This poll of 600 registered 2012 general election voters in North Carolina was conducted May 19-20, 2012 by National Research, Inc. of Holmdel, NJ. All respondents were part of a fully representative sample of registered 2012 general election voters in North Carolina. For purposes of this study, voters interviewed had to have voted in at least one of the past three general elections (2006, 2008, 2010) or be newly registered to vote since November 2, 2010.
The confidence interval associated with a sample of this size is such that: 95 percent of the time, results from 600 interviews (registered voters) will be within +-4% of the “True Values.” True Values refer to the results obtained if it were possible to interview every person in North Carolina who had voted in at least one of the past three general elections or is newly registered since November 2, 2010.
More information on the Civitas Institute is available at www.nccivitas.org, or contact Jim Tynen at (919) 834-2099.
[civitas_poll id=”2012_05″]
Surprising in some areas……need more voter education! I would like to participate as I receive AND APPRECIATE your newspaper, and am a member.
I’m in favor of merit pay for both teachers AND administrators, but I want to know WHO is going to be the judge primarily of teachers’ performance. WHO is going to judge the administrators’ performance? What is going to be the criteria for these decisions?
Who is going to develop these criteria? These are critical questions that MUST be answered before a satisfactory conclusion can be reached in EACH of these situations. Having been a teacher and taught under a yearly contract basis as opposed to tenure I KNOW the problems involved. I have yet to see an administrator who is cognizant of all the problems(day to day) that occur in the classroom. All too frequently the outcome is a result of personal likes and/or dislikes, NOT performance!
The problem is that “education” is top-loaded with administrators. Young teachers come into the system as classroom teachers whose goals are to teach. Before long their goals have shifted. Now they strive to become administrators. Why? because that’e where the money is. Look around the school; chances are that you will find three assistant principals for every principal. That’s just an example. The public usually thinks of “teachers” in the classic sense, lumping every school official as “teacher”. That’s why, when they want a pay raise, the first thing you usually hear is that “teachers” need raises. Take a look at whom those raises go to and see what percentage of the recipients are administrators. Let’s start completely separating “classroon teachers” from “administrators”, and treat their demands and needs accordingly. If, as I suspect, your school has a plethora of “administrators”, give thought to reducing that number first. Thanks.
The phrasing of a number of the questions is misleading, for instance, if you had asked the question regarding the restoration of the 1 cent sales tax as a way to increase funding for education instead of framing it as a 1 billion dollar tax increase, the results would have been much different. Civitas structured many of the questions to affirm what they consider to be the “correct” answers, skewing the results.