Education is On Folks’ Minds

According to a recent PEW Research Center poll, education is very much on people’s minds as they consider the upcoming U.S. elections.  In McCain’s Negatives Mostly Political, Obama’s More Personal, The PEW Research Center for the People and the Press, reports that 78% of registered voters feel that education is “very important” to their vote.  Also receiving the same percentage are health care and jobs.  The only issue receiving a higher percentage was the economy, with 88%.  Important to fewer voters are energy, social security, Iraq, deficit, taxes, terrorism, environment, moral values immigration trade policy abortion and gay marriage.

Lou Dobbs must be appalled.

7 thoughts on “Education is On Folks’ Minds”

  1. I just hope that those 78% of voters support policies based on sound educational research and whose primary goal is to improve student learning.

    If those 78% support more “accountability” in education, I’m not as excited about this stat. It is good to see that it seems to be a priority in people’s minds. Perhaps the economic concerns have people realizing how important it is to have a good education under their belt in order to best ride out a recession/depression.

    1. This is what worrisome about all of this. People don’t really know what to do about it, and I would put the candidates in that category as well. Part of the effort is to get the candidates talking about the issue, but they probably won’t, because it’s too complex.

      On a lighter note, the SETDA (State Education Technology Directors Association) are preparing a set of documents designed to be promoted to who ever gets elected. They’re plan is to be ready, set, and on the go when the time comes.

  2. Well, it could be argued that good education will help with what is lower on the list. However, do most people know what needs to be done and can those big changes happen?

  3. If education is really on people’s minds they need to be paying attention to what NCLB is actually doing to schools. I had a conversation with someone in our district this week who told me that so much benchmark testing is happening that he had figured out that there were only 7 to 9 instructional days per month. Do parents understand what this means? This un-funded mandate needs to be looked at much more carefully.

  4. It’s a good thing voters are thinking about education. A good number of those voters are teachers who are working hard and looking forward to 2014 when all children will be reading on grade level! Dream on!
    Yes, there is a lot of assessment happening, and the Response to Intervention movement is moving in as well. Teachers in NCLB schools are probably better trained than ever to begin to work with our struggling readers. Unfortunately, inspite of all of this, the data is not showing much improvement in comprehension scores among 3rd graders.
    I don’t know what the answers are, but I think it lies somewhere between continued professional development, and increased parental engagement. I hope that those who rank education as 2nd in importance after the economy will support some common sense solutions around those ideas.

  5. These kinds of survey data concern me. What about education are these voters thinking when they say education is on their minds? Funding? School quality? Parental development? Teacher pipeline? Age-appropriate language programs? Full-day Kindergarten?

    Education has too many facets and is too open to interpretation for such a survey to be much more than anecdotal, don’t you think?

    Stephen Dill

  6. I agree that education is an important part of the future of this country. However I think we need to look deeper into the teaching practices that are used with the young students of today. Spending more time on memory techniques and comprehension, prior to jumping into the “core” subjects would greatly improve what each student gets out of their educational experience.

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