Turns out Education At The Brink does read polls, just not good ones and just not the laws they’re based on. He responds to the admittedly snarky comments at the bottom of this post by noting the PDK poll about No Child Left Behind. Great point, except that in places, the PDK poll is almost a push poll. It has some interesting data about an education law, just not the one popularly known as NCLB (click here, for a slightly different take). For instance, contrary to popular mythology, NCLB does not require states to base school accountability on a single test.
Leave aside the general problems with public opinion research about issues the public knows little about, several PDK questions are simply poorly constructed. As Ross Wiener of Ed Trust told Ed Week: “[T]his poll employs questions that are clearly designed to produce particular results”.
More texture, but still limitations about what the public knows here.
Brink doesn’t address the issue of whether its payola for all of NLCB’s liberal supporters. It’s not just him, the considerable support on the left is such an inconvenient issue for the law’s critics…
For more PDK public opinion debate, this time about vouchers, click here, here, and here.