Education Week - August 29, 2012 - 11

EDUCATION WEEK

AUGUST 29, 2012

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Gallup Poll: Student Success Linked to Positive Outlook
Engagement found to wane in middle school
By Liana Heitin
Washington

Roughly half of today’s students are hopeful about their futures, while two-thirds are engaged in their learning and two-thirds have high well-being, according to Gallup, a polling organization. Those three positive traits are closely linked to student success and should be focal points for educators, the polling group says. Gallup’s data about student “hope,” “engagement,” and “well-being,” based on polling of nearly 1 million students in grades 5-12 from 2009 to 2011, was the focus of a policy meeting convened by the group here this week. Shane Lopez, a senior scientist at Gallup, told attendees that the finding on student hope is significant because, according to the organization’s meta-analysis of studies linking hope and achievement, hope accounts for about 13 percent of the variance in students’ academic success, defined by such markers as attendance, credits attempted

and earned, and graduation. “That’s a significant chunk,” he said. For purposes of the student survey, Mr. Lopez said, hope means students “believe the future will be better than the present, and that they have the power to make it so.” One surprising finding, he noted, was that hope has almost no correlation to family income, in contrast to findings on hope for the nation as a whole. To measure engagement, Gallup asked students to rank their level of agreement about whether they feel safe, important, and acknowledged in their classrooms. While engagement levels were high in total, the data also indicate that engagement decreases significantly in middle school, Mr. Lopez said. “When students walk out the door to elementary school, that’s where the slide starts,” he said. There’s an engagement uptick again in the 10th grade “because that’s when the most disengaged students drop out.” Many adults are apt to blame hormonal and other life changes for the drop in student engagement at the middle level, but that is not how students tend to explain it, he added. Instead, students are more likely to say they are “not known, not valued, not recognized” at the secondary level like they were in elementary school. They also indi-

cate that their school days are stripped of “play.” Suddenly, there are no more monkey bars or swing sets, Mr. Lopez said. Based on findings from other surveys, Mr. Lopez said that teachers show less engagement than their students. “There are some things you can do as a principal [to increase student engagement], but the number one thing you can do is make sure your teachers are engaged,” he said. According to statistical modeling by Gallup, student engagement accounts for 10 percent of variances in achievement, including highstakes test scores.

‘Joy Juice’
Buried in the Gallup presentation was a piece of related data from a 2009 study that seemingly contradicts the popular narrative about teachers being a discontented bunch: According to Gallup’s nightly poll of adults, teachers have the highest well-being of any occupational group in the country. The poll results indicate that five out of six teachers are “thriving,” said Mr. Lopez. He speculated that teachers are disengaged in their day-to-day work, but fulfilled by the kind of work they’re doing to help children. By contrast, about two-thirds of students

have high well-being, which is defined as how people think about and experience their lives. To determine well-being, the survey asks whether students feel respected, laugh a lot, and are healthy and energetic. Well-being accounts for approximately 8 percent of student achievement, based on what Mr. Lopez called the “least strategic analysis” of the group’s statistical modeling. Mr. Lopez was careful to point out that hope, engagement, and well-being do not necessarily account for a total of 30 percent of the variance in student achievement, despite what the figures seem to suggest. “You have to look at how they work together,” he said. That said, the three indicators do account for a large portion and “deserve more of our attention,” he argued. The major piece the three indicators have in common, Mr. Lopez said, is positive emotion. “You have to have a little bit of joy juice to do well in school,” he said. The 2012 iteration of the Gallup Student Poll will be administered online this year starting in October. Schools can participate at no cost and receive a scorecard with data down to the grade-level and comparisons to other districts, states, and a national sample.

Middle-Class Children Raised as Squeaky Wheels
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

intended to help parents learn education advocacy. “What we see typically is, often those parents had problems themselves in school,” said Sherri Wilson, the National pta’s senior manager of family and community engagement. As a result, “they are reluctant to ask for help from school themselves, and also they do not encourage their children to ask for help because they don’t want to draw attention,” As part of an ongoing series of studies in an outlying suburb in Pennsylvania, sociologist Jessica McCrory Calarco of Indiana University in Bloomington observed and interviewed 56 white students from 3rd through 5th grades and their working- and middle-class families, and then conducted followup interviews when the students were in 7th grade. Through observations of classroom interactions with teachers, and interviews with the students and their parents, the researcher tracked students’ confidence and their ability to seek help from teachers, clarify assignments or concepts they didn’t understand, and resolve problems around academic issues—what Ms. McCrory Calarco called educational advocacy. “I find that although both middleclass and working-class parents teach children skills for negotiating with institutional authorities on their own behalf, the nature and content of these lessons varies along social class lines,” she said. “Whereas middle-class parents stress the development of children’s self-advocacy skills, working-class parents instead emphasize skills

for problem-avoidance.” While the study is small, its findings build on studies suggesting that students’ ability to seek help and successfully navigate the school system can make a big difference in their academic achievement. For example, Stuart A. Karabenick, a research professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, found that students who sought help appropriately were more likely to try to master educational content, rather than simply trying to pass a given test—a mind-set associated with both better academic and life achievement. In addition, research by special education professors David W. Test and Catherine H. Fowler, both of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, found that students who participated in programs that improved their help-seeking and advocacy skills became more engaged and betterbehaved in school.

By contrast, working-class parents stressed respect for the teacher and directed their children to solve problems on their own; they did not encourage students to ask for help or discuss questions with the teacher, Ms. McCrory Calarco found. For example, the study describes a single father, “Mr. Graham,” who tells his daughters to ask classmates but not their teacher for help when they don’t understand an assignment. He recalled his own childhood experience with a teacher who yelled at the class for questioning an assignment. “Unfortunately, it seemed very much like a cycle,” Ms. McCrory Calarco said. “It almost seemed he wished there could be a different relationship for his children, but … he thought that would be unlikely.”

Teaching Advocacy
Schools can play a role in helping students feel comfortable asking for help and discussing academic issues, the study suggests. Ms. McCrory Calarco found students whose teachers approached them directly and clearly explained how to ask for help were more comfortable discussing problems. In spring 2008, Terry Simpson, a special education teacher at Windsor High School in Windsor, Colo., launched a class called Learning and Educating About Disabilities, or lead. Advocacy lessons in the class, originally just for special education students, were soon after included in a transition class for all incoming freshmen. “My role is encouraging and actively teaching how to be asser-

tive versus aggressive, and what is your purpose in advocating for yourself,” Ms. Simpson said. Yet Ms. McCrory Calarco said educators alone can’t ensure students will know how to advocate for what they need, particularly if they come from backgrounds that discourage asking for help. “It seems as though even if you are taught those skills at school, it’s not going to work if it’s not reinforced at home by the parents,” she said. That’s why the National pta takes a different tack. The group has just completed the initial three-year cycle of its Urban Family Engagement Network, which trained 750 parents in nine cities—Albuquerque, N.M., Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, Philadelphia, and the Queens borough of New York—on how to seek help from schools and work

with them on school policies. Parents attend training outside of schools—in a housing-project recreation room or a community center, for example—on their legal rights and responsibilities with regard to their children’s education and ways they can work with teachers and administrators. Ms. Wilson said the program is starting a new threeyear cycle and evaluation with the original and eight new cities to be selected this fall. “We teach parents advocacy skills so that they feel comfortable going into school and advocating on behalf of their kids,” she said. “Our belief is that once they have that skill set for themselves, parents will feel more comfortable teaching their children how to do that.”
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.

Varied Approaches
Ms. McCrory Calarco found that the middle-class parents often engaged in role-playing to help their children practice asking for help, but did not—as commonly thought—swoop in to “save” the student from problems in school. “That was one of the most surprising findings,” Ms. McCrory Calarco said. “They recognize, and many of them actively resisted, the ‘helicopter parent’ stereotypes, but they wanted to equip their students with very important skills to know how to get help at school.”

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Education Week - August 29, 2012

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