Groundhog Day: A comment on “Americans like their schools just fine - but not yours.”
The headline of this article should have been “Severe media bias on education persists.”
As is the case every year, the Gallup poll found that people rate their local schools much more positively than they do schools in the US in general.The differences, as usual, were striking: Seventy-six percent of parents said they would give the public schools their oldest child attended a grade or A or B, but only 25% would give public schools in the nation an A or B.
Lorraine McDonnell, a professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has an explanation: Parents have direct information about the school their children attend, but their opinion of American education comes from the media. The image of public schools, she notes, “is somewhat vague and increasingly negative though media images."In reality, American schools are doing quite well: When researchers control for the effects of poverty, American students' international test scores rank near the top of the world. This is strong evidence of media bias. When parents rate the nation’s schools and their children’s school the same, we will know this bias is gone.
Stephen Krashen
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/08/23/490380129/americans-like-their-schools-just-fine-but-not-yours
This comment posted on nprEd Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/nprEd/402441646563033
The headline of this article should have been “Severe media bias on education persists.”
As is the case every year, the Gallup poll found that people rate their local schools much more positively than they do schools in the US in general.The differences, as usual, were striking: Seventy-six percent of parents said they would give the public schools their oldest child attended a grade or A or B, but only 25% would give public schools in the nation an A or B.
Lorraine McDonnell, a professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has an explanation: Parents have direct information about the school their children attend, but their opinion of American education comes from the media. The image of public schools, she notes, “is somewhat vague and increasingly negative though media images."In reality, American schools are doing quite well: When researchers control for the effects of poverty, American students' international test scores rank near the top of the world. This is strong evidence of media bias. When parents rate the nation’s schools and their children’s school the same, we will know this bias is gone.
Stephen Krashen
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/08/23/490380129/americans-like-their-schools-just-fine-but-not-yours
This comment posted on nprEd Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/nprEd/402441646563033
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