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Reality Check 2001
The drive to set higher educational standards has started to take hold in America's schools, according to the fourth Reality Check survey by Public Agenda.
Nearly every state has now set specific academic requirements and mandatory testing to try and improve public schools. Reality Check is designed to track whether these efforts have made a difference by surveying the people who should know: the students, parents and teachers actually in public schools, and the employers and college professors who deal with recent graduates. In previous years, we found strong support overall for high standards, but few who reported significant changes in their own schools.
But our 2001 survey found several statistically significant changes in perception. Fewer teachers report their schools using social promotion, and more parents say their children have to pass standardized tests to advance in school.
Intriguingly, the perception gap between public and private schools seems to be narrowing. Four years ago, just one parent out of five (22 percent) said that local public schools had higher standards than local private schools, but in 2001 this number has jumped to 34 percent. The number giving private schools the edge on standards has dropped from 42 percent to 35 percent. Employers, who have always been among the toughest critics of local schools in previous Reality Check surveys, still voice considerable doubts about students' basic skills. But almost two-thirds of employers (64 percent) say kids don't graduate from local schools unless they have learned what was expected of them, up from 51 percent in 1999.
Although high-stakes standardized tests are often controversial, Reality Check picks up few signs of public backlash. Neither parents, teachers, nor students themselves voice significant dissatisfaction with testing in their own schools. Large majorities of all groups express strong support for their own district's efforts to raise standards and for using standardized tests to enforce standards, although few believe a student's future should rest on one high-stakes test. Most students say the tests they take seem fair, and few say they have to take too many of them. Teachers are the most skeptical of testing, but only one-fifth say they have to focus on test preparation so much that real learning is neglected. Still, 83 percent of teachers do say they worry "teaching to the test" could become the norm, and nearly half fear schools will be overwhelmed with students who fail the test.
This year's Reality Check devotes a battery of questions to the use of computers in schools. Here again, reports from the field suggest that technology, like standards, are slowly but surely recasting the way American students learn. Virtually all students say they've used a computer in school this year, and nearly two-thirds say they used computers for substantive learning. Nearly 8 in 10 teachers say they use computers regularly or sometimes, and of those only one quarter believe the technology is overrated.
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Finding One:
Students, parents and teachers report changes in academic, promotion, and testing policies suggesting that the standards movement has begun to take hold in classrooms nationwide.
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Finding Two:
All groups voice strong support for local efforts to raise standards and for using high stakes standardized tests as part of the effort. However, all groups strongly oppose basing promotion or graduation solely on the results of testing--a policy that teachers say is still quite rare.
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Finding Three:
Students voice very little resentment or anxiety over testing and promotion in their schools, and most say the tests they take seem fair.
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Finding Four:
Parents give their districts good marks on standards, and increasing numbers know more about how their own school rates within the district. But large numbers of parents are still poorly informed about other important criteria.
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Finding Five:
Teachers say standardized tests can motivate kids and diagnose problems, and most say that "real learning" is not suffering in their own classrooms. But large majorities also say districts are putting too much emphasis on tests and that schools themselves are not chiefly to blame when students do poorly.
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Finding Six:
Employers and professors are far more disapproving than parents or teachers of how well young people are prepared for college and work, and very large majorities continue to voice significant dissatisfaction about students' basic skills.
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Finding Seven:
More students report using computers at school on a regular basis, and are using them for serious learning. Most teachers say they get the technological support and equipment they need.
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Reality Check is a joint project of Public Agenda and Education Week, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and the GE Fund. Online presentations are also available for Reality Check 2000, Reality Check '99 and Reality Check '98.
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