Poll Finds Drop in Public’s Regard for Schools

Americans express less confidence in the nation’s public schools and less support for the renewal of the No Child Left Behind Act than they did a year ago, according to the results of an opinion poll released today.

The poll, a project of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, shows that 26 percent of respondents give public schools a grade of D or F, compared with just 20 percent who give the schools an A or a B. When a similar poll by the same research group asked the same question last year, 27 percent gave the nation’s schools an A or a B.

Those results should be heeded by the presumptive Democratic and Republican nominees for president, argue the authors of an article analyizing the findings that is slated to run in the fall issue of Education Next , a journal of research and opinion published by the Hoover...