Updated: Here are two more articles about the poll:
What parents really think about school reform is by Valerie Strauss at The Washington Post.
AFT: Current Ed. Policies Don’t Work, Are Unpopular With Parents is from Education Week.
Poll: Parents don’t support many education policy changes is the headline of a Washington Post article . Here are the first two paragraphs:
Most parents with children in public schools do not support recent changes in education policy, from closing low-performing schools to shifting public dollars to charter schools to private school vouchers, according to a new poll to be released Monday by the American Federation of Teachers.
The poll, conducted by Democratic polling firm Hart Research Associates, surveyed 1,000 parents this month and found that most would rather see their neighborhood schools strengthened and given more resources than have options to enroll their children elsewhere.
Some might question it impartiality because of the AFT’s involvement, but the results are reflective of past polls done by other groups.
Here’s another summary of the same poll: What Parents Want For Education Policy
I’m turning this post into something of a “The Best…” list, and here are links to posts about previous polls:
The Best Posts/Articles On This Year’s Phi Delta Kappa and Gallup Education Poll — 2012
Gallup Poll On Education Issues Just Released 2011
Gallup Poll On Education Issues Released 2010
“Public Attitudes Toward The Public Schools” 2009
U.S. “Survey finds parent-teacher relationships strong–Teachers given grade of “A””
“Parents Agree – Better Assessments, Less High-Stakes Testing”
On the heels of the poll mentioned at the beginning of this post, another came out contradicting it. However, here are two posts analyzing this new polls lack of credibility:
Do Parents Support High-Stakes Testing? is a great post by Diane Ravitch responding to a new poll supposedly finding that parents support these tests.
Associated Press Propaganda: What the AP Survey Really Shows is from Accomplished California Teachers, and links to an exhaustive analysis.
Many of the questions in the survey are very leading and therefore some of the top picked answers contradict themselves. Surveys are like economics and the weather, they can be spun to mean anything the messenger wants them to mean. Everyone likes their representative in Congress but gives Congress as a whole a poor grade. That tends to mirror parents’ views of public education.