Our Money, Our Schools: Ten Top Findings From Our Research Team
The public school system is the underpinning of American society: the vehicle for trying to make equal opportunity a reality, while empowering a new crop of citizens to ultimately step up as active participants in democracy. Because the schools are so important, we all pay taxes to finance the schools and we all have a stake in their success.
What do parents and teachers really think about what's going on in our schools? Is the work too hard? Too easy? And how about high school: should would-be grads have to take an exit exam? Check out the answers to these questions and more, in this list of findings from research by Public Agenda.
1. Most students support a high school exit exam.
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2. Over half of Americans say that colleges today are like a business, with an eye mostly on the bottom line.
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3. A large majority of Americans believe that students have to borrow too much to pay for college.
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4. Most parents think school today is better and harder than it was when they were in school.
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5. Most superintendents and principals don’t think math and science education or low standards are serious problems locally.
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6. Almost all superintendents and principals think making it easier to fire bad teachers would improve teaching; more than 7 in 10 say it would be very effective.
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7. New secondary teachers are more likely than new elementary teachers to say unmotivated and misbehaving students are a major drawback of teaching.
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8. Large majorities of new secondary teachers say they would choose schools with better student behavior and parental and administrative support over schools with a significantly higher salary.
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9. In high-needs schools [defined as schools where more than half of students qualify for the free or reduced-price lunch program], first-year teachers who enter teaching through alternative certification routes are much more likely to feel that they are assigned the hardest-to-reach students.
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10. Most new teachers say they were trained in teaching an ethnically diverse student body, but fewer than 4 in 10 say that their training helps them a lot in the classroom.
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Paul Gasbarra is a Research Associate for Education Insights at Public Agenda.
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