Gallup polled American's on their feeling about the "No Child Left Behind" act introduced by the Bush Administation in 2001. From what I understand, a very basic explanation of the NCLB is that every federally funded school (K-12) have to administer standardized tests and schools that repeatedly do poorly or do worse than before get some sort of reprimandation by the state or federal government. Surprisingly, this act is viewed rather poorly by the public which comes as a bit of a surprise to me. It is surprising to me because I can't see how an act that measures schools' performance on an annual basis can be anything but good. Is it because of the social lashing the school's reputation receives whence done poorly with their education efforts? And it was also surprising that here was virtually no difference in opinion about NCLB between adults with students in a K-12 setting, and one's without. Not only do American's generally think NCLB is not beneficial, almost 1/3 of them thin it has made education worse! Someone please explain to me how this can be. The public's general perception of them hating Bush? Who knows? In my opinion, I think school's should be called out more for student's performing poorly.
Source: No Child Left Behind Act Rated More Negatively Than Positively
Good questions, Blake. You might think about using some of the data from the poll itself to start "testing" possible answers -- for example, Democrats and Republicans show very similar levels of (dis)approval (something you rarely see in polls on policy issues), which suggests that it's probably not just a matter of people hating on Bush. Maybe also see what other polls on NCLB, especially from earlier years, have shown. Could be it's gotten less popular over time, which might suggest that people have problems with the way the act's been implemented rather than the broader idea of holding schools accountable. (Maybe something to think about for your research paper?)
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