According to a new national study, much less than a quarter of Americans believe that public schools are “on the right track.” The survey, conducted by Grinnell College, determined that 64 percent of Americans think public schools are on the wrong track.
“There is significant partisan difference, with 83% of Republicans saying public schools are on the wrong track, and only 9% saying they are headed in the right direction. Democrats are more evenly split, with 44% feeling schools are on the wrong track and 41% saying they are headed in the right direction,” the pollsters observed.
Most of respondents stated that they suspect the way schools manage teaching regarding race problems in the classroom.
Grinnell reports, “beyond these partisan differences, distrust in the ability of public schools to teach about racism was associated with the belief that public schools are on the ‘wrong track.’ Of the 24% who say things are headed in the right direction, a strong majority (71%) trust how educators teach about racism. However, of the 64% who feel schools are on the wrong track, a majority (54%) say they distrust educators’ decisions on this issue.”
“Historians point out that U.S. public education has long been driven by three overarching, but sometimes conflicting, goals: democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility,” said Cori Jakubiak, associate professor of education at Grinnell College. “The racial reckoning catalyzed by the 2020 killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement has prompted some educators to teach about structural racism as a central way to promote the democratic equality goal of public schooling.”
Jakubiak proceeded to say, “We find that the public is divided over whether the schools can be trusted to teach about racism, and that these concerns have fueled the sentiment that schools are on the wrong track.”
Instruction built around Critical Race Theory in colleges has actually been credited for helping to flip Virginia, a state that was trending blue, to red in the last gubernatorial election.
The study uncovered a lack of trust about colleges relating to three areas; educating students regarding bigotry, choosing proper library books and responding appropriately to a pupil presenting a danger of physical violence.
Education concerning racism was the only classification in which much less than half of the people questioned educators.
The poll also found that Americans think pupils need to be taught the fundamentals– reading, writing, American history, home economics, and budgeting. International languages, art and also music, and also sex education fell behind in the top priority listing.
“Our school systems right now are not even doing a good job of covering the basics – teaching our kids how to read, teaching our kids how to do math, preparing them to enter the workforce,” Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, told CBS Boston.
Rodriguez believes that much of the reaction is because of parents seeing what their kids were being shown throughout remote discovering at the height of the pandemic.
“The fantasy that we had in our heads about what was actually going on in school every single day, it all fell apart,” Rodrigues said. “Now that the wool has fallen from our eyes, it’s gonna be very difficult to fool parents and say ‘no we’ve got it from here,’ because we don’t trust you anymore. We’ve seen too much. Parents are not in the mood to stand by and just trust that this system, which has obviously failed, is going to step up and meet the challenge [of lost learning and mental health issues]. We’ve seen too much.”
H/T Timcast