drag on for years.

A fourth approach advocates using the power of the free market to improve public education. Supporters assert that public schools don't improve because they have no real competition. By giving parents vouchers that could be used for students to attend either public or private schools, parents could choose the best school for their child, and public schools would be forced to improve to compete. "School choice" programs for public schools are now officially part of the No Child Left Behind Act, which permits parents in failing schools to transfer their children to another public school. Only a few communities, like Milwaukee, Cleveland, Dayton, Fla., and Washington D.C., have attempted to include private and religious schools in their voucher plans. That raises concerns about the separation of church and state, but the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld Cleveland's plan.

A divided public

According to surveys, American tend to agree that schools are in trouble "out there" across the country, but are more satisfied with the public schools in their community and those attended by their children. Most parents in a recent Public Agenda survey say that their child gets a better education than they did.

Although most Americans want decisive action to improve the schools, there is disagreement and uncertainty about some fundamental questions, as well as about which approach is most promising. Most Americans support exit exams for students (and so do most students) but think it should be focused on basic skills and key stakeholders don't think standards alone are sufficient to improve schools. The public is divided over whether more money will improve the schools, and the public's understanding of vouchers and other school choice proposals remains weak. Most Americans don't know very much about the No Child Left Behind Act. Teachers are quite dissatisfied with the law, and while school administrators seem to have largely come to terms with it, they consider schools to be in pretty good shape overall. People are also deeply concerned about issues beyond academic achievement, issues like drugs, crime, and discipline in schools, and surveys show the public considers these among the major problems facing educators.

(Additional context is available in a number of other public opinion studies by Public Agenda, available in our Educators section.)