Public Agenda: Reality Check 2001

By Public Agenda and Education Week

For the past four years, Public Agenda has asked public school students, parents, and teachers, along with employers and college professors, to assess their own communities' progress in raising the bar for public schools. Although 49 states have set academic standards in at least some subjects, and all test how well their students are learning, earlier Reality Check surveys suggested that many of these reforms had yet to reach the nation's classrooms.

This year's polling paints a different picture. Students, parents, and teachers all report a set of incremental changes in their experiences and expectations, suggesting that the "standards movement" has begun to take hold. And although the increase in the use of high-stakes standardized tests that has accompanied the movement has been controversial, Reality Check picks up few signs of a public backlash.

Neither parents nor teachers, nor even students themselves, voice significant dissatisfaction or alarm about expectations or policies in their own schools. Large majorities of all groups express strong support for their own districts' efforts to raise standards and for using standardized tests as an important—though not the...