Poll shows broad support for NCLB—with changes

Despite misgivings and misunderstandings, Americans support the No Child Left Behind Act and want Congress to reauthorize it—but with at least some changes, according to a national poll conducted by ETS, the national nonprofit testing and research organization behind a number of academic products such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test and National Assessment of Educational Progress.

“They’re split between making major changes and making minor changes, but very few said, ‘Don’t reauthorize it,’ ” said Allan Rivlin, a partner in one of the polling firms that conducted the survey. Rivlin spoke at a briefing in Sacramento this week attended by Jack O’Connell, state Superintendent of Public Instruction, Scott Hill, undersecretary for education in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration, and others.

“The public really doesn’t have a clear fix on what No Child Left Behind is,” Rivlin said, and the uncertainties deepen when the questions of reauthorizing the federal education law—which Congress is scheduled to consider this year—are added to the mix. Still, when pollsters explain NCLB, support for the federal education law increases, Rivlin said.

“Less than half [of poll respondents] can pick NCLB out of a lineup,” the pollster joked, but most “are in agreement with the basic provisions.”

The survey, “Standards, Accountability and Flexibility: Americans Speak on No Child Left Behind Reauthorization” was conducted May 4-15 among 1,526 adults nationwide, including 626 K-12 parents, 101 public school administrators and 251 public school teachers, with “oversamples” gauging opinions in California and among Spanish speakers.

“The answer was, very clearly, ‘Fix it. Don’t replace it,’ ” Rivlin said of responses to questions about NCLB. Characterizing the prevailing attitude, he added: “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”

Attitudes of teachers, administrators and Hispanics

Seventy-seven percent of teachers and 63 percent of administrators hold a “staunchly negative” view of NCLB, according to a summary of the survey results. In what Rivlin called “the most interesting finding,” however, 58 percent of teachers and 52 percent of administrators. grudgingly support NCLB, “although they place major emphasis on major changes,” Rivlin said.

Among the general public, 35 percent favor reauthorization with major changes while 41 percent favor it with only minor changes.

Only 16 percent of the general public—along with 25 percent of teachers and 22 percent of administrators—said they oppose reauthorization of NCLB. However, “People don’t have an agenda for change,” with other two of seven specific criticisms of federal education law resonating with a majority of respondents.

Teachers, in contrast, showed a very clear conviction about NCLB’s shortcomings: 80 percent thought the rationale that “teachers are pressured to teach to the test” was a “very convincing or fairly convincing” argument against the law, compared to 53 percent of the general public and 56 percent of administrators.

Support for investing in education

Americans especially value NCLB’s use in identifying poorly performing schools, Rivlin said, and they expressed their willingness to pay for improvements. “The emphasis is on finding out what’s wrong with our schools, developing a change plan, and funding it,” he reported.

In California, “the general bias is for more flexibility” for educators, especially with regard to excluding English language learners’ test scores from overall assessments for at least two years. Eighty-five percent of administrators and 77 percent of teachers favored omitting the scores while the students struggle to learn English.

Here again, though, education professionals diverged with the general public, which split narrowly in favor including EL scores in schools’ overall scores—and Hispanics posting the highest support, at 55 percent.

Following Rivlin to the podium, state schools chief O’Connell said the survey shows clear support for California’s “world-class standards.”

“We need to continue to have very high expectations—and make a greater investment in public education,” O’Connell said, urging the federal government also to “make investments that are commensurate” with the demands that NCLB imposes. He noted that California voters have shown their support for those investments, approving nearly 85 percent of the local education bonds that have been proposed in the past four years.

That support is also evident in responses to the ETS survey that ranged beyond NCLB. The New Jersey-based organization has commissioned national education polls annually for the past seven years, establishing a baseline of sorts on public attitudes. A clear plurality has given the nation’s schools a grade of C for the past three years, for example; 40 percent gave that answer in the latest survey, compared to 20 percent giving a grade of B and 15 percent D.

Californians grade their schools even more highly: 41 percent of all respondents in the state give the schools a grade of B, 21 percent a C and just 8 percent a D.

Related link:

Review the ETS report and related materials @ www.ets.org/americansspeak.html