Common Core Scandal

The lesson to be told from the two polls attempting to quantify the public's feelings for the Common Core State Standards is the wording in a poll can make a world of a difference, especially when pollers have strong beliefs on a topic. In a sense, the polls from PDK/Gallup and Education Next are both right. However, it’s interesting to see that the question in Education Next poll, which had more context and addressed the public's fears ended up to favor common core. It was known 80 percent of people thought they knew common core. But, as it turns out they obtain their news from bias sources such as the TV, newspapers, and radio. The reason the Education Next question turn out to favor Common Core was because the question told the message: …show more content…
However, I feel the PDK/Gallup poll did feed into the public's misconceptions that Common Core would limit what teachers could teach locally. Personally, if I had read PDK/Gallup’s question before reading this article, I would not have thought their wording would result in such a conflicting response, compared to Educational Next’s poll. It is very interesting to learn that by providing people with context information that the result would greatly differ. It just proves the fact that the community may not actually know about the Common Core. I feel the Educational Next’s poll may have been pulling for people to favor the Common Core, while the PDK/Gallup poll was pulling for people to turn against the Common Core. This is because the Educational Next team addressed people's fears, while the PDK/Gallup team addressed people's beliefs. Nonetheless, the two polls truly opened my eyes to how the wording of a question can alter results dramatically. Knowing this, pollers can use this to their advantage. They may try to get objective data or they may try to get the data they want. It's shocking to know that question which may at first seem unbiased, may actually be biassed. Thus, it is important to evaluate a poll fully before relying on the