polls

PDK, We Have a Problem

Eduflack accountability, Parents, polls, teachers, technology

It is that time of year again, time for the annual PDK/Gallup Poll on America’s thoughts about public education in our great nation.  And once again, the American people have demonstrated a clear schizophrenia when it comes to our classrooms.

When it comes to grading the schools attended by the surveyees’ oldest child, 79 percent of schools received a grade of A or B.  But for our nation as a whole, we only give 17 percent of our schools an A or B.
Seventy one percent of those surveyed have “trust and confidence in the men and women who are teaching children in the public schools,” yet less than one in five believe our schools are above average.  (So we trust the teachers, but don’t have any confidence in the outcomes, I suppose.)
Of those surveyed, 76 percent said we should actively recruit high-achieving students to consider teaching as a profession, but 70 percent of those surveyed said the ability to teach is a natural talent, with just 28 percent believing it can be developed in college.
The full PDK/Gallup survey can be found here, with USA Today’s write-up of the results here.  Among some of the other headscratchers:
* Fewer folks believe school districts have a harder time recruiting good teachers today (52%) than did in 2003 (61%)
* Nearly half of those surveyed (47%) believe unionization hurts the quality of public education, yet 52% side with the unions on collective bargaining issues
* People believe that “principal evaluations” are the most important criteria for determining if a teacher should keep his or her job (with student test scores coming a close second), but there is no explanation whatsoever of what a principal should be evaluating
* 74 percent of those surveyed want increased investment in school technology, but 59 percent oppose using technology to help kids learn at home (while reducing the number of hours needed in high school)
* Despite the emphasis on teacher quality, half of those surveyed would rather hire a less effective teacher than allow students to utilize online learning
Buried deep in the survey (and nowhere to be found in the PDK press release on the report), 74 percent favor public school choice, the highest level in more than two decades, and 70 percent support charter schools, the highest total ever in the PDK survey’s history.  
And the methodology?  Of the more than 1,000 surveyed, 62 percent of those surveyed did not have kids in school, while 29 percent were public school parents.  Sixty seven percent were over the age of 40.  Sixty two percent had a college education.
What do we learn from all of this?  On the whole, it seems folks are pretty happy with their local schools and their local teachers.  But they don’t know why.  They are frustrated with the quality of public education across the nation, but the give President Obama high marks for his education work.  We want technology, but we don’t want kids to use it outside of a 19th century classroom.  We like charters.  And we are basing all of this on a majority of surveyees that aren’t actually customers in this game.
At least one thing can make this local school board chairman feel good this morning.  According to PDK/Gallup, our opinion of school boards seems to be at an all-time low.
  

College Print Isn’t Dead Yet

Eduflack higher ed, polls, Students, technology

I’m not so far removed from my time at the alma mater that I can’t remember the highs and lows of college textbooks.  The excitement of the book list for new classes.  The dilemma of whether to buy new or used.  The challenge of lugging a stack of books back to the dorm.  And then the roulette-like feeling of finding out how much those textbooks were worth a mere three months after buying them (and knowing that the spines of many of them may not have been cracked during that time).

But I am also a 21st century consumer of information.  And I’m enough of a geek that the highlight of my week — so far — has been discovering that the 2011 AP Stylebook is available as an iPhone/iPad app (and is now proudly downloaded on my electronic devices, with my old, ratty 2001 edition of the AP writing guide now officially retired).
So Eduflack was quite surprised to see the info-graphic on the front page of today’s USA Today.  The question — What kind of textbooks do college students prefer?  The answer, determined by Harris Interactive speaking with more than 1,200 students on Pearson Foundation’s behalf?  Print textbooks are preferred by 55 percent of college students surveyed, with 35 percent choosing digital (tablet, e-reader, or computer).  We’ll forget about the 10 percent who have no preference, a now requisite number for most surveys, it seems.
In an age where we live on our smart phones, print textbooks are still by a sizable margin.  In an era of Kindles, Nooks, iPads, and netbooks, print remains king (at least in the eyes of today’s college students).  And a time when dollars are tight and college costs are rising, those expensive print textbooks still rule.
Maybe I’m alone in this, but I was incredibly surprised by the data.  I can understand such numbers coming from professors, many of whom want to see students purchase their teachers’ textbooks.  And I can see it from the colleges and universities themselves, who depend on college bookstores as revenue centers.  But just a third of today’s college students prefer digital textbooks?  Really?
So I pose a few questions for the two-thirds of college students choosing to diss the e-text?  Do you still subscribe to print newspapers?  How many slick magazines are delivered to your mailbox each month (assuming you still have a box receiving snail mail)?  When was the last time you bought an actual, paper book for leisure reading?  Do you still keep a printed phone book in your dorm or apartment (instead of using the web)?  Just curious, is all.
This survey response really has Eduflack scratching his head.  Is the problem that current electronic book experiences don’t stack up?  Are professors down on the e-book, and students are feeding off that?  Has classroom instruction not caught up to the times, as we still deliver 20th century instruction that doesn’t warrant 21st century tools?  Or do we just like that payoff for selling back those used textbooks at the end of the term for a fraction of the purchase price.
Someone, anyone, please help me out here.  What are the motivations for the college student, in the year 2011, having such a strong preference for a print textbook?  
  

Brookings, Ed Media, and Missed Opps

Eduflack Media, Parents, polls

They’re back!  The good folks over at Brookings Institution have returned with their third study on the United States and how it covers education issues in the media.  If you’ll recall, in 2009 we learned that only 1.4 percent of national news coverage in the dear ol’ U.S. of A was about education issues.  Last year, the trio of Darrell West, Russ Whitehurst, and E.J. Dionne came back for a return engagement to tell us how key leaders are seeing the future of education media.

First off, the people seem to care most about the issues that are pretty much getting the most coverage these days.  Teacher performance (73 percent).  Student academic performance (71 percent).  School crime or violence (69 percent).  School finance and school reform (66 percent).  It is just shocking!  The most important education policy issues for those polled are those issues they constantly hear about from President Obama, EdSec Duncan, governors, and the mainstream media that still covers K-12 issues.
Who do they get their information from?  Family and friends is tops, at 75 percent.  Then comes daily newspapers (60 percent), school publications (56 percent), local television (54 percent), community groups (42 percent), national television (38 percent), Internet sites (37 percent), radio (33 percent), and school Facebook or MySpace sites (14 percent).  (Who knew we were even still using MySpace??)  Of those sources, family and friends were deemed the most highly regarded (62 percent), with radio coming in at 24 percent, Facebook at 12 percent, and just 7 percent regarding those phone texts as valuable.
This is all important data, as it helps flesh out the picture of how one successfully informs stakeholders — namely parents, as far as this survey is concerned — about developments in local and national education.  But it also raises some concerns:
* Do we really believe this is a true representative sample of Main Street USA?  Setting aside the concerns of telephone polling and who has land lines these days, just take a look at the numbers, take a look at the school communities you know, and compare.  Are we really getting local education information from daily newspapers and local television stations?  
* Does this even provide us an apples/apples comparison?  I look at the first bucket — “the areas they wanted more coverage of their local schools,” and teacher performance comes in first.  Then we ask them how they are getting news, and we are scoring things like texts?  Who texts about a complex issue like teacher evaluations?
* When asked how to improve communications, the most popular response was more printed newsletters.  Second was more information through the Internet (despite it ranking seventh in preferred sources).  Seems we really don’t know what we want, doesn’t it?
Unfortunately, Brookings didn’t offer up some recommendations on what to do with this data.  Instead, it concluded its report with the following:

Although Americans feel reasonably well-informed about schools and do not sense a decline in the amount of information available to them, they do want more information than they are getting, especially on the most basic educational questions: teacher performance, student academic achievement, curricula, finances, and reform efforts. They are also concerned about violence in the schools. To a remarkable degree, they still rely on daily newspapers for educational information, and that is true even among young Americans who are more open to newer technologies. This points to an opportunity for newspapers eager to expand their readership among the young. Education blogs on newspaper websites are a growing and vital source of education news. Expanding and building on them would be helpful to the education policy debate, and good for newspapapers.

But Brookings’ loss is Eduflack’s gain.  Let me offer us a few observations/suggestions:
  1. We need to define what “news” is.  The first set of questions address high-brow policy discussions related to ESEA and other national debates.  But the news source information seems to focus on “information,” not “news.”  There is a big difference between learning about teacher incentives and knowing how the girls’ soccer team did.  But those are lumped into the same question as equals.
  2. We need to separate discussion of education policy issues from local school issues.  Here, respondents were focused on the policy issues driven by the mainstream media.  But their answers regarding media sources reflect what they are hearing about schools in their local community.  How many of us have family and friends who can talk about teacher performance issues?  And what printed newsletter is going to enlighten us on that issue?  We need better data on the separation of the two issues.  And quite frankly, knowing how people learn about their local schools and their concerns regarding those local schools is far more valuable.
  3. While the information regarding what 18-29 year olds think about these topics is interesting, how many 20-year-olds really care about what is happening at their local schools?  Along similar lines, how many really care about student academic performance information?   
  4. We need data on “who” is providing the information to the sources in question.  Is it earned media from news organizations?  School-generated print and web information?  Community-generated blogs or radio programs?  All information is not created equal.  Are people looking for more fact-based, trusted news, or are they looking for the snarky, the provacative, or that that simply relates back to them and their families?  
  5. Finally, the big issue is SO WHAT?  What do we do with this data?  Is it a problem of information not being out there, or people not knowing where to look?  Is the information folks are not finding in their local newspapers available on the Internet?  Is the data people want from printed newsletters available on school web or Facebook sites?  We need both educated and informed customers of education information.  We need to understand what they need, information wise, and then help them see where to find it.   
Ultimately, the data provided by Brookings makes for lovely water cooler or cocktail party chatter for those in ed policy circles, but it does very little, if anything, to help advance improving communications in the education arena.  
UPDATE: Apparently, the report’s authors have said a second document, focusing on reccs from the telephone survey, is in development.  But in these days of instant gratification, who waits to deliver reccs??

Edu-Profs: Hot or Not?

Eduflack higher ed, polls

University professors used to be held to the old adage, publish or perish.  But things may be a little different for those in the education policy space, thanks to an interesting new ranking from the always provocative Rick Hess.  Last week, Hess offered up his RHSU 2010 Edu-Scholar Public Presence Rankings.

The premise is simple.  Take a pool of university-affiliated academics and researchers, track the number of times they appear in the education media, newspapers, blogs, and the Congressional Record.  Sprinkle in extra points for the books they publish and the rankings they secure with booksellers like Amazon.  And let the fun begin.  It’s like the Roman gladiators, only with Blackberrys and standard deviations.
What does Hess find?  Stanford and Harvard Universities are the top breeding grounds for edu-scholars.  Stanford takes four of the top 10 spots, with Linda Darling-Hammond at number one and Rick Hanushek at number two (Nel Noddings and Anthony Bryk also made the top 10).  Harvard offers three in the top 10 — Paul Peterson, Dick Elmore, and Roland Fryer.  
Private institutions do much better at turning out the edu-scholars than their public brethren.  Only six of the top 20 come from public universities (Wisconsin with two, U.Va., Arizona, Michigan, and Washington). 
It is always interesting to see the civil war that is Stanford University ed policy play out in these sorts of rankings.  For every Stanford University School of Education’s Darling-Hammond, we have a Hoover Institution’s Hanushek.  Guess that means there is room for all thinkers out on the Farm.  And it is surprising to see how well many of the edu-scholars affiliated with the National Education Policy Center did on the rankings.
How do the scholars do in the individual breakdowns?  Darling-Hammond is tops on Google Scholar scores, followed closely by Hanushek.  Peterson is tops for Book Points, with Noddings on his heels.  Colorado University-Boulder’s Kevin Welner (with NEPC) gets tops for Highest Amazon Ranking, with Darling-Hammond and Elmore close by.  Darling-Hammond is queen of the Education Press Mentions, but Hanushek is close to storming the castle.  Fryer gets top marks from the Blog Mentions.  Hanushek is tops for Newspaper mentions (though Darling-Hammond is just a fraction behind).  And Darling-Hammond, Harvard’s Thomas Kane, UPENN’s Richard Ingersoll, Vanderbilt’s Camilla Benbow, and Arkansas’ Patrick Wolf win bragging rights for Congressional Record Mentions.
Of course, Hess has to be onto something when he faced some criticism out of the gate during a holiday week for his rankings.  Diane Ravitch seemed upset that she wasn’t included (since she isn’t affiliated with an academic institution).  And other “scholars” with think tanks, advocacy groups, research organizations, and the like are likely to share her frustration.  Perhaps Hess can offer up an affiliates rankings, where all the non-academic academics can square off for bragging rights.  (But can Hess put himself in the mix, or does he need to step out, as unofficial commish?)
Personally, Eduflack would like to see these edu-scholars actively campaign for higher scores in 2011.  With the change in political landscape and the focus of Congress, I think Hanushek has a chance to take the top spot, particularly with the Hoover PR machine helping his campaign.  And it would be great to see the “ivory tower” edu-scholars (measured mostly by the book numbers) separated from the “main street” edu-scholars (measured by blogs and newspaper appearances).  And, of course, it would be terrific for someone to spring for the VMS data so Hess can include radio and television appearances in the scoring.
And while I’d prefer to see the metrics work out to a nice 100-point scale instead of a system that best looks like NFL quarterback rankings, I understand you just can’t always take the research out of the researcher.  So I’ll let that go.
Kudos to Hess for the 2010 Edu-Scholar Public Presence Rankings, and congrats to this year’s winners!   

We’re Not Watching Our Schoolhouse Rock

Eduflack civics, polls

As it is the Independence Day weekend, there are two bits of information dear ol’ Eduflack simply can’t pass up.  The first comes to us from the Associated Press, where Lauren Sausser reported on a recent analysis of the original Declaration of Independence conducted by scientists at the Library of Congress.  Using the latest technologies, they can see that Thomas Jefferson accidentally used the word “subjects” instead of “citizens” when first declaring our independence, undoubtedly a force of habit after a lifetime under the rule of the monarch.  Like most good writers, he simply “erased” the error, replaced it with citizen, and the rest is history.  Guess that means there is still hope for us educators who can’t help but let works like phonics, scientifically based, AYP, and NCLB to slip through out lips.

While the University of Virginia graduate and all-around Jeffersonian in me was quite taken by the AP story (and talked about it most of yesterday), I was even a little more taken by the Marist University poll Eduflack read last evening.  Chalk it up to being the son of a political scientist or a whole host of reasons, but seeing polls on what Americans know about history and civics can be like watching a car wreck for me.
As this is Independence Day weekend, Marist decided to ask a very simple question.  In honor of this national holiday, the researchers asked, “On July 4th we celebrate Independence Day.  From which country did the United States win its independence?”
A whopping 74 percent of Americans were able to answer the question correctly (and please don’t make Eduflack give the correct answer).  Those from the Northeast knew far better than those from the South.  Those with higher household incomes were more knowledgeable than those with incomes below $50K.  America’s youth (those under 29) seem ignorant of such things.  And men know their early American history far better than women seem to.  
Of the 26 percent who do not know who the 13 colonies fought to win their independence, most simply declared themselves as “unsure,” or unwilling to hazard a guess.  But of those incorrect answers, the most prominent ones were France, China, Japan, Mexico, and Spain.
Fighting China or Japan or Mexico for our freedom definitely puts a different spin on Schoolhouse Rock’s “Shot Heard ‘Round the World,” that’s for sure.  Maybe a quick look at that video can remind that 26 percent who fought who.
Regardless, hopefully these numbers remind us why we need to continue to fund the K-12 civics programs long advocated by U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander (TN)  the recently departed U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd (WV).
Happy Independence Day!