Make teaching more professional
Are Americans signaling that they want changes that would boost the professionalism of teaching?
Americans want higher professional requirements for teachers and believe teacher pay is too low, but they don’t like tenure, according to the newest PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools.
Public school parents trust and have confidence in the nation’s teachers, and they said communicating with their child’s teacher is easy. In broad terms, the PDK/Gallup poll indicates that Americans believe schools are safe places where children are able to do their best work and that teachers recognize and praise good effort at school.
This year’s PDK/Gallup poll is a nationally representative web survey of 3,499 Americans ages 18 and older with Internet access and an additional telephone survey of 1,001 Americans ages 18 and older. Both surveys were conducted in May 2015. The addition of the web survey this year allows PDK and Gallup to gather larger sample sizes to report in greater detail about segments of the U.S. adult population for the first time. We point to responses from specific groups when we deem them to be significantly different from the total responses. All of the results in this report are taken from the web survey only.
This report follows our initial release of findings in the September issue of Kappan, where we shared poll results regarding testing, the Common Core, choice, and the role of the federal government in education. Still to come are responses to questions regarding college and the American Dream.
Last month, we reported that Americans said there is too much emphasis on standardized testing in public schools. They said student engagement at school and whether students feel hopeful about their future are far better factors to consider when evaluating schools than the results of standardized tests. They rank standardized testing lower than other ways of measuring student progress such as examples of student work, grades awarded by the teacher, or written observations by the teacher.
FindingsPDK/Gallup Poll - October highlights:
