Poll Finds Few Well Informed About Bush Education Plan
by Jim Brown
August 30, 2004
(AgapePress) - A new Gallup poll on education issues reveals that many parents say they do not know much about the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Meanwhile, the pollsters also found that school vouchers continue to lack majority support.Of the adults who took part in the poll conducted by the Gallup Organization and a professional society for educators, 68 percent say they know very little or nothing at all about Bush's signature education law, and 55 percent say they do not even know enough to form an opinion of it. Also, only a little more than half of those polled expressed the belief that NCLB will improve student achievement in their schools. However, many respondents opposed provisions in the plan.
Krista Kafer, senior education policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, found the results of the poll surprising. She notes that NCLB has "received a lot of coverage in the news, has been debated by experts," and "has received a lot of media attention." So why are so many Americans uninformed about the education program? Perhaps, the education expert speculates, it may be due to the unfortunate fact that "parents and other citizens are not as involved in education as they should be."
She goes on to note, "The fact that we've got a major piece of federal legislation that has been in existence for a couple of years and that people don't know what it's doing, have no idea how it applies to their particular school -- or in some cases have never even heard of it at all -- is really appalling."
Gallup's research also indicated that school voucher programs are opposed by a majority of Americans. When asked if they favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense, 54 percent of adults opposed the idea, while 42 percent favored it.
Kafer feels this statistic may be misleading, however. "It really depends on how you word the question," she says, "as to what kind of support you're going to see for vouchers. According to the education policy analyst, numerous other polls have shown that support for school voucher programs is growing and already exceeds 50 percent.
In fact, Kafer notes that the Freedman Foundation conducted a poll contrasting response to the wording of the Gallup poll ("at public expense") with response to the wording "with public funds." She says the researchers found when the term "public funds" was used, support for vouchers went up more than 20 points, to 64 percent of respondents favoring school voucher programs.
