Parents Rate Schools Much Higher Than Do Americans Overall
Parents Rate Schools Much Higher Than Do Americans Overall
Little change in recent years
by Frank Newport
PRINCETON, NJ -- Three in four American parents (76%) are satisfied with the education their children receive in school, compared to 45% of the general public who are satisfied with the state of schools nationwide. These findings from Gallup's annual Work and Education survey are almost identical to what Gallup found last year, and have not changed materially since 2003.
I just wanted to point out that it is mathematically guaranteed that more parents would be satisfied with their own children's education than with education as a whole, given the following fairly reasonable axiom:
Axiom. A parent who is dissatisfied with his own child's education is also dissatisfied with education as a whole.
Now it is not hard to prove the claim I just made:
Proof: Let S be the set of all parents satisfied with education as a whole, and let P be the set of all parents who are satisfied with their own children's education. By the contra positive of the above axiom, S is a subset of P. Therefore, it follows that the size of S is less than the size of P.QED
In other words, often there's simply nothing remarkable about statistics. A little common sense (or deductive logic) will tell you what you wanted to know without doing any surveys.
On the other hand, what the survey really tells us is that nothing big government programs have done in the past several years has made any difference in results in our education system. That should have been the headline of the article.
