On Education Polls And Confirmation Bias
| Education Polls |
Our guest author today is Morgan Polikoff, Assistant Professor in the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California.
A few weeks back, education policy wonks were hit with a set of opinion polls about education policy. The two most divergent of these polls were the Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup poll and the Associated Press/NORC poll.
This week a California poll conducted by Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) and the USC Rossier School of Education (where I am an assistant professor) was released. The PACE/USC Rossier poll addresses many of the same issues as those from the PDK and AP, and I believe the three polls together can provide some valuable lessons about the education reform debate, the interpretation of poll results, and the state of popular opinion about key policy issues.
In general, the results as a whole indicate that parents and the public hold rather nuanced views on testing and evaluation.
In contrast, advocates’ responses to the first two polls were predictable. The PDK poll was widely seen as more favorable to what I’ll call the “reform skeptics,” and rightfully so. The two most important data points the skeptics used to support their headlines were as follows.
First, PDK asked “Over the last decade, there has been a significant increase in testing in the public schools to measure academic achievement. Just your impression or what you may have heard or read, has increased testing helped, hurt, or made no difference in the performance of the local public schools?” 22 percent responded “helped”, 36 percent responded “hurt,” and 41 percent responded “made no difference.”
Second, PDK asked “Some states require that teacher evaluations include how well a teacher’s students perform on standardized tests. Do you favor or oppose this requirement?” 41 percent favored and 58 percent opposed this requirement.
At the same time as reform skeptics pumped up the results from the PDK poll, they trashed the AP poll. These
