From Achievement to Engagement: Two Ages of Educational Change

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CHAPTER 1

Since the turn of the millennium, there have been countless books and articles about inadequate student achievement and falling standards.4 How many times have we heard about wide achievement gaps, worrisome test results, and students getting left behind? Too many of our school systems have been all about racing to the top, beating the competition, and being best in class.

An equally important but frequently overlooked problem is the lack of student engagement. It’s not a trivial matter. According to a 2018 Gallup survey report, only 47 percent of U.S. students are engaged with school, with just over a quarter “not engaged” and the remainder “actively disengaged.”5 Around half the students surveyed by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD)—one of the leading organizations for school administrators in the United States—say that they are bored every day.6 The numbers fluctuate across ages and disciplines, but a lot of students report that they have no idea why they are learning what their teachers ask them to learn. For them, school is a long, tedious ordeal.

As they move from elementary school to high school, students become more and more disengaged. The Gallup survey results show that “engagement is strong at the end of elementary school, with nearly three-quarters of fifth-graders (74%) reporting high levels of engagement,” but other surveys, Gallup points out, show steep

declines in student engagement through middle school and then high school.7

School attendance is compulsory in almost every country. As COVID-19 has made clear, one reason that young people have to go to school is so their parents can go to work. There’s no getting around it. For too many students, especially by the time they leave elementary grades, the experience of school is reduced to sitting and suffering in silence.

Student disengagement is a worldwide problem. Two decades ago, the OECD undertook the first of many international studies of student achievement. The PISA assessment that it devised measured student achievement at age fifteen in reading, mathematics, and science across the OECD group of developed economies. We’ll say more about this assessment and its impact later. For now, it’s important to understand that the OECD’s tests, undertaken every three years, are also accompanied by surveys of students’ experiences of school. In 2000, these questions addressed students’ senses of participation and belonging in school.

According to the OECD’s measures “between a fifth and a quarter of 15-year-olds [had a] low sense of belonging in the majority of OECD countries.”8 The scores were similar across countries, although the range extended from 17 percent in the United Kingdom, to 21 percent in Canada, to 25 percent in the United States, and to more than a third in Japan, South Korea, and Poland. The OECD report also noted “wide between-school differences” in senses of belonging— meaning that what happens inside individual schools, from class to class, significantly affects student engagement.9

All types of students are affected by these experiences of disengagement. Low-performing students from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds are the most prone to experience failure and to drop out of school as a result. At the same time, higher-achieving students in nations like Japan and South Korea become so disillusioned with traditional schooling in super-competitive environments driven by examination success that when they subsequently move on to university,

they indulge in what Japanese professor Manabu Sato describes as an “escape from learning. ”10 This entails “opting out of the educational race” by “spending no time learning outside of school,” and instead falling prey to “egocentric nationalism.”11

The OECD report notes that students who are disengaged at school are more likely to experience poor academic outcomes and to drop out. Disengaged students create classroom management problems for their teachers, and they don’t acquire the social skills necessary to do well at work or in higher education, either. Student disengagement matters not just because it affects achievement, sometimes, but also, as the OECD puts it, because it is an “outcome in its own right . . . that will affect students’ futures as adults.”12

By the time the OECD reported its results for PISA in 2018, it incorporated many new measures of What School Life Means for Students’ Lives. These in turn also presented new findings on students’ sense of belonging. According to the OECD, “a sense of belonging at school reflects how accepted, respected and supported students feel.”13 Although 71 percent of students surveyed in 2018 “agreed or strongly agreed that they feel they belong at school,” “a considerable number of students do not feel socially connected.”14 The report continued: “About one in four disagreed that they make friends easily at school; about one in five students feels like an outsider at school; and about one in six feels lonely at school.”15

The 2018 PISA report also gives some indications of how students’ engagement in their learning, as well as in their relationships, affects their achievement. “Teacher enthusiasm and teachers’ stimulation of reading engagement were the teaching practices most strongly (and positively) associated with students’ enjoyment of reading,” the report found.16 Students thrived the most in a learning environment that “facilitates and supports students’ active engagement in learning, encourages co-operation, and promotes behavior that benefits other people.”17

Other research supports the OECD’s findings. One 2019 U.K. survey, for example, points out that 27 percent of young people believe