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Ewa 4
Name Topic: Public thinking on testing, opt out, common core, unions, and more
March 09, 2017
Article Review # 2
Bibliography entry:
Henderson, M. B., Peterson, P. E., & West, M. R. (2016). The 2015 education next poll on school reform.
Purpose: The 2015 education next poll on school reform public thinking on testing, opt out, Common Core, unions, and more. To examine what the public, the parents, and teachers think about the government’s proposal that all students should be tested and support for the opt-out movement.
Author affiliations:
Henderson - The research director for the Public Policy Research Lab at Louisiana State University.
Peterson - Editor-in chief of education next, is professor and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School.
West - The associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and deputy director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Summary:
The article is based on the findings of a survey that was administered by the authors and their team of scholars to a few representative sample respondents throughout the United States in May and June of the year 2015. The sample size for this study was 4083 people which included teachers, African-Americans, and Hispanics. The article is trying to examine the general feeling of the public regarding the implementation of the no child left behind act (NCLB), which was proposed by congress in 2015 as a method of assessing the performance and productivity of teachers and schools. Despite the large number of parents who opted out of the testing, the bill was still pushed through congress, seemingly against the will of the people. A revision of the bill proposed that students be tested in mathematics and reading from grade 3 to grade 8 and even in high school.
The article further gives its findings regarding the general opinion on the role of the different stakeholders such as the government in setting up education standards, determining what constitutes a failing school and coming up with remedies to a failing school. While the highest number of respondents believe that the state government should have the biggest say in setting up education standards, determining what constitutes a failing school and coming up with remedies to a failing school, some people thing that the federal government and the local government should have a role in this, although the support for the latter is relatively lower than that of the state governments. The suggestion, in this case, would be that the biggest role should indeed be given to the state government because unlike the federal government which is responsible for a broad territory and as such may not be able to effectively narrow down its focus to the requirements and the situation of the each school or the local governments which may be too small and less equipped to carry out an effective evaluation, the state governments are in the best position to acquire best machinery and mechanisms of evaluating the performance of schools within their territory. The state governments are most conversant with the situation within its territory and can thus evaluate schools more fairly than the federal and local governments.
The results of the article further indicate that most of the people who participated in the research are not fully aware of the use of the Common Core within their state. The Common Core is a set of standards which are meant to standardize mathematics and reading across the nation. However, the number of people within the teaching fraternity and the general public who oppose the use of Common core is on the rise. Although standardization across the states would be important so that all schools can be measured using a common national scale, the strategy would be less effective since some states have a competitive advantage over others, hence standardization would portray a deceptive score that would have the effect of demoralization.
Critique:
The methodology used in carrying out this study was effective as it covered most of the major stakeholders from different angles. For example, the article covered the opinion of the parents, the teachers, and the public. In addition to categorizing the sample population based on these three classes, the article further classified them based on the political affiliation as Democrats and Republican which was important as it helped further declassify the opinions of the stakeholders and understand the reason they hold so dearly to their opinions. However, the sample size used does not seem to represent the whole nation, hence there is a possibility that should the sample size be wider, the results would be different.
