Close followers of education policy know that Phi Delta Kappa and Gallup released their annual poll of the public’s attitudes toward public schools late last month. The education world was ablaze with articles and tweets about whether or not Americans oppose major tenets of modern school reform like standardized testing and the Common Core State Standards. But this is not the biggest story from the survey. There are two others that are particularly important for education policy and politics. One has persisted for well over a decade: the disconnect between people’s view of their local schools and the nation’s schools at large. The other is new to this year’s poll, but perhaps not all that surprising: blacks and Hispanics have a drastically different view of their local schools than the general population.

According to the poll, 51 percent of Americans awarded the schools in their community a grade of A or B. That number was even higher – 57 percent – among parents of children in public schools, and the view was consistent across party lines. Only four percent gave their local schools a failing grade.

However, public opinion of schools at the national level was very different. Only 21 percent of people thought America’s schools deserved an A or B grade. Last year that number was 17 percent. And nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that less than half of public school students receive a high-quality education.

And this dichotomous view has persisted over time. According to the survey report, it is “a pattern that has held across 40 years of the PDK/Gallup poll.” 

Clearly, addressing these gaps should be a national priority in education. But implementing federal programs usually generates local backlash, putting policymakers in a catch-22. In order to be successful, federal policies need to have enough teeth to make a real impact, but also must be flexible enough to garner support from different communities in different ways. This is a difficult balance to strike, but it is necessary if we want to boost the performance of our national education system.

Phillip Burgoyne-Allen is a policy analyst at Bellwether Education Partners. Reach him via email or Twitter.

In the last few months, Congress invited 18 education experts to share their thoughts on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act during a series of hearings. Only three of them were current teachers.

Congress should care more about what teachers think, particularly when crafting such teacher-centered legislation.

For example, I don’t know many any teachers that are fond of standardized tests. However, here we are, 14 years into No Child Left Behind, and we have one of the most difficult and stringent tests yet—the PARCC tests. And while PARCC was not created by nor is mandated by Congress, the results from these tests could potentially be used for a lot of things that won’t please educators — including job evaluations, school ratings, and to secure government funding for education.

However, if I could weigh in on the ESEA reauthorization, here’s what I would say:

Standardized tests don’t work.

Teachers, students, and parents have expressed their views that standardized testing does not work for measuring educational quality. There are so many variables that affect a student’s performance on any given day, particularly in low-income communities, where students face greater outside pressures. We need to find other ways of evaluation that don't involve such high-stress measures.

Students should be taught how to learn, how to think, and how to create (not how to take a test).

Some of the best school systems in the world, such as Finland, have curricula that include much more than your basic arithmetic, science, and reading. They have classes in music, art, sports, religion, and even textile handcrafts. It is widely known that many American schools, particularly those in impoverished areas, have cut a lot of their extracurricular activities because of funding issues. Oftentimes these subjects are the ones that get at the essence of learning and encourage curiosity and inquisitiveness. In order for students to be ready for the work world—and more importantly, life—they need to learn how to think critically and solve problems. Academic study alone cannot provide these lessons.

Make school funding truly equitable.

A huge mistake that No Child Left Behind made was not providing any additional resources to struggling schools. This move is counterintuitive—schools that aren’t performing well need more funds than schools that are doing better in order to make improvements to their schools and provide additional supports for kids. This move would make funding equitable. And while NCLB does provide additional money for high-poverty schools through its Title I Funding, those funds are often not enough because typically states and districts give less money to the schools serving the students who need it the most. In other words, Title I money cannot create school finance equity unless all schools have at least the same amount of funding. Congress must do more to make sure that states and districts hold up their end of the bargain and provide disadvantaged students with at least the same, if not more resources than their peers.

Case in point: I teach in one of the bottom 40 performing schools in the District. My school is also severely outdated. Only two of our eight classrooms have smart boards; we have one computer lab; and each classroom has about two computers (many of which don’t work). Our bathrooms were out of paper towels for an entire week during the month of April. Our school was built in 1974 and has not been updated. However, another school in the district, Janney Elementary—one of the top 10 performing schools—got a new addition (complete with new rooms for the arts, sciences, and multipurpose use) in July 2014. (It is important to note that Janney is located in a much wealthier neighborhood and receives significant funding from its community.) Currently, District of Columbia Public Schools has 26 school projects in the works, but only five are part of the bottom 40 (and some schools in the bottom 40 have been updated in the past). Although NCLB aimed to make education more equal, this provision only served to continue to marginalize our struggling students.

Although well-meaning, a lot of the legislation surrounding education has yet to really improve things. To many, it’s only made things a lot worse. I think for any real change to happen, Congress needs to do what it’s supposed to: listen to the teachers.

Amara Pinnock is an elementary school teacher in DC. Reach her via email or Twitter.

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, otherwise known as PARCC, is a set of words that D.C. students and families are about to become extremely familiar with.

PARCC assessments are the new Common-Core aligned tests that will replace the often-controversial DC-CAS exams, which were criticized for providing “point-in-time” measures of student achievement and for ignoring critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. Similar to the Common Core State Standards, the PARCC is aimed at creating more of a common ground for students to compete on, regardless of race or socioeconomic status. No matter where a student attends school, he or she will take the same assessment, based on the same standards students in the same grade levels across the country.

But perhaps one of the biggest differences with the PARCC is that these assessments are online. Students will be required to read, write, and annotate text and numbers on a computer. Are D.C. schools technologically ready for this?

Transitioning to tests that are aligned to new college- and career-ready standards has stirred debate for their content, rigor, and the politics involved. More states are using standardized tests to promote students to the next grade level, and students are better understanding what it means for them if they do not (or do!) perform well. Students are noticing as teachers ramp up time for preparation, but not all teachers are noticing that some students may be taking these tests with performance-hindering anxiety.

Extreme testing anxiety affects about 16 to 20 percent of students. Some anxiety before a test is normal, but an overload of stress starts to impede brain function—like decision-making, which is critical to testing well. But there are a few structural changes that educators can do to help alleviate students’ stress and, in turn, increase their ability to test well. 

Let’s be honest: There’s a lot going wrong with standardized testing. I remember as a teacher, sitting in the back of our gymnasium during a pep rally in anticipation of state tests and thoroughly dismayed at the implicit message that success on tests was just about being motivated enough on test day. (And there are, of course, the more sinister cheating scandals.) Add to that the number of students with test accommodations that go unmet and the degree to which standardized tests often fall short of putting all demographic groups on equal footing, and these challenges leave many arguing that “no such measurement exists” to provide a “a simple, accurate measurement of student potential.”

This is what is so refreshing about the recent SAT overhaul. Rather than conclude that these challenges are evidence of the fundamental unworkability of standardized testing, David Coleman and the College Board have decided, instead, to build a better test. This is an attitude normally missing from discussions around the value of standardized testing. Too often, the shortcomings of many of our current tests polarize those in education to simplified positions both for and against testing that see it either as a panacea or a poison. But the truth is somewhere in the middle. Standardized tests do face real shortcomings, but those shortcomings shouldn’t be confused as evidence for abandoning testing altogether. They should be reasons to fix the tests.

Below is a rundown of the questions and answers tweeted during Tuesday's #YEPchat with PARCC and Smarter Balanced, the two testing consortia with assessments aligned to the Common Core State Standards. Flip through the slideshow or click on the title to see the complete Storify.

Albert Einstein said that the value of a liberal arts education was “not the learning of facts but the training of the mind to think.” If that’s what we want for our students, a good place to start is training the mind to accept this crucial truth: There isn’t always one right answer. 

And that lesson is more important than ever, as states roll out assessments tied to the Common Core State Standards that will ask students to choose not just the right answer — questions can have more than one correct response — but the best answer. Earlier this month, teachers from across D.C. gathered to strategize how their instruction can facilitate this change in thinking. (They were meeting for the final “Cutting to the Core” professional development session of the fall semester, an event sponsored by Teach Plus D.C.) How do we shift the mindset of our students from seeking the one easy, right answer to searching to unearth several right answers? To tackle this difficult task, I co-facilitated a session that explored best practices in four key areas: “teacher talk,” student feedback, assessment formation, and “student talk.”

The standards are rising, and so are the stakes. 

As a teacher in a GED school, the new year brings a new exam, aligned to the Common Core State Standards, that will ask students to go far beyond what the previous test ever asked of them. There is no doubt the transition will be a rocky one as students learn to develop college-level, critical thinking skills. I’m up for the challenge of getting them there, but I’m also aware of the realities: In a school like mine, where we receive students at just about every grade level, we have to consider the effect of telling a 20-year-old student, with a third-grade reading level and a five-year gap in his education, that his next stop is a GED that demands 12th-grade proficiency. I’ve seen it too many times: The student comes in expecting that, just like his more advanced schoolmates, he will study for several months — maybe a year — pass the test, and be on his way to college. A year later, aware of how high a climb he faces, he packs it in and heads for a job market where he faces little chance of upward mobility in the years to come. 

If you’re a teacher, think about the last time you handed a test back to a student. If you’re not, think about the last time you were handed a test back from a teacher. Imagine a failing grade, maybe a 55 percent, a grade that most teachers at most schools in this country would still label an “F.” If it’s you getting that test back, what are you likely to do? 

I remember the routine. Step one is to flip the paper over quickly before your classmates notice. If that doesn’t work the next-best strategy is pretending you don’t care. But the last thing most kids do with that “failing” test is review it line by line, looking for patterns where they went wrong and thinking about how they can improve and build on the 55 percent of the questions they got right.

It’s more likely to end up in the trash bin.