Associated Press June 28, 2008

HEADLINE: Poll finds US schools doing 'fair to poor' job

By Nancy Zuckerbrod and Trevor Tompson,

WASHINGTON - Half of Americans say US schools are doing only a fair to poor job preparing teenagers for college and the work force. Even more feel that way about the skills youths need to survive as adults, an Associated Press poll released yesterday finds.

"A lot of kids, when they get out school, are kind of lost," said Jamie Norton, a firefighter in Gridley, Calif. "When you get out of high school, what are you educated to do?"

The views of the general population echo concerns voiced by business and college leaders, who say they have to spend a lot of time and money on remedial education for people who completed high school but don't have the skills to succeed at work or in college.

Education ranks behind the economy and gas prices as a top issue for Americans, the survey said. However, nearly all those polled said the quality of a country's education system has a big impact on a country's overall economic prosperity.

Education was generally viewed to be as important as healthcare and slightly ahead of the Iraq war. Among minority parents, education is just as important an issue as the economy.

Minorities and whites rate schools differently. Fifty-nine percent of whites rate their local school as good or excellent, compared with 42 percent of minorities.

Minority parents are more likely to think their children are getting a better education than they received as children. Overall, the majority of those surveyed said the quality of US schools has declined over the past 20 years.

Three-fourths of those surveyed believe that schools place too much emphasis on the wrong subjects. Asked what subjects should be given more time in school, more than a third said math. English was a distant second, at 21 percent. A tiny fraction picked art, music, and science.

Parents may want more math in school because they feel unprepared to help at home, said Janine Remillard, who teaches math-related courses at the University of Pennsylvania's education school.

"Math is the subject that parents are often intimidated by," she said. "We've allowed a lot of kids to just say, 'I'm not good at math' . . . and those kids become parents." Most think the United States is just keeping up or falling behind the rest of the world in education. On recent international tests, US students have posted flat scores and landed in the middle to bottom of the pack when compared with other nations' children.

Americans have mixed views about standardized tests, which have grown in importance. The 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law judges schools based on math and reading tests taken by their students. Schools face increasingly tough consequences for scores that miss the mark.