ABSTRACT
The annual Gallup education poll also asks each parent to rate public schools in general and then the school attended by his or her eldest child. According to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, just about everyone who sticks with formal education through high school graduation acquires rudimentary literacy and numeracy. From one source after another, for the past decade we have been receiving evidence that American education, taken as a whole, is doing a mediocre job, one that ill serves this country and our children. Besides spending more on education, we have been trying conscientiously to make the enterprise more effective. For a long time we construed education in terms of intentions and efforts, plans and inputs, institutions, resources, and services. American girls and boys, Stevenson has found, give themselves top ratings when probed about characteristics as their own abilities, their educational attainment to date, and the performance they expect from themselves in the future.
