Scottish Parliament Discussion on the upcoming independence referendum. Delta kappa a Phi International and gallup poll, most standards oppose but are in favor of standardized testing like the s. A. T. And a. C. T. They discuss possible solutions for Public Education equity and reform. This is one hour and 25 minutes. How is it going . All right. Ok. First of all, on behalf of gallup, welcome to our beautiful, great hall. I am these active director of gallup education and i am delighted to kick off the results from the 46th annual p. D. K. Gallup poll. In 1969, many years before i was born. You have a deeper appreciation for how many years we have been looking at Public Perceptions of schools. Obviously, a special opportunity every year. It is interesting. In addition to this special half century of research we have done in collaboration. , arguably, in the last year, has conducted more orource more Research Education than any organization we cant think of. If i were to summarize some of the most important things we learned last year, which i will do in a few short minutes, it is safe to say that what we are seeing is that something is very wrong. But we have to be careful about what we mean when we Say Something is very wrong. Because there is a lot of stuff that is still going pretty darn well. I wonder if we have not, as a country, started to become incredibly negative about school, teachers, education. This is not just an american phenomenon. The whole world is worried about what is happening with Education Systems from kindergarten through career. But what is interesting is one of the things we have always is thaton this poll even though americans, when you ask them about Public Schools nationally, are pretty negative about that, when you ask parents who have kids in school about how they think their kids sch ool is doing, they are blowing ratings. It is fascinating to think about the disparity. If you say, how do you think we are doing nationally . Not so good. What about your kidss school . Americans are feeling good about that and they have been for a long time. It is similar to asking americans about congress. Ratings are as low as they have been in the history of asking them that question greed but if you ask them about their congressman or congresswoman, they love them. Another bizarre thing. Any of us who live in washington, you feel this every day. Great americans go to work in washington for our government every morning to read a we are in the middle of gridlock every morning. Yet we are in the middle of gridlock. I was just in the second poorest city in america and the san director of Public Schools got up and gave an address. If anyone would be low on hope, it would be this place. It is just the opposite. I have never seen more hopeful people in any School District that i have been in. He had an interesting thing that he said to his staff. He said, and this is my point about being careful about what is going wrong and what we think is going wrong, he said, it is not the people that are the problem. It is the people that they wake up to it is the system that they wake up to every morning. Let me to you about our poll. We learned that, for every year they stay in school, they are less engaged in school. School, engagement is at 76 . 61 in middle school and 44 in high school. The longer they are in school, the less engaged they become. Yet we found a needle in a haystack about student engagement. If a student agrees that their school is focused on building the strength of each student and if they have at least one teacher who makes them excited about the future, they are 30 times as likely to be engaged in school. It is just unbelievable to think about how powerful that energy from a single teacher, in terms of its impact on a student, can have. Desktop we learned about teachers in the teaching profession is interesting. We can break it down by profession. Teachers have the secondhighest wellbeing of any profession in the united states. Physician. To that is amazing. If we are thinking about the secret to a good life, teaching is one of the best professions you can go into. Here is where they get bad marks. A are not doing so well on their Work Environment and their own workplace engagement. Teachers, despite having the wellbeing, they are dead last of all professions in saying they feel their countns at work out and dead last in feeling their supervisors create an open environment. Teachers are dead last in that measure. Broken linke is a between our Education System and the economy. This is from three separate studies we did. Provosts of colleges and universities whether they think they are doing a good job. Guess what percent are confident . 96 . We asked americans, do you think College Graduates are wellprepared for success in the workplace . A little different report card. 14 strongly agree. Evelthen we asked cl executives of employers and only 11 agree that College Graduates have the skills necessary to do the jobs. We know there is a ton of Entrepreneurial Energy in our schools. Than 5 of kids are interning in an actual Work Environment right now. How do we give them opportunities and let the appetite and desire come to fruition . You might have missed a story this year, they came out and looked at their hiring data and found no correlation with the grades and test scores of candidates and the success of at their job at google. How many of you missed that story . One of the most important stories of the year and most of us in education glossed over it. Google is one of the worlds most modern employers. As goes google, so goes the rest of the world. Only 5 of superintendents strongly agree that grades and test scores are a great predictor of success in college. It seems that superintendents justbelieved what google learned because we surveyed superintendents this year. You will see some data about how americans feel about the value of testing. Let me leave you with this final point. We just did the largest study that has been done, a representative study of College Graduates. 30,000 College Graduates in the u. S. We found three special elements about their College Experience that sorted their longterm success at work and in their lives. These three simple things. Hadou strongly agreed you at least one professor who made you excited about learning, you strongly agreed that the professors at your, modern at you alma mater cared about as a person and you had a mentor that encouraged your goals and dreams, if you say strongly agree to those three questions, it doubled your odds of being engaged in work and thriving in your overall wellbeing. Think about how profound that impact is. We saw no difference of these impacts by type of institution, whether you graduate from a public, write it, selective institution. No difference by type of institution. ,ut if you had that experience it was astronomically different in terms of your trajectory for success. Here is the killer. Only 13 of College Graduates in the u. S. Hit that mark. Are you kidding me . His is not dropouts these are not high school graduates. These are College Graduates. On the one simple measure of having felt that they had a mentor, only 22 hit that alone. Eight out of 10 College Graduates do not feel that they had a mentoring relationship in college. We have got to be doing better. People that are what is wrong right now. It may be the systems that we created around them. We can all agree that we have done a marvelous job creating improved accountability systems in the last 20 years. I worry that we have failed miserably creating engagement systems within them. With that, i would like to invite our great colleague to come up and present results from the 46th annual p. D. K. Gallup poll. Thank you all for being here. [applause] good morning, everyone, and welcome to our program this morning. We got a great turnout. We are glad that you could join us. I want to extend greetings from appa board of k directors. We are a Global Association of educators that includes principles, superintendents, Higher Education faculty. We are helping to grow and connect leaders in education. To talk about our board of governors. It funds the poll every year. As branded mentioned, for 46 consecutive years, p. D. K. Has enjoyed our association with gallup. I wish i could say what brandon said, that i was not alive at that time. [laughter] poll workingd the in Close Association with p. D. K. Then he turned it over to his son and his son directed the poll for 25 years. Into its poll recognition that we see today. These are two great icons in Public Opinion polling and it has created a great opportunity to investigate and understand what americans believe about their Public Schools. Because the poll is conducted annually for 46 years and there are very few poles that can say many of the revisit questions year after year and that allows us to be in a unique position to provide trend data, looking to see how americans opinions change over time. We are dedicated to transparency. We list every question that we asked verbatim in the poll. We invite readers and others to take a look at the questions. We make interpretations and invite others to make interpretations based on the way the question was asked. We were guided in the development of the questions this year by a 15member Advisory Council that met in february. These were education leaders representing a broad spectrum. Teachers, principals, superintendents, policymakers, college faculty. The list of the Advisory Council is in the report in front of you. Allow me to take a few minutes to share some highlevel findings from this years results. The charts i am going to show you are at our website. The website is pdkpolls. Org. Theou go to the website, interesting thing that we tried to do this year, we actually break out the responses for national totals and then responses by political affiliation, republican, democrat, or independent. Finally, the responses for Public School parents. So lets begin. Our common core standards. Last year, only 38 of americans had ever heard of the commons core stage standards. A major change this year. Over 80 indicate that they have heard of the standards. Either know a great deal or a fair amount. We then asked those americans who said they had heard of the standard so this is the 80 that said they had heard of the standards. We asked them the straightforward question, do you favor or oppose having teachers use the common core state standards to guide what they teach . The common core standards, while 60 were opposed. That is the light blue bar that you see. We see that there are significant differences for republican and democratic responses. Democratic responses eating in yellow and republicans in orange. Favoredasked those who , why . Andards why did they favor the standards . The number one reason is they thought students would be helped to learn more that they needed to know. We asked those who opposed the standard why they opposed them and the number one response they told us was that they were worried that it would limit the flexibility of teachers to have to teach what they think is best. So lets turn to testing. We know from last year and that only 22 of americans believe that the increase in student testing has helped performance of schools in their community. While the other three quarters said it made no difference. But do americans love all standardized tests together . What about other assessments like College Entrance exams and advanced placement tests . Here we see relatively strong support for these kinds of standardized tests. That is what you see in the dark orange and light orange. So we see, for the sat or a ct a. C. T. , advanced placement for the third step, and finally, tests used to determine whether a student can be awarded a high school diploma. Stump students some students believe that they help them no more. Other teachers believe that standardized tests do not help what do you think . That was a new question we asked this year. There was a different response. Americans have a divided opinion. 45 believes it helps teachers. 54 believe that it does not. The orange bars, those are the responses of Public School parents. That is a very different response that they gave us. A much more negative view of standardized testing and how it helps teachers know more about their students. This opens the door for us to take a look at further research for next year. We will find out why parents had a different opinion about this. 46 years, the very first , what doon the poll is you think is the biggest problem that the Public Schools in your Community Must deal with . It is the first question on the poll. It is openended. We do not provide any props prompts. We do not want any of the other questions to impact the response to this. Time, student discipline, gangs, fighting, drugs, that was the number one concern americans had. Approximately 2004, that began to change. Now we see that one third of americans indicate that lack of Financial Support is the number one problem facing the schools in their community. Student discipline still registers, but that has been added this year and these are new concerns about standards with the information about the andorde the common core getting and keeping good teachers. Thesen mentioned questions and i will share this years results. Early on, dr. Gallup included these questions. We asked americans to grade this cools. It is a threepart question that we asked. The first question is to grade the schools in your local community. Approximately 50 gave the schools in their community either an a or a b. This is a consistent finding that we have found over the last couple of years. It has stayed about the same, these scores. This is the second part of the question. We asked americans to grade the nations schools. Brandon talked about this. You can see the responses are very different. That, inggest to you fact, there are no nations schools. Communities. Re in the depictionlly of the schools in the media. What is interesting here is that the results have again stayed fairly consistent for several years. Finally, and brandon mentioned this also, this is the third part of the question. We asked parents to grade the schools that their oldest child attends. Of the three, these are the highest grades. And haver around 70 gone as high as 77 as and bs. Lowerear, it is slightly p we have seen a decline in recent years, but this score tends to go up a little bit more than the two scores. So local control of education in the u. S. Remains an emotional issue. We have questions in our archive that address it read this year that address it. This year, we asked a new question. Who should have the greatest influence in deciding what is taught in Public Schools . We asked this question in 2003. At that time, 61 of americans felt it was the local school board that should decide what is taught locally. We then brought the question back in 2007 and we saw a very different response. Rum 61 , it went down to 49 of americans who thought the local school board. Both federal and State Government had higher scores in 2007. We wanted to bring the question back now thomas seven years later, to see if that trend has changed. As you can see, it has. Now it is moving in the other direction where americans are looking they believe that the local school board should have more say in what is being taught locally. Completes the highlevel findings that we have. What i would like to do now is ,o bring our panelists forward if you would, and join us up front. Let me introduce them as they come up. Katie is president of the education trust. Tom is executive director of the National School board association. Dallas i forgot to tell you, there are no assigned seats. Is superintendent of the Baltimore CountySchool District. Programhe senior officer at the bill and Melinda Gates foundation. Have more extensive biographies included in your materials if you want to know more about our four. We are going to open it up to audience questions in just a minute. Question here. So my question to any and all, given what we have learned in the poll and from other information you have, how do you see the implementation of the common core standards proceeding . Who wants to go first . I will jump in. First of all, i want to thank kappa for phi delta conducting this poll. Tois important to for us know what people think about Public Schools. My sense from reading the poll was that there is a growing public concern about the standards because there is the perception that they are driven by the federal government. And we saw much evidence of a lack of confidence in the federal role of education. We will talk about that, i am sure. What is interesting is when you talk to parents and Community Business leaders, they would support what the common core and other academic standards are trying to achieve. I think the reality has been overtaken by the perception and we know that a lot of information is coming from sources other than Public Schools. Part of it is we have a job to do to explain what the standards are and what we are trying to do in terms of education in this country. Question my experience, and i spent a fair amount of time with teachers, is general, feel in good about the quality of the common core standards. Most polls suggest that is loud. That that suggest continues to be the case. I think all of us knew that continuing support from teachers would be a function of two things. One is how much support they got in implementing very different Teaching Strategies necessary for these standards. Second is how fair the timelines around implementation felt. I think we have gotten, into many parts of the country, both of those things wrong. Not enough support and timelines that feel unfair. Both of those things need real attention if the implementation effort is to get the support needed from teachers. Lets check and see. I get all the volume and you get none. [laughter] i think wehe things all realize is that whyementation is the issue, teachers do not feel they are as prepared to teach at a higher that are required if you are going to teach to these standards. , as a country, throw a name to anything, people throw darts. You have people looking to appeal the common core standards in maryland. It is all the same. We have had standards for years. We have earned what standards are doing is just setting the bar for what we want students to know and be able to do. The question around the flexibility in terms of how you teach those, that is where leadership has to come in to make sure that teachers and principals feel supported. But i think what has happened in terms of teachers perception is that it has gone to the evaluation side of this. As the country is of limited three reforms at the same time, new standards, new assessments, and you evaluations that are tied to student achievement. We do not have the assessments yet. Folks want to read it fairly. That is what they deserve. When folks think about common core, as a teacher, many times they think about the evaluation piece of it. What we have to do as leaders is make sure the supports are in place, to let teachers know were in this together. But there will be some growing pains. That is what we we need where we need state officials to help us get it right. The poll lets us know as a country where we are. We are very polarized as a country. I think folks perception in terms of the federal role in many issues has declined