McREL News Room

Study suggests current reforms may fail to address people’s biggest concerns about schools

July 21, 2003

Aurora, Colo. — A new research brief released today from Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) suggests that while people continue to support standards-based school reforms, such efforts may fail to address their biggest concerns about public schools.

Although public opinion polls have shown that parents and the public are generally supportive of current standards-based education reform efforts, such polls only provide part of the picture of what people think because they rarely let people finish their sentences or express why they believe what they do.

To gain a deeper understanding of where the public stands on standards-based education, McREL, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization located in Aurora, Colo., conducted focus group research with students, public and private school parents, non-parent taxpayers, business owners and policymakers in Kansas City, Mo., for the Kettering Foundation, a nonprofit foundation focused on studying and improving democracy.

“Amid the largely technical discussion among educators and policymakers about standards, high-stakes testing and accountability, we rarely hear the voice of the public,” noted Dr. J. Timothy Waters, President and Chief Executive Officer of McREL. “McREL and the Kettering Foundation both felt it was important to listen to what the public has to say about its schools and current efforts underway to improve them.”

Here are some of the common themes that surfaced during these sessions:

• Tests are necessary, but accountability should be based on more than just test scores.
• Accountability should make schools more responsive to parents and communities, not outside officials.
• Parents and students are a crucial, yet often marginalized part of accountability systems.
• People’s key concerns about schools are mostly social issues not addressed by standards, tests, or accountability.
• Parents would like to be more involved in their schools, but often feel shut out of them.

After conducting these focus groups and hearing people’s responses, McREL researchers concluded that while people do appear to support using standards, testing and accountability to improve schools, they appear to have a host of other concerns that standards-based reforms do not address.

In short, it seems that when it comes to education reform, parents and the public may be far more focused on improving social and personal aspects of schools — “soft” results that cannot be easily quantified. Educators and policymakers, on the other hand, appear to be mainly focused on improving the technical aspects of schooling, namely test scores and other quantifiable results.

“We believe educators and policymakers should take note of the possibility that the public may have a very different idea in mind about what needs to happen in their schools,” said Dr. Waters. “If school leaders fail to understand the public’s deeper concerns about education, it’s possible that even if public schools succeed in boosting test scores and avoiding sanctions, they may still fail to increase public satisfaction with them.”

For more information about McREL, visit www.mcrel.org. To learn more about the Kettering Foundation, visit www.kettering.org.

McREL is a nationally recognized, private, nonprofit organization located in Aurora, Colo., dedicated to improving education for all students through applied research, product development and service. Its staff of highly respected educators and researchers focuses on providing educators and policymakers with the highest quality, field-tested, research-based products and services available in PreK–16 education.