Schools need reform — but not my school

In a nationwide survey of 833 adults and 854 parents of school-aged children funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and released last week, The Associated Press found Americans are largely unhappy with their government schools.

Fully half of those polled report America's public schools are doing only a poor to fair job preparing kids for college and the work force.

And when asked about how well the schools provide those new graduates with the skills needed to survive as adults, even fewer respondents gave the schools a passing grade.

The majority of those surveyed said the quality of U.S. schools has declined over the past 20 years, despite vast increases in staffing and funding. Three-fourths of those surveyed believe the public schools place too much emphasis on the wrong subjects. Asked what subjects should be given more time in school, more than one-third said math.

Most think the United States is just keeping up or falling behind the rest of the world in education. That matches the results of objective comparisons: On recent international tests, U.S. students have posted flat scores and landed in the middle to the bottom of the pack when compared with the children of other nations.

The findings echo concerns of business and college leaders who complain of having to spend time and money on remedial education for people who completed high school but don't have the skills necessary to succeed at work or in higher education.

But break down those numbers a little further, and a trend likely to frustrate would-be reformers emerges -- a trend directly paralleling the conundrum faced by those who seek to reform Congress by ousting longtime incumbents.

A vast majority of Americans believe Congress is corrupt, wasteful and/or ineffective -- overall approval ratings frequently dip below the 30th or even the 20th percentile. Yet when asked about their own, local congressmen, a majority of these same voters quite regularly turn around and say, "Oh, not my congressman. He really cares; he brings home lots of great federal programs and funding right here to the district."

And so it goes with the schools. Voters may be unhappy with the system's overall output, but a whopping 59 percent of whites -- and even 42 percent of minority adults -- rate their own, local school as good or excellent, the AP survey found.

It's statistically impossible for most schools to be bad but for every "local school" to be good to excellent. It's a finding similar to humorist Garrison Keillor's tongue-in-cheek claim that in his hometown of Lake Wobegon, "All the kids are above average."

But the survey deals with public perceptions, not statistical standings.

Why is this important? When parents believe their own children's school is sub-par, they're more likely to embrace reforms, from charter schools to school choice to vouchers that can promote more freedom and competition in the education process.

So long as parents and voters acknowledge problems, but insist those problems are "out there somewhere; not at my kid's school," reform proposals are likely to stay bottled up in the desks of lawmakers whose primary fealty is to the teacher unions.