Closing the Achievement Gap: A Secondary Analysis of Stakeholder’s Attitudes About Education Policy

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  In Roundtable Session: Creating the Accountability System

Abstract

This paper is a secondary analysis of a completed public poll of stakeholders’ attitudes about education policy in SC. We were moved to this secondary analysis because the quantitative data pointed to a contradiction. That is, respondents all claimed that they had high expectations for their schools yet at the same time believed that not all kids could learn. This was especially dramatic among educators. As the dominant ideology underlying education policy in the United States, closing the achievement gap (Farkas, 2009) should be one of the dominant themes garnered from a study commissioned by South Carolina’s Education Oversight Committee regarding the public’s perceptions of schools and education policy; however, this was not the case.

Authors

• Amanda Bell Werts, Appalachian State University

• Curtis Anthony Brewer, Clemson University

• Robert Charles Knoeppel, Clemson University

• Jennifer Michelle Horace, Clemson University

• Jane Clark Lindle, Clemson University