Fill out this form to email this article to a friend
Parents know education, not leaders
More give high ratings to their kids' experiences than to the Pinellas County School Board or the superintendent.
By THOMAS C. TOBIN and DONNA WINCHESTER
Published December 10, 2005
Deana Batzer has never seen a Pinellas County School Board meeting in person or on TV. Ask the Gulfport mom to name one of the board's members, and she draws a blank.
"I have no clue who they are," she says.
But ask how her two children are doing in class and her attention meter springs to life.
"How my children are being treated and whether they're learning what they need to know is the most important thing," said Batzer, who, like many Pinellas parents in a recent St. Petersburg Times poll, is more focused on education than on the high-profile educators in charge of it.
Pinellas parents generally feel good about the education their children receive from the public school system, the poll found. But when asked to rate their education leaders - the School Board and school superintendent Clayton Wilcox - they answered with less passion and certainty.
Sixty-six percent of the 617 parents polled gave Wilcox a rating of excellent or good compared with a bare majority for the School Board. But a sizeable number - 13 percent - had no opinion on either Wilcox or the board.
When asked to rate the education their children were receiving in Pinellas public schools, the same parents gave out much higher marks. Seventy-seven percent rated their children's education as good or excellent, and 84 percent said school employees treated their children fairly.
The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Black parents were less effusive than white parents, with lower percentages giving their schools good or excellent marks. But their sentiments were more difficult to assess because only 12 percent of the 617 parents polled were black. Black students make up 19 percent of the district's enrollment.
The black sample was low because of a higher incidence of black parents who declined to participate in the poll or did not answer when a pollster called on the phone. The result: a larger potential error rate among black respondents, though the results are still statistically valid.
Lucile Evers, a black mother in St. Petersburg, rated her children's education as excellent. She applauded Wilcox for revamping the school bus system and showing a strong public presence.
But she sees room for improvement. She would like her children's teachers to stay in closer touch with her. She also wishes there were more black teachers in the system.
She has six children, three of whom have graduated from Pinellas schools. As long as she has been involved with the district, Evers doesn't feel her opinion counts for much.
"When it's just one person," she said, "you get pushed to the side."
Wilcox called his 66 percent approval rating "a mixed message."
"It's heartening," he said. "But when you have another 20 percent of the folks who think I'm not doing so well, it tells me I've got a lot of work to do to get people to see what I'm doing is positive for the school system."
He said he was disappointed his approval rating among black parents was only 60 percent, compared with 69 percent for white parents.
"I've tried to spend an awful lot of time working with groups in the African-American community," he said. "I was hoping some of that would have found its way home to parents."
Watson Haynes has one explanation. As the co-chairman of Concerned Organizations for Quality Education for Black Students, he has witnessed Wilcox's outreach efforts. But black residents have heard too many promises over the years, he said.
"For him to say (change) is going to happen - good move," Haynes said. "But make it happen. Then come back and ask me."
Palm Harbor parent Jennifer Patera, who is white, said she was impressed with Wilcox at two community meetings.
"I don't always agree with his actions, but I think he's trying to make changes," she said. "It's nice to know there is someone who is making an effort to address some of the problems we have."
Wilcox expressed concern about parents' views regarding how fairly their children are being treated. "Eighty-four percent of the folks think their children are being treated fairly," he said. "If 16 percent say they aren't, I think we've got a lot of work to do."
School Board member Mary Russell saw pluses in the marks for fairness and quality of education.
"I think it speaks highly of our school-based staff," she said. "It's almost like they stay above the fray. They're focused on what they need to be focused on."
Tampa attorney Jonathan S. Coleman expressed surprise at how high the marks were, considering what Florida spends on education compared with other states.
"It kind of mystifies me," said Coleman, one of the attorneys representing black students in a class action lawsuit against Pinellas schools. "Clearly, expectations are low. To me, schools (in Florida) are doing the bare minimum or below."
Board member Janet Clark said she was not surprised Wilcox garnered a high approval rating.
"He's got a lot of support in the community," she said. "I think having had the problems we faced last year, he has a little sympathy, too."
While Clark said she was "not in this for popularity," she wondered whether the board's approval rating might have been higher if the poll had been conducted when the district was not embroiled in a discussion about school start times and busing issues.
She also wondered whether people had a difficult time assessing a board with seven individual personalities as a whole.
School boards are chronically low on the public's radar, said Beth Rawlins, a political consultant who last year worked to pass a tax increase to raise Pinellas teacher salaries.
"The only time that the School Board gets covered is when there's controversy," she said. "When things are running smoothly, there's not a lot of press."
Board member Jane Gallucci, the next president of the National School Boards Association, said the board's 51 percent approval rating is consistent with national numbers.
Like Wilcox, she was more interested in parents' opinions about their children's education. The fact that both north and south Pinellas parents gave generally high marks to the system indicates the district could be becoming more uniform, she said.
She also was glad to see that both white and black parents say their children are being treated fairly.
"It tells me the schools really try to apply the rules consistently to all children," she said.
ABOUT THIS POLL
So, how can a few hundred people accurately represent the view of tens of thousands or more?
It has to do with scientific random sampling. If a truly random sample is drawn of a population, the views of a seemingly tiny group can truly reflect the opinions of the whole, based on the rules of probability.
Pretend you have a really big bucket of 100,000 marbles - 60 percent are pink, 25 percent are blue and 15 percent are red. If you properly employ statistics, you don't need to count them all to know that. If you pick a representative random sample, you will find nearly the same percentages of each that you would discover if you counted every last marble. In fact, you could count roughly only 500 of them and be pretty sure that you already had the percentages correct, within a small margin of error. That's the concept that makes random sampling work.
In the case of the St. Petersburg Times poll, 617 Pinellas residents were asked last week about school start times, racial integration, the performance of local educators and other issues. The respondents were adults who said their children will attend Pinellas public schools in the 2006-07 academic year. Their phone numbers were randomly selected by computer from a frequently updated database of local households with children, ages 5 through 17.
The Times commissioned the Lakeland firm, Communications Center Inc., to conduct the interviews. To within plus or minus 4 percentage points, the views expressed by the 617 respondents reflect those of parents across the district, which has students in about 112,000 households.
The poll employed well-established, scientific sampling principles routinely used to gauge public opinion. National polls typically sample about 1,000 people to gauge opinion among 210-million adults in the United States.
[Last modified December 10, 2005, 06:18:02]
Share your thoughts on this story
|
News
Fifty years ago, they were screwed-up kids sent to the Florida School for Boys to be straightened out. But now they are screwed-up men, scarred by the whippings they endured. Read the story and see a video and portrait gallery.
Print
Email story
Comment
Email editor
