The Art of People-Pleasing
A recent opinion poll indicates that the public's approval of public school performance, and the No Child Left Behind Act, have dwindled over the past year. This nugget (quoted in an Education Week article about the poll) caught my eye:
"(The) results should be heeded by the presumptive Democratic and Republican nominees for president, argue the authors of an article analyizing the findings that is slated to run in the fall issue of Education Next, a journal of research and opinion published by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
'f Barack Obama and John McCain want to walk in step with the American public, they should acknowledge the flagging performance of schools, for while Americans retain an abiding commitment to public education, the grades that they assign the nation’s schools are increasingly mediocre,' says the article, written by William G. Howell, an associate professor of public policy at the University of Chicago; Martin West, an assistant professor of education at Brown University, in Providence, R.I.; and Paul E. Peterson, a professor of government at Harvard. Mr. West is an executive editor of Education Next, and Mr. Peterson is the editor-in-chief."
First of all, the poll results indicate that 26% of respondents (up from 20% last year) give schools grades of D or F. Yet, 56% of respondents indicate that their local public schools are headed in the right direction. So more people than last year think schools are going down hill, but a majority of folks still believe their local schools are headed in the right direction. Hmmm....So if either candidate wanted to "walk in step with the American public," as Howell says they should, shouldn't McCain or Obama be talking about how we're "headed in the right direction?"
In addition, the commentary from Howell seems to presume that an increase in negative public opinion (put aside, momentarily, that the majority polled still believe their schools to be headed in the right direction) in fact proves the existence of "flagging performance of schools." Thinking something (schools are flagging)is so, is not evidence that something is so. Conspicuously absent from this article as well is any reference to the recent trend of rising test scores under No Child Left Behind. Perhaps the writer hit a word limit.
I would appreciate it if my elected officials based policy decisions on data, facts, evidence, etc. Not public opinion. I don't want to elect the public opinion. I want to elect a leader who will employ the resources available to him to make sound decisions, not decisions based on a fickle public, which may or may not have any idea what they're talking about when it comes to questions of policy.
