Americans grow skeptical as school reform takes toll

The more Americans learn about Washington's new guiding hand in the nation's schools, the less they like it.

More than two-thirds say they don't think that a single test gives a fair picture of whether a school needs improvement, according to a new poll. They also don't believe that students with disabilities should be evaluated by the same standards as other students, the poll found.

Both points are linchpins of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).

In a separate survey, teachers cite compliance with new federal testing requirements as the most serious problem they face - more serious than lack of resources, incompetent administrators, student discipline, and personal safety issues.

These findings - from the Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll and the National Center for Education Information - come at a critical time for NCLB, the signature domestic reform of President Bush's first term.

While the law isn't up for renewal until 2007, it has set off a backlash in many state legislatures. In response, the US Department of Education, which once claimed that no waivers would be allowed under the new law, has eased up on some requirements. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is considering further flexibility.

The Phi Delta Kappa poll, released Tuesday, is considered a bellwether of public attitudes toward schools. Over its 37 years, it has often produced anomalies. For example: While Americans think the nation's public schools are in trouble, they consistently give high marks to their own local schools. A similar rift shows up in the public views of NCLB.

"The most important finding is that the public wants the achievement gap closed, but does not approve of the strategies used in No Child Left Behind," says poll director Lowell Rose.

He adds that the good news for federal officials is that the public broadly supports the objectives of the new law - and that there is still time to fix it.

Some 90 percent of those polled say that it is important to close the achievement gap between black and Hispanic students and their white classmates, and 58 percent agree that that responsibility belongs to the public schools.

But there is broad concern that the performance-based measures in NCLB can't measure how well a school is doing, he adds.

At the heart of the new law is a key assumption: What can be measured can be fixed.

States are required to set standards for reading and mathematics and test whether students are making adequate yearly progress toward meeting them.

If they're not, penalties kick in under the law, including a shift of federal funding from the school to parents. The parents can use the money to buy tutoring or other services for their children or to transfer to a better performing public school.

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