Poll on education finds Texans’ worried about school funding, standardized test pressure
In a new statewide poll assessing Texans’ views on public education, respondents pointed to pressure to do well on state standardized tests and insufficient school funding as some of their top concerns.
Of the roughly 1,160 Texas adults surveyed, 60% said they are not confident state standardized tests effectively measure student learning and 59% believe their community public schools have too little money.
Released Thursday and conducted in Spanish and English, the poll was commissioned by the Raise Your Hand Texas Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to improve public education. It’s the organization’s first such survey, and it hopes it can be an asset to track trends over time.
“We’re excited to learn from these results to be able to say, ‘What do Texans think? What do parents think about these particular issues?” Jennifer Jendrzey, Raise Your Hand Texas’ vice president of strategy and evaluation, told reporters Wednesday.
School finance was one of lawmakers’ top priorities this past legislative session, and they passed sweeping legislation that allocated about $6.5 billion more toward public education and $5.1 billion to cut school district taxes.
Raise Your Hand Texas’ poll found that 64% of Texans surveyed felt that the state, in particular, is providing too little in school funding. When it comes to funding public education, a majority has historically come from local taxpayers — 64% in 2018, according to a January 2019 report from the Comptroller’s Office.
Meanwhile, 62% of Texans say they’d support raising taxes to try to improve the public schools in their community. But when broken down among partisan lines, conservatives were the most skeptical that schools would improve if funding was increased, with 48% of conservatives supporting raising taxes versus 81% of liberals and 66% of moderates, according to the poll’s results.
Last year was also the first time that Texas public schools received letter grades individually from the state — accountability ratings based largely on STAAR test results taken during the 2018-2019 school year.
However, only about half, or 51%, or public school parents surveyed said they’re aware of the state’s A-F grades for their local public schools, and that number dropped even lower to 39% among all adults. But of those that are aware of the accountability ratings, 9 in 10 found them helpful.
“It’s a relatively new measure and a pretty large, aggregated measure. And so it will be interesting to see how that is perceived as time goes on,” Shari Albright, the president of the Raise Your Hand Texas Foundation, told reporters Wednesday.
According to the poll, 93% of Texans surveyed see pressure to have students do well on standardized tests as a challenge facing teachers today.
For years STAAR tests have faced pushback from advocates and parents, some who have joined a growing movement of opposing standardized tests and having their kids sit out the mandated assessments. Critics of the STAAR tests have argued they are too difficult and hold too much weight. The tests can play a role in whether a student is promoted or whether a school is taken over by the state.
A state-mandated study released in December found that a sample of statewide STAAR tests mostly align with state standards, but experts found it difficult to assess if individual questions meet reading grade levels.
Thursday’s poll was also modeled after the national Phi Delta Kappa, or PDK, poll on the “Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public School” in an effort to compare Texans’ attitudes to adults’ nationally.
For example, Raise Your Hand Texas’ poll found that 77% of Texans express trust and confidence in their teachers — higher than the 61% of Americans asked the same question.
Langer Research Associates, the firm used by PDK in its national poll, conducted the research for Raise Your Hand Texas’ inaugural poll, and Gary Langer, the firm’s president, said they “oversampled” Texas public school parents in particular to have greater confidence in those results.
Overall, the more closely connected Texans feel to a school in their community, the higher they rate it.
The poll also assessed Texans’ views on school diversity, additional school programs like mental health services, measures of school quality, and more.
This story was originally published February 20, 2020 at 5:30 AM with the headline "Poll on education finds Texans’ worried about school funding, standardized test pressure."
