School 'Experts' Found Out of Sync With Public

By Mark Walsh

Education-reform ideas favored by government and business leaders are badly out of sync with the general public's top concerns--safe and orderly schools and a return to the basics, a survey by the Public Agenda Foundation suggests.

A majority of respondents in the survey released last week by the New York City-based research organization support calls for higher standards in the nation's public schools.

But many reject the methods proposed to reach them, such as new forms of assessment, cooperative learning, and relying on calculators in mathematics. Those methods were often characterized as untried teaching fads that replace "time-honored...