Surprises Surface in Public Poll on Schools.

Every September, with considerable fanfare, Kappan publishes the Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the American Public's Attitudes Toward Public Schools. The findings are cited widely by educators, policymakers, and the press.

In anticipation of the 1995 PDK/Gallup poll, I revisited the data from the 1994 poll. A number of findings were not surprising.

For example, during the past decade, respondents have issued consistent grades to the performance of schools locally and nationally. About 70 percent of the 1994 respondents continued to give a grade of A or B to the school attended by their oldest child, while only 20 percent gave such grades to schools nationwide.

We also should not be surprised that violence tied with discipline as the No. 1 problem facing public schools in 1994, given the news media's attention to these issues.

Survey findings on other subjects, however, were surprising, if sometimes perplexing.

Rising Contact

The first showed up in the dramatic increase in the public's contact with public schools.

Respondents in 1994 reported twice as much contact as respondents a decade earlier. Particularly high levels of school contact were noted by those with children in public schools. Eighty-seven percent indicated they had met with a teacher about their child during the past year, a 10 percent increase since 1991 and 25 percent higher than the 1983 poll.

Equally encouraging, more than half the parents in 1994 also reported they had attended a meeting dealing with the local public schools during the previous year. This suggests school improvement programs that emphasize parent involvement may be achieving their intended results.

Race Matters

Somewhat surprisingly, race was the variable most consistently tied to large differences in responses in last year's poll. For example, people of color were more likely than whites to respond that they:

* met with teachers about their children during the past year;

* attended parent-teacher association meetings and school board meetings during the past year;

* grade their neighborhood schools lower but schools nationally higher and think schools in their communities have gotten worse during the past five years;

* consider violence the biggest problem facing public schools;

* consider students' easy access to weapons the most important contributor to increased violence in public schools;

* favor governmental voucher systems to fund education;

* consider the creation of a national curriculum and standardized national assessments very important;

* favor greater emphasis on mathematics, English, science, history/U.S. government, geography, foreign languages, music, and art in the public school curriculum; and

* have enrolled their children in private schools.

These responses suggest that people of color are more dissatisfied than whites with conditions in public education. They are more likely than whites to favor private education and most options listed in the survey to improve public education and reduce school violence. People of color appear more willing to try any school improvement strategies.

Cautious View

We need to view these racial differences with caution. Only 170 poll respondents (11 percent) in 1994 were identified as non-white, a percentage that has remained fairly constant in these polls over the past decade, even though non-white representation in the U.S. population has increased to almost 17 percent.

The non-white numbers were too small to analyze differences between whites and non-whites by variables such as occupation, parent status, income, or community setting. Had the sample of people of color been larger, interesting differences might have been revealed among certain subsets of respondents (e.g., suburban versus urban respondents by race).

Surprisingly, whites and non-whites responded similarly in supporting the promotion of both a common cultural tradition and diverse traditions in public schools and in seeking equal emphasis on both in the curriculum. One would expect a higher percentage of people of color to support cultural diversity and a smaller number to support a curriculum emphasizing common traditions.

On these issues, almost three in 10 parents of public school students preferred monoculturalism, i.e., emphasizing one common cultural tradition over diverse traditions. Given the increasing diversity of our population, one might assume that exposing students to multiculturalism should be a high priority in public schools. But the poll data suggest that nearly one-third of parents may resist such instruction.

Looking Ahead

If the past is any indicator of what to expect, the 1995 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll will contain both encouraging and discouraging news. Will the increase in public school contact among parents continue? Will race differences in responses persist? Will support for monoculturalism remain strong?

It will be interesting to see if these patterns persist in the 27th national poll or if other surprises emerge.

Local communities that want to know how their residents view these issues can contact Phi Delta Kappa for technical assistance in conducting their own polls. If enough local polls take place, their findings might reinforce or refute the national findings.