Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Confidence In Public Schools Continues Long, Slow Decline

I started kindergarten in 1970.  Three years later Gallup conducted its first poll on confidence in public schools, and 58% of Americans polled either had either a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the nation's public schools.  It's been downhill from there:
Americans' confidence in public schools is down five percentage points from last year, with 29% expressing "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in them. That establishes a new low in public school confidence from the 33% measured in Gallup's 2007 and 2008 Confidence in Institutions polls. The high was 58% the first time Gallup included public schools, in 1973.
Trend: Confidence in the Public Schools 
Just tossing this out there--when did teachers unions start amassing power?

Some good news to report, though: the military as an institution remains at the top of the list, where it has been almost continuously since 1989, at 75% "great deal/quite a lot" of confidence.

3 comments:

mmazenko said...

A bit of a disconnect here - because Gallup also reports that 75% of Americans are "very satisfied" with their own kids' schools, and 85% of Americans are "very satisfied" with their own education.

Thus, people have a misrepresented opinion of "public education." They think their kids school is great but all others are failing. This is no different than the 10% approval rating of Congress, while 92% of incumbents are re-elected. People generally approve of their reps while claiming it's the other ones - or the other party - that is bad.

Anonymous said...

Confidence in congress has followed the same basic trend:

About 42-43% in 1974 and about 12% today.

Confidence is lower in church or organized religion ... 66% to 48%.

I don't think this is unionization of school teachers.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/108142/confidence-congress-lowest-ever-any-us-institution.aspx

-Mark Roulo

Darren said...

It certainly didn't help, and isn't helping today.