Education Week - March 25, 2015 - 8

States Should Play Role in Fostering Engagement, Report Says
Policy a key support
for school efforts
By Evie Blad
State education leaders should take
a more active role in supporting and
pushing schools to nurture student
engagement, a critical driver of academic
achievement.
That's the conclusion of a new report
by the National Association of
State Boards of Education, which
the organization assembled after six
months of consultation with experts
and educators.
The report's recommendations come
at a time when teachers and schools
are recognizing the importance that
interpersonal relationships and noncognitive
factors play in supporting
academic achievement, and increasingly
changing their policies as a result.
But the crucial role that state
policymakers can play in supporting
student-engagement efforts is
sometimes overlooked, said Kristen
Amundson, the executive director
of the National Association of State
Boards of Education.
"When we dug into it, we realized
there were policy changes that state
boards of education could make and
not just say to teachers, 'Hey, go out
there and engage those kids,' " she
said.
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State education officials can respond
to the report's five recommendations
by changing policies and
by using their influence to encourage
schools and state lawmakers to
change practices, Ms. Amundson said.
Too often, states view engagement
in terms of truancy and dropout rates,
not recognizing that students can be
present at school without being engaged,
the report's authors said.
"To put it another way, regardless
of what other investments states
may make in education, nearly half of
their students will not be physically
or mentally present to benefit from
those investments if states fail to pay
sufficient attention to student engagement,"
says the report, released earlier
this month.
More Than Attendance
It cites a 2013 Gallup Education
poll of 600,000 students who ranged
from 5th to 12th grades that concluded
that 45 percent of students
did not demonstrate signs of engagement
at school. Gallup's engagement
indicators included questions like, "I
have a best friend at school" and "At
this school, I have the opportunity to
do what I do best every day."
While it may be easy to determine
how schools and teachers can directly
impact interpersonal relationships
that contribute to strong student
engagement, the path for states isn't
always as clear. State boards of education
recommended that nasbe study
the issue, and they had great interest
in the results, Ms. Amundson said.
"The fact that individual interaction
between students, their peers,
and adults drive engagement does
not negate policymakers' responsibility
to help build a system that makes
these interactions more likely," the
report says.
It suggests state-level policies that
can help support and give space for
district-level behavioral, emotional,
and cognitive engagement efforts.
They can also boost accountability to
ensure that schools are acknowledging
nonacademic factors in their improvement
efforts, it adds.
How school success is defined and
measured is an "essential area of influence"
for state policymakers and
one of the key ways they can encourage
schools to make student engagement
a priority, the report says.
Practically, that means more carefully
measuring and tracking factors
like attendance and survey data
about student perceptions of their
schooling experiences. Those data
should include student and educator
surveys, and they should be incorporated
into schoolwide accountability
measures, the report says.
In Illinois, for example, the state
board of education administers a
survey called 5Essentials to gather
student input on issues like school
climate that is later incorporated into
school report cards posted online. The
report also cites examples of statewide
student assessments of school
safety, student engagement, and
environment that are being used in
California and Maryland.
States must also incorporate best
practices for student engagement into
teacher-preparation programs and
ongoing professional development,
the report says.
"We can tell teachers all the things
they can do to increase engagement,
and I think that's important, but if we
don't deal with the system-level factors
... it might be all for naught," said
Jennifer Fredericks, the director of the
Holleran Center for Community Action
and Public Policy at Connecticut
College in New London, Conn., whose
input helped shape the report.
That teacher training will be more
effective if states foster school environments
that are more conducive to
engagement by adopting and promoting
positive school climate guidelines
and specifying noncognitive skills
that schools should emphasize, the
report says.
What States Are Doing
Kansas, for example, has adopted
social and emotional learning standards
that identify how meeting
student's emotional needs relates to
academic standards in the classroom.
And other states, including Idaho
and Washington, provide guidance to
teachers on nurturing factors related
to behavioral, cognitive, and emotional
engagement, the report's authors said.
They also recommend that state
policymakers "invest in school structures
that personalize student learning"
to boost engagement.
That could take the form of individualized
learning plans, which are
mandated for students in 6th grade
and beyond in Kentucky, or the promotion
of competency-based learning,
the report says.
Finally, the report recommends
that states encourage schools to collaborate
with each other, as well as
with parents and community groups
to identify the best ways to meet students'
needs.
West Virginia's state education
board did this by creating local school
improvement councils-groups of
school staff members, parents, and
community members that develop solutions
to problems schools face and
recommend policy changes, the report
says.
Coverage of school climate and student
behavior and engagement is supported
in part by grants from the Atlantic
Philanthropies, the NoVo Foundation,
the Raikes Foundation, and the
California Endowment. Education Week
retains sole editorial control over the
content of this coverage.
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Education Week - March 25, 2015

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