Make teaching more professional

Abstract

Americans want higher professional requirements for teachers and believe teacher pay is too low, but they don’t like tenure, according to the newest PDK/ Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes To­ward the Public Schools. Public school parents trust and have confidence in the nation’s teachers, and they said communicating with their child’s teacher is easy. In a separate opinion piece, PDK CEO Joshua P. Starr said the poll shows that the country uniformly wants highly qualified professionals teaching in our public schools. With this kind of consensus, one would imagine that we, as a nation, would be able to organize around a bold plan to ensure that we have a well-qualified professional in every classroom. But it’s not clear that current state and district polices and practices are improving the teaching profession. How do we design, develop, support -- and hold accountable -- the absolute best teachers. In the past, the PDK/Gallup poll was done exclusively by telephone. This year, we used a multi-mode design that employed a telephone poll of 1,000 adults and an online survey of 3,499 adults. This new survey allowed us to report about specific subgroups of the population, including public school parents, political party memberships, and black, Hispanic, and white respondents.