Teaching values: what does the public really want?

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), July, 1995 by Jean Johnson, John Immerwahr

Despite the controversies over sex education and multiculturalism, parents are more concerned about safety, discipline, and instruction in basic skills.

THESE ARE difficult times for educational reformers. Despite broad leadership consensus about how to improve the public schools--a strategy centering on raising academic standards, increasing course work in science and math, and introducing tougher assessments designed to encourage critical thinking and problem-solving--reform agendas have become unraveled in the face of unexpected opposition from parents, teachers, and community and religious groups.

In the summer of 1994, Public Agenda, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research and education organization, undertook a project to explore the public's perspective on the controversies causing turmoil in the schools. The resulting report, First Things First: What Americans Expect from the Public Schools, is based on a national telephone survey of more than 1,100 Americans, including 550 parents with offspring currently in such educational institutions. It includes detailed views of white and African-American parents, including those who identify themselves as traditional Christians. The report finds overwhelming public support for making the schools safer and more orderly, as well as for placing a renewed emphasis on basic skills. Reform agendas that fail to address these fundamental concerns, the study suggests, in all likelihood will fail to receive public support.

First Things First also sheds light on a topic that has received a great deal of media attention in recent years: values disputes in the schools. In a number of communities, discussion about how to improve student skills has taken a back seat to debates over what should be taught. Bitter quarrels over the content of history and science courses, selection of textbooks and library books, and, most prominently, sex education and AIDS prevention have surfaced in school districts in all parts of the nation.

In comparison to safety, order, and the basics, values issues are not a priority for most Americans. They are not preoccupied by concerns about sex education and multiculturalism that have caused such acrimonious debate in various communities.

Despite the attention they have attracted in the press and the genuine turmoil they have created in some school districts, "values" disputes about how history and science should be taught, how minorities are portrayed, what textbooks should be used, and what moral traditions should be conveyed in sex education and AIDS prevention programs are not at the top of the public's list of concerns about the schools. While Americans certainly have opinions about such issues and care about how they are resolved, these topics simply are not a chief concern when most people consider how well public schools are serving the nation's children.

Although very strong majorities in all parts of the country and in all demographic categories express concern about safety, discipline, the basics, and academic standards, just 24% feel that sex education in public schools has become "too graphic" and 14% think that schools devote too much time to it. Even among traditional Christians whose children attend public schools--those who attend church regularly and say they accept the Bible as the literal word of God or characterize themselves as "born-again"--a mere 30% express concern about graphic sex education. Thirty percent of respondents are worried that textbooks stereotype women and minorities, although 53% of African-American parents voice this sentiment.

When parents are asked whether they ever have seen anything in their offspring's textbooks that "struck them as very inappropriate," 15% say they have. Twenty-three percent of traditional Christian and 14% of African-American parents indicate they have been upset by material in their children's textbooks or lessons.

Moreover, people seem comfortable with the values of educational professionals. Seventy-six percent state that the values of teachers are close to their own; 64% agree with school board members' values; and 65% feel that people who write school textbooks have similar beliefs. In contrast, 16% say that the values of those who produce Hollywood action films are similar to their own, and 10% regard the values of those who make TV soap operas in that way.

These results should not be interpreted to mean that people are blase about the role of the schools in transmitting values to the nation's children. Seventy-one percent maintain that it is even more important for the schools to teach values than academic subjects. They especially want schools to emphasize those values that allow a diverse society to live together peacefully.

When the press and national leadership accuse the public of a lack of concern about "values issues," it does not mean that Americans endorse a public school education that is value-neutral or makes no judgments about moral behavior. There is a circle of broadly agreed upon values people expect the schools to teach directly and reinforce by example. There also are some "lessons" that most believe are not the business of the public schools--those that seem aimed at dividing people, rather than helping them live together in harmony.