Among the stack of challenges facing public schools—teacher shortages, declining attendance, and a lack of clarity on how best to support learning for the post-pandemic, digital-first generation—test score gaps and drops attract the most attention. Most proposed solutions target test-score gaps directly. But if you talk with students and teachers and observe them in the classroom, as I have been doing for some time now, the real story is engagement.
Today’s students experience a deep misalignment between their life goals and what school offers. They vote with their feet, attention, and energy. Solving for engagement is the only way public schools can address the dual threats of academic decline and post-pandemic growth in private school enrollment, homeschooling, and no schooling.
Students reveal both a lively enthusiasm and energy for learning and a request for learning opportunities that are personally relevant, relational, and active—opportunities that invite and afford engagement. Although most educators acknowledge those opportunities as their goal for students, they are neither widespread nor the first choice for many educators responding to declining performance. One leader, when asked how to best support post-pandemic learning recovery, only offered “more instructional time” as the solution to students’ needs. Most students might argue that more time in the kind of instruction they receive is likely to push more of them further away.
For four decades, first as a classroom teacher and then as a researcher, I have studied the way in which classroom interactions between teachers and students shape how students feel about school and how much they learn there. Those observations make evident that the connections between teacher and students that fuel learning have taken a back seat across the past couple decades of standards-based instruction and test-based accountability. Notwithstanding the value that students and teachers place on their relationships, the opportunities for building those resources are few and far between. Both teachers and students describe their time in the classroom as pressured and their interactions as restricted.
Perhaps difficult to envision, education policy and practice do not have to promulgate solutions for learning gaps focused on narrow, adult-defined standards; reliance on pacing guides as the curriculum; and tests as a substitute for teachers’ feedback. Singapore, the poster child for standards-based reform and measurement, has made a pronounced policy shift in the past five years, moving to de-track the curriculum, tie credentialing to nonacademic metrics, and emphasize a broader set of performance criteria.
State boards could cut 50% of standards (and corresponding assessments) now on the books with little to no risk to students’ futures.
Learning that students find significant happens daily for millions outside of school—composing music, making art, engaging in activism or volunteering or commerce, communicating in social groups, or programming technology. Solutions that work for them don’t start with more instructional time; they start with a focus on what they and their teachers value.
The contemporary crisis of the public education system, experienced most deeply by students and teachers, is a lack of authentic connection—to each other and to learning that is both relevant and rigorous. If state legislatures, school boards, superintendents, principals, teachers, and parents want to improve learning experiences and outcomes for students, engagement must be the north star by which they navigate. Here are some suggestions for doing that.
- Teach far less information. If Singapore can do it, we can. State boards could cut 50% of standards (and corresponding assessments) now on the books with little to no risk to students’ futures. Students and teachers would be free to go deeper into required topics, focus on problems of personal interest, and engage in collaborative projects in their community and with others around the world.
- Ensure every student gets the fundamentals. Choose and implement with intent the most rigorous and evidence-based curricula in reading and math that you can find. Be clear with frontline educators about expectations for implementation and provide aligned support; commit to a 5- to 10-year plan, assess and report progress regularly.
- Leverage students’ perspectives on school and learning. Survey students regularly about their learning experiences, interests, and suggestions. Include students in planning the curriculum and organizing school time, setting discipline and behavior standards, and identifying topics for further explorations. Do this in districts, schools, and classrooms.
- Observe classrooms regularly and provide teachers with low-stakes, improvement-focused feedback that targets their skills to engage students and foster their thinking, self-regulated learning, and connections to peers.
- Create time and support for teachers to get to know each student, their interests and background (for example, through interviews, surveys, activities).
- Leverage technology (including AI) in three ways: personalize students’ learning using adaptive learning platforms; expand students’ collaborations with peers having similar interests across the globe, and reduce teachers’ administrative burdens to free up time to build stronger relationships with students and provide feedback on projects.
- State boards must get more serious about teacher preparation, shifting from credentialing by counting course credits and hours to assessing novice teachers’ actual knowledge of learning and instruction and their skills in interacting with students. Do teachers-in-training, for instance, demonstrate an understanding of the facts and implications of the science of reading? Have they shown evidence of increasing competence in interacting with students who might be inattentive, disruptive, or withdrawn?
Our public schools face enormous challenges. The solutions to those challenges require a shift in mindset and approach—away from an overstuffed and over-engineered paradigm of standards, tests, and pacing guides intended to manage a learning experience. We must shift to practices centered on a core of evidence that students will enjoy learning challenging material they find relevant alongside teachers who they feel care about them personally and who challenge them to be better.
That approach does not mean leaving kids behind or taking educators off the hook. It does mean that decisions at all levels of the educational enterprise reflect what we know about how to foster learning that matters.
