January 15, 2019

Contact:
William J. Mathis: (802) 383-0058, wmathis@sover.net
Gustavo E. Fischman: (602) 330-9629, fischman@asu.edu
Great Lakes Center: (517) 203-2940, greatlakescenter@greatlakescenter.org

Report Gauging Public Opinion on K-12 Education Is a Flawed but Helpful Starting Point for Future Research

Key Takeaway: Though a unique contribution, report's inconsistency and lack of clarity make many of its conclusions questionable.

Lansing, MI (January 15, 2019) – A recent report from Public Agenda compiled public opinion surveys to show where the American public stands on education issues. The report notes the importance of gauging current public understandings about education, particularly given three major policy changes in the past 10 years: Race to the Top, the Common Core State Standards, and the Every Student Succeeds Act.

Gustavo E. Fischman and Kevin Winn of Arizona State University reviewed Our Next Assignment: Where Americans Stand on Public K-12 Education: A Review of Recent Opinion Research. They find that the report makes a unique contribution in its gathering of many surveys into a single report, as well as its inclusion of interviews with employers. But a lack of methodological clarity makes many of the report's conclusions questionable.

The report is also inconsistent in how it addresses respondents from different demographic groups (e.g., race, class, political affiliation) and in how it treats disaggregated data, resulting in an inability to generalize to the population or to any subgroup. Therefore, the conclusions are cursory and incomplete, requiring further study and research.

For these reasons, Fischman and Winn do not recommend that the report be used to make policy, but they do see the report as a good starting point for understanding where more research should be undertaken. As the report's authors accurately point out, this includes incorporating the often-ignored voices of students and parents.

Find the review, by Gustavo E. Fischman and Kevin Winn, at: http://greatlakescenter.org/docs/Think_Twice/TT-Fischman-K12-Surveys.pdf

Find Our Next Assignment: Where Americans Stand on Public K-12 Education: A Review of Recent Opinion Research, written by Rebecca Silliman and David Schleifer and published by Public Agenda, at:
https://www.publicagenda.org/files/PublicAgenda_OurNextAssignment_2018.pdf

NEPC Reviews (http://thinktankreview.org) provide the public, policymakers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected publications. NEPC Reviews are made possible in part by support provided by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice: http://www.greatlakescenter.org

The National Education Policy Center (NEPC), housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, produces and disseminates high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. Visit us at: http://nepc.colorado.edu/

About The Great Lakes Center
The mission of the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice is to support and disseminate high quality research and reviews of research for the purpose of informing education policy and to develop research-based resources for use by those who advocate for education reform.  Visit the Great Lakes Center Web Site at: http://www.greatlakescenter.org.   Follow us on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/greatlakescent.  Find us on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/GreatLakesCenter.

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The mission of the Great Lakes Center for Education Research & Practice is to support and disseminate high quality research and reviews of research for the purpose of informing education policy and to develop research-based resources for use by those who advocate for education reform.

Visit the Great Lakes Center website at http://www.greatlakescenter.org/