A poll came out this week about American schools.
Thirty-two percent of adults said they were satisfied.
Lowest in twenty-seven years of asking.
The headlines went out. Everybody nodded. Schools are failing.
But keep reading.
The same poll asked parents about their own child’s school.
Two-thirds said they were satisfied.
Two-thirds.
Same poll. Same month. Same country.
Thirty-two percent for the schools.
Sixty-six for other kid’s schools.
Because those are not two opinions.
Those are two different kinds of knowing.
One of the experts in the article said it better than I could.
When people weigh in on the nation’s schools, they are talking about tens of thousands of schools they have never set foot in.
He said it as an aside.
It is the whole story.
Here is what actually happened in that survey.
They asked people two questions.
The first one was, what do you think about a thing you have seen.
The second one was, what do you think about a thing you have heard about.
Then they added the answers together and called it satisfaction with education.
I want to be fair here, because there is another explanation and it might be right.
The Gallup man said people just have a negative feeling about everything right now. No institution seems to be working.
That is true and I feel it too.
But notice it does not explain the gap.
If the mood were the whole story, people would be sour about their own school too.
They are not. They walk in that building. They know the teacher’s name.
The sourness is reserved for the part they cannot see.
We have built a country where a person can hold a strong, confident, specific opinion about ninety-nine thousand buildings he has never walked into.
And where that opinion is treated as information.
It gets polled. It gets reported. It gets quoted in Congress.
And it can be, at the same time, completely at odds with what that same man knows firsthand about the one building he has actually been inside.
I keep running into this.
This Morning I wrote about yard signs. About Kentucky and seeing what was not there anymore.
I did not have a citation for that. I had a windshield and drive around twon.
And I will tell you what happens when you bring that kind of knowing to a machine.
It asks you for a source.
It wants a study. It wants a number. It wants something with a link on it.
What it will not do, unless you make it, is say the honest thing.
Which is: you were there, and I was not.
So I wrote that down as a rule.
A person’s account of what he has seen, heard, or lived is evidence.
It does not get thrown out for showing up without a footnote.
And when it disagrees with a measurement, both of them stand, and you say the disagreement out loud.
Not resolved. Not averaged. Named.
Because that Gallup poll did not have a mistake in it.
It had two true things in it that disagreed, and the reporting picked one.
I am not telling you the number is wrong.
Thirty-two percent is probably an accurate measurement of what Americans feel about a thing they mostly know from headlines.
That is a real fact. It just is not a fact about schools.
It is a fact about what we have been told about schools.
Those are two different subjects and only one of them got the headline.
Here is what I would ask you to do with this.
You have one of these in your own life. Probably several.
A thing you have strong opinions about that you have never touched.
And a thing you know cold, from standing in it, that you would never think to call evidence.
The second one is worth more.
It is the only kind nobody can hand you.
And the next time somebody puts a number in front of you about the whole country, ask one question.
How many of the people who answered this had actually been there?
If the answer is almost none, you are not looking at the country.
You are looking at what the country has been told.
Go walk into the building.
Then decide.
” Attic Thoughts”-library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
Contact: micvicfaust@gmail.com
This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
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