The Students Know

Most parents have no idea how good the school they send their kids to every day really is. That’s why, as a school leader, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to what parents thought about the school day we ran through the year. Instead, we paid way more attention to what our youngsters were telling us about whether we were helping them become smarter and stronger as independent learners.

A report, released this past Monday by the Washington think tank’s Center for Universal Education, supports the position that if you want to know exactly how good or bad a school is, ask the kids and not the parents.

Kevin Mahnken from EducationWeek writes,

“American parents are far more bullish about the quality of learning in schools than their kids, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution. While substantially less than half of all high schoolers say that they believe they’re learning a lot each day, over 70% of parents say they are.”

“[The report also] shows that parents also appear to overestimate how much students ‘love’ going to school. The divergence in perceptions between adults and children only grows with age, mostly driven by a sizable drop in the numbers of students reporting positive experiences in school after the elementary years.”

“The figures point to a failure not only to keep students engaged in school, but also to keep families informed about the true state of their children’s learning, said Rebecca Winthrop, the report’s lead author and a Brookings senior fellow. Parents themselves, she added, find it ‘hard to admit’ that K-12 education isn’t offering all that it should.”

“’It is psychologically hard for parents – and I say this from personal experience, to send their kids to school every day knowing that they are just not being challenged, not interested, and not enjoying their time,’ said Winthrop.”

“Data for the report were drawn from the nonprofit Transcend Education, which conducts an ongoing Student Voice Survey querying pupils in public, charter, and private schools around the United States. A nationally representative sample of over 66,000 students from grades 3-12 was asked about their time at school – including their feelings of self-direction, community ties, and the relevance of the material they studied – between 2021 and 2024.”

“Additionally, Transcend contacted nearly 1,900 parents of school-aged children in 2023 and 2024, generating a trove of responses that has not previously been shared with the public. The findings, along with five years of personal interviews and reporting, have also been compiled into The Disengaged Teen, a book being released by Brookings later this week.”

“The data highlight a profound degree of academic and social disengagement among teenagers. While students report comparatively high levels of enjoyment and agency at school, less than one-third of middle and high schoolers said they felt that what they learned was relevant to life outside the classroom, that their classmates persevered ‘when the work gets hard,’ or that they had any say over what happened to them during the school day.”

“Older students were also more likely to report a sense of disconnection from their learning environments, with less than half saying they felt like they were part of a community or that adults respected their suggestions. Overall, only 36% of respondents from grades 6-12 said they were able to develop their own ideas at school.”

“Perhaps unsurprisingly, the jaded responses grew substantially as children aged into adolescence. While 86% of third graders said they learned a great deal in school, just 44% of 12 graders said the same. The portion of students who said they ‘loved’ going to school fell from 74% to 29% over those 10 academic years.”

“While higher percentages of parents always responded more positively to those questions than children, the gap in perceptions also grows significantly with the passage of time. By their freshman year, just 30% of students say they ‘loved’ attending school; by contrast, nearly 70% of parents said they believed their kids loved their time in the classroom.”

…

It’s doubtful that K-12 leaders will change their system without a certain amount of external pressure from the outside stakeholders – like parents. Part of the plan to create a new learning system for kids must include a parent education program whereby moms and dads, and other caregivers, are brought up to speed about how well, or not so well, their public schools are performing. Based upon this report from Brookings, it seems like the more parents who learn what their kids seem to already know, the better chance there will be to create a new system of learning for all kids.

Til tomorrow. SVB