The Education Week headline reads, "Opposition to School Law Growing, Poll Says":
American voters are becoming increasingly aware of the No Child Left Behind Act, but a growing minority of them are deciding they don’t like it, a new poll sponsored by the Public Education Network and Education Week suggests.
Three-fourths of voters questioned in January said they had heard about the bipartisan law, up from 56 percent who said so in a survey a year earlier...While supporters still outweighed those who dislike the law, the opposition grew threefold between January 2003 and a year later. Twenty-eight percent of this year’s respondents said they opposed the No Child Left Behind Act, compared with 8 percent in the 2003 PEN/Education Week poll.
Although we certainly can expect that as the number of those aware of NCLB increases, so will the number of its detractors, there are a couple of ways to look at this. One way is to say that the people who have discovered NCLB only in the past year have got it right, and these increased numbers reflect a public response to negative effects that took several years to develop.
One could also claim that these Johnny-come-latelys have it wrong. Perhaps they're people who don't have kids in the system. Perhaps the mainstream press has been consistently biased against NCLB, and those who discovered NCLB in the past year only know about it from reading negative articles. This poll oversampled minority parents; if those parents are more likely to believe that standardized testing, the cornerstone of NCLB, are unfair and racist, then it wouldn't be surprising if they were more likely to oppose NCLB. The main increase in opponents appears to have come from the "Not sure about NCLB" category, and perhaps those undecided folks are more swayed by negative press.
And is it possible that John Kerry was one of the people surveyed?
How can we tell? We can't. We can say that it appears from this poll that NCLB appears to have more detractors, but we don't know anything about who they are and why they oppose it, and I believe that would be the more useful info. And there are usual disclaimers about respondents who are willing and able to complete telephone surveys.
Other polls suggest that support is holding steady:
But David H. Winston, a Republican political strategist and the president of the Winston Group, a polling firm in Alexandria, Va., said the opinion research his group has conducted on the No Child Left Behind Act doesn’t bear out the conclusion that more voters are opposing it...
Mr. Winston cautioned that there were some differences in polling technique, both in the phrasing of questions and the sample. His group polled 1,000 registered voters with no oversampling. A December 2002 poll by the Winston Group showed 50 percent of respondents with a favorable impression of "Bush’s education reforms," and 29 percent unfavorable. Results from a January 2004 survey were about the same, with 52 percent favorable and 33 percent unfavorable.
Posted by kswygert at April 7, 2004 11:38 AM