Los Angeles. -- Listening to parents: Now there's an educational innovation. A public-opinion research firm named Public Agenda recently released the results of a national study based on just that idea. Titled "First Things First: What Americans Expect from the Public Schools," it reveals that what parents want and what professional experts seem determined to give them are vastly different.
Three things top the parents' list of concerns: Order, safety and "the basics." "Americans are concerned that too many public schools are so disorderly and undisciplined that learning cannot take place," is how the report sums it up.
Disorder is bad enough, but many schools are downright dangerous. Nearly three-quarters of the survey participants said drugs and violence are serious problems in their local schools.
And rounding out the top three issues for parents is a belief that schools aren't doing enough to teach their children essential skills -- the ability to read and write English and to do simple arithmetic, and to be conversant with science, history and geography.
"Education is becoming more about social issues as opposed to reading, writing and arithmetic," said a father from Des Moines. "Some of it's fine, but I think schools need to stay with the basics. . . . You can't get by in the business world on social issues if you can't add and subtract."
Public Agenda, based in New York, was started in 1975 by Cyrus Vance (later secretary of state in the Carter administration) and pollster Daniel Yankelovich. Its aim is to provide research on how average citizens think about public-policy issues.
This education survey, carried out in August, was based on telephone interviews with nearly 1,200 people, and included sub-samples of three groups of parents -- traditional Christians, African-Americans and non-Latino whites -- whose children are in public schools.
There are some differences among the subgroups, as you would expect. On the question about drugs and violence, for instance, 80 percent of African-American parents
said it was a serious or very serious problem in their own community's schools, compared with 58 percent of the white sample. Plausibly, that reflects at least in part real differences in the schools their children attend.
But African-American parents also felt more strongly than whites (70 percent to 49 percent) that "Academic standards are too low and kids are not expected to learn enough." To the extent that represents reality in the schools, they are short-changing African-American children, and the officials who are in charge of the schools shouldn't delude themselves that parents are supportive.
The similarities, however, are more striking than the differences. Huge majorities of all groups agree on the importance of teaching honesty and truthfulness, respect for others regardless their racial or ethnic background, and how to solve problems without violence.
Granted, those would be hard things to be against, and it's not so clear how to succeed in teaching them, but schools should be encour
aged that they have support from their communities if they try.
On some important issues, though, parents are much more in agreement with each other than they seem to be with the prevailing philosophy in the schools. Large majorities say children should not be allowed to graduate from high school unless they clearly demonstrate they can write and speak English well, that students caught with drugs or weapons should be permanently removed from school grounds and that persistent troublemakers should be taken out of class so that teachers can concentrate on the kids who want to learn.
But fewer than half agree with a currently hallowed educational principle, that fast learners and slow learners should be mixed in the same classes.
Even after hearing the arguments about the supposed benefits of heterogeneous grouping (as educators like to call it), the people in Public Agenda's focus groups remained skeptical. One reason seems to be that a majority feel "average learners get
less attention than either fast learners or slow learners . . . because the teacher is distracted trying to deal with the youngsters at the extremes."
Experts like to suggest that parental opposition to mixed instruction is a disguised form of racial prejudice, but that's belied by the finding that African-American parents were as strongly opposed as white parents.
"People often cited differences in the needs of their own children as arguments in favor of grouping students by skill level and tailoring teaching to their level of advancement," the report says.
"In short, heterogeneous grouping makes no intuitive sense to people and seems to fly in the face of their real-world experience."
The purpose of this report, says Public Agenda Executive Director Deborah Wadsworth in her concluding remarks, "is to ask leaders to stop, to listen, and to give the public's point of view the same attention and respect, the same consideration, they naturally give to the 'experts.' "
What a radical idea!
Linda Seebach is a columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News.