(NAPSA)—With Congress debating President George W. Bush’s education reform package, a far-reaching national public opinion poll indicates a majority of Americans are demanding both increased federal funding and greater accountability. The survey, A Measured Response: Americans Speak on Education Reform, was commissioned by Educational Testing Service and conducted by the bi-partisan polling team of Peter Hart and Robert Teeter. The survey, which is available online at www.ets.org, polled 1,500 adults and parents of school-aged children, and included interviews among educators and education policymakers. Perhaps the most comprehensive study done to date of public, parent, educator and policymaker attitudes on education and standards-based reform, the findings show that Americans: * rank education as the most important issue facing our nation. * want to spend real money hiring more teachers, reducing classroom size, paying teachers more, and building new schools or repairing old ones. * want to know what they’re getting for the tax dollars spent through recognized achievement standards, state tests to determine whether those standards are being met and a nationally standardized test to confirm the comparability of those state tests. * support federal funding, but prefer to give state and local government more control over how they spend federal money, and trust state government to set high educational standards. “Tt is clear that when it comes to 4; A recent study found Americans want our schools fixed, not abandoned, and wantto invest in schools, teachers and students— not punish them. education reform, the common element among parents, educators and policymakers is balance,” said Kurt Landgraf, President and CEO of Educational Testing Service (ETS), which commissioned the study. “People look to the federal government to set standards for education and to serve as a resource, but they do not see the federal government micro-managing local schools,” he added. “Americansalso favor the use of testing to measure student learning against educational standards but they do not want a system that relies too heavily on testing at the expense of other broader-based school performance evaluations. The people have spoken and they are challenging their elected leaders to produce a bill that properly balances proposals to increase accountability with increases in funding,” he concluded. The survey is available online at www.ets.org.
