Teachers versus the Public (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | knygos.lt

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Public schools rely on local communities for voter and tax support. But are communities and educators in agreement about what really matters for America's current generation of students? In "Teachers versus the Public," a cast of well-established education experts reveals what the public and teachers really think about school reform.

In partnership with the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the journal Education Next, the authors engineered a project to gather public opinion over the course of seven years. They analyzed the results of sample responses about contemporary school politics to discover just why the teacher-public divide is so apparent and so potentially deleterious to education advancement.

Paul Peterson, Michael Henderson, and Martin West consider the rise of teachers unions and associations; further, they juxtapose union messages with teacher survey responses to verify if unions faithfully represent their members. They also carefully stratify the public respondents to evaluate if divisions exist not only between teachers and the public, but also between grouped respondents.

Do parents' opinions differ from other members of the public? How do socioeconomic status and other social and political factors affect the public's position on local school support, charter schools, and accountability? And on the other side, just how widespread is teacher opposition to rigorous evaluations, teacher pension reform, merit pay, school vouchers, and other items on the reform agenda?

"Teachers versus the Public" draws on a rich data set and shows that the teacher-public divide is not confined to issues presented in a national context. Even when the question is framed in terms of the respondent's own school district or community, a palpable teacher-public divide remains. These findings present a frightening picture of a fractious school reform landscape. Ultimately, the lack of consensus and surging opposition to change leads us to question if the public can truly rely on teacher power to promote common goals.