Why Teens Are Checking Out of School — and How to Bring Them Back

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, are we preparing young people for our rapidly changing world? In an age of advanced artificial intelligence, climate change and populism, our next guests say that we are not teaching children the skills that they need, not only to stay engaged, but for the reality of later life. Authors Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop joined Michel Martin to explain some of the examples and solutions they lay out in their new book. “The Disengaged Teen.”

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Jenny Anderson, Rebecca Winthrop, thank you both so much for speaking with us.

JENNY ANDERSON, CO-AUTHOR, “THE DISENGAGED TEEN”: Thanks for having us.

REBECCA WINTHROP, CO-AUTHOR, “THE DISENGAGED TEEN”: Thank you.

MARTIN: And so, Jenny, you’ve been in education, you’ve been a journalist focused on education and the learning experience. You’ve done a lot of other things, but that’s what have been your prime — one of your primary interests. Rebecca Winthrop, you are an education policy expert. You’ve written a new book where you talk about the disengagement crisis among teens. Rebecca, why don’t you start and tell us, why do you say that there’s a disengagement crisis? Like, what is that? And why do you say that there is one?

WINTHROP: Student engagement is actually incredibly important for how kids can learn, and it’as essential to learning well, and it means that kids don’t just behaviorally show up to school, it means that they cognitively engage and they really start deeply learning about the subjects that they’re being taught in class. It also means that they’re interested in what they’re learning. Because actually, how you feel about school has a lot to do with how well you do. And what we know is that there has been a student disengagement crisis for a long time. The last couple decades, U.S. census says that only a third of kids are highly engaged in school. But today, the consequences of being deeply disengaged are much higher than they were before.

MARTIN: People complain about teenagers from time immemorial, right? And how many, you know, movies have we seen that are about, you know, bored kids and the teacher who comes in to save them, right? So, is this something new? I mean, is there something new about the fact that a lot of kids don’t like school?

ANDERSON: The genre of the disaffected teen is a long and storied one. There’s a reason we all love the “Breakfast Club.” It was a great movie, right? So, you are correct in noting that it is not new. The consequences of it have changed dramatically. The skills that kids need on the other side of school are much different than what they were even 20 years ago. You know, 20 years ago, you had a college degree, maybe an internship or two, you were probably set up. Today, you need a whole different set of skills to be able to navigate a world of generative A.I. to be able to navigate polarization, to be able to navigate everything that we see in the world today. And another thing that’s really changed that’s incredibly important is there’s always been a gap between what kids do in school and what’s happening in the real world, that gap is a chasm. And kids know it. They feel it. They see it through their phones 24/7. They see the world changing and they’re studying trigonometry and they’re wondering why am I doing this? And we’re asking them to work hard and put in a lot of energy to do something that doesn’t feel like it’s preparing them for the future. And they feel that and it feeds into the anxiety. And then, you layer on top of that, the 24/7 distraction machine, which is social media, and you kind of have like a much grimmer portrait of how kids feel during their days.

MARTIN: So, the second question I have is, is this an American problem or is this something that you’re seeing in countries beyond the United States?

WINTHROP: This is definitely a problem that we’re seeing certainly across high income countries, where kids are increasingly less interested in going to school. There is a big fallout on attendance from COVID. But there’s a lot of kids who are in school physically, are attending and have dropped out of learning. And just as you said, Michel, it was OK a couple decades to go — decades ago, you could coast through school, get the basic academic requirements that most employers were looking for literacy, numeracy, good at math skills. But today, employers are looking for much deeper skills. They’re looking for collaborative problem solving, creative thinking, strong interpersonal conflict resolution skills. And all of those things, you can’t really coast through school and get them. And this is why the disengagement problem is really important. And we do see this across a lot of the high-income world.

MARTIN: I do want to ask a couple more questions about the why. I think a lot of people look at COVID. I mean, COVID was a worldwide phenomenon. Obviously, a lot of people were hit — you know, some people were hit harder than others. What age you are, whether you had access to vaccines, what, you know, policies that your school system undertook to address it. Is COVID at the root of this, or is there something else?

ANDERSON: COVID is absolutely not at the root of this. COVID made everything dramatically worse. It had devastating, devastating impacts on kids learning. But disengagement has been a long — has been around way longer than COVID and way longer than smartphones, which is another conversation that’s being had. But kids have been disengaged for a really long time. And to your question of why don’t we care more about this? Like, yes. Why don’t we — I want to reiterate that right back to you, why don’t we care more about this? I covered finance for a long time and we care a lot about financial markets and we invest a lot, of sort, of time and money and media attention on it, and we don’t in learning. And I think it’s a good question and I think it’s hopefully something that we can focus more on. The quality of kids learning experiences in school affects what they learn, how they learn, how they develop as humans, how they can communicate with others, how employable they are, what kind of humans they become, and we do seem to have a general apathy or almost acceptance that I guess kids are just going to hate school and that’s OK. And that is not OK. Like how they feel about school affects how they learn in school and what kind of learners and humans they will be. So, I do think we need to care more.

MARTIN: I know that you interviewed a really broad cross section of people, you know, for this book. But this does — I mean, I’m just going to be honest, there’s an element of where I think people might hear this as kind of middle class anxiety, right? How would you respond to that?

WINTHROP: Yes. I would say, I would argue that this is an equity issue because kids across the socioeconomic spectrum are disengaged in roughly the same numbers, but the impacts of being disengaged are disproportionately felt for low-income kids. This is because when kids start disengaging, it’s a long continuum. They start showing up in school, but checking out, they get farther behind, they might start — stop doing their homework, then they start skipping school, et cetera, et cetera. Kids with parents who are — have resources intervene, they get tutors, they change schools, they get family rallying around them. But poor kids don’t get second chances. And so, the impacts of disengagement are much more felt for low-income kids.

MARTIN: Now, we’ve talked about disengagement and we can sort of see it and showing up in, as you said, you know, checking out poor grades, absenteeism, just not showing up. What does engagement look like?

ANDERSON: So, engagement is how kids think, feel, act, and initiate what they’re learning. So, a lot of it is invisible. And this is the challenge for parents, right? We see the behaviors. That is one component of engagement. Emotional engagement is how they feel about what they’re learning. Cognitive engagement is whether they’re digging into their learning. And agentic engagement, which is kind of the holy grail, is whether they are taking actions on behalf of their learning to sort of really make it theirs to ask a question because they don’t understand. I mean, think of the bravery it requires in learning, right? To raise your hand and admit that you don’t understand something, but that is the stuff that is going to work, right? That’s what makes it — it brings it back to you. I want to do this assignment this way. I really care about this thing. I have identified this as a subject I care about, and so I want to learn more. All of that initiative really drives deeper learning. And we were — you know, a bunch of teachers said to us, wow, I always thought engagement was when kids just showed up and did the work and they were quiet. And that is not the case. Of course, we need, you know, behavior management in classrooms. But engagement is a much more active process. And so, parents actually have a unique role they can play. Teachers are challenged because they have to keep order in a classroom, right, with a lot of kids. At home, you want to be asking those active questions and getting kids engaged and digging in and curious. We can talk about that. But that is what engagement looks like. And you know, when you see it, because kids bubble over, right? And when you ask a kid, how was school today? And they say, fine, that’s maybe when you need to worry a little bit more.

MARTIN: I’m hearing you talk, and now, what I’m thinking about is I’m thinking about, you know, fancy private schools. What do you say to people who say, well, gee, as a society, we can’t afford that, you know, in public schools or big schools, we can’t afford everybody to have a wiggle cushion. Teacher cannot keep track of 35 kids and make sure that everybody’s on track, nor can we — and this is the other thing that comes up when you talk about engagement, no — you can you say that giving kids, you know, agency doesn’t mean letting them do whatever they want, you know, the education has to be fun. You know, a lot of parents will be like, it wasn’t fun for me there.

WINTHROP: There is a myth out there that we certainly found in our research is not true that if you give kids a little bit of agency, they’re going to, you know, go off the rails. We actually found that you can do quite a bit to boost engagement as a classroom teacher in any type of school. This — there’s 20 years of research on this that compares classrooms to classroom in public schools when teachers shift slightly how they talk to kids with more respect, more options. You know, for example, 3 options for homework, asking them, hey, we’re studying photosynthesis today. Do you guys have any questions about it? And I’ll start the lecture there. Little shifts without changing curriculum, without changing the discipline, you know, strategies of the school make a big difference for student engagement.

MARTIN: Why does it make such a big difference?

WINTHROP: So, when teachers give kids options to think a little bit about where they want to start a discussion, it means — think about it for a moment, it means they have to reflect, think about the topic, see what is curious or interesting to them and then put a question out there. That very process, which is one minute, two minutes, all of a sudden locks them in to the topic, much more than when a student shows up and they’re in passive mode, just ready to receive information. That is one example of a switch in teacher practice. It makes a big difference. And there are a variety of other things. Another one is when teachers give explanatory rationales is what it’s called in the literature. Basically, explain why you’re assigning something. So, saying, hey, read this, it’s going to be on the test on Friday, is not an explanatory rationale. An explanatory rationale is, I’m assigning you this text because I really want you to learn how the author weaves in story through, you know, historical settings. I’m making this up. So, those small shifts actually make a big difference for kids.

MARTIN: Jenny, you wanted to talk about the role that parents can play in this. Could you talk more about that?

ANDERSON: Yes, they can play a tremendous role. They don’t need a PhD. They don’t need to be a teacher. And they don’t need a lot of time because we don’t have time. We are all busy trying to get the laundry done, food on the table and get the work done and really just get to tomorrow. This is very much — as Rebecca was explaining, this is very much a shift in the teenage years in perspective. So, it’s a lot about sort of less instructional, more invitational. Don’t make the plan for them. Don’t solve the problem for them. Don’t do their homework for them. You know, don’t sit there and nag them to do their homework, help them make a plan to do their homework. So, really, the two key issues that we drive in on for parents is the quality of discussion. Discussion is to adolescents, what cuddles are to infants, necessary for brain development. It is how a brain in the adolescent year is actually forming connections. And teachers, as we’ve said, are, you know, a little hamstrung in the classroom. They get a lot of kids they have to look after, a lot of curriculum standards they need to meet, a lot of things they have to do in that classroom. Parents have the luxury of knowing the kid that’s sitting in there house, and they know them for a long time, and they do have the time, you know, and that time might be just the dinner table, to have that discussion, to dig in, to know what they’re studying, to talk about what they’re doing in school, to validate the work they’re doing at school, right? Oh, I know you dissected a frog in science today. Tell me about that. Did it make you feel sick? Was it gross? Did you see the ovaries? What did those look like? You know, you weren’t communicating through that, the learning matters, that what they do all day matters, right? So, discussion and interest. Interest is the canvas on which kids are developing skills.

MARTIN: Rebecca, I want to go back to the kind of the initial premise here, which is the teenagers, right? This is tough on teenagers. You can have some data in the book where you suggest that, you know, third graders still love school, by and large. Why does it change over the course of time? Why is it that by the time a lot of kids get to be teenagers so many of them say that school feels like a prison or they hate it or they don’t like to read, what happens there?

WINTHROP: Yes, it is a really big concern to me, to Jenny, that in third grade 75 percent of kids love school and by 10th grade, it’s flipped 25 percent of kids love school. And what is happening is this shift really picks up when kids enter middle school. When they’re primed to try to figure out how to stand out to fit in, they’re trying to find their unique gifts and their place in their tribe. They’re also primed to try to make meaning of the world, to try to make sense of it. And school serves up a range of very siloed discipline — different disciplines and multiple classes. They don’t have one teacher to connect with. So, a lot of kids lose a sense of belonging. They don’t see the connection of what they’re learning to the real world, which is very important for adolescent development. They want to understand how things fit together. And they start thinking it’s pointless, even though it’s not pointless, obviously. So, we have a really big role to play as family members to try to connect those dots for them. That’s another thing we can do of, hey, yes, you know. There’s a reason you’re learning the Pythagorean theorem. Here’s how I use it at work, or somebody else uses it at work, et cetera.

MARTIN: Is it possible that they’re right? It’s just bad. School is like prison. A lot of what they’re being taught has no relevance to them. What if that’s just true?

ANDERSON: No, a lot of it is true. I mean, we actually spent — we’ve just spent three years talking to teens and listening to them, and a lot of what you are saying is true. We need to do better at a system level to make the experience of school more engaging. I mean, think about what adolescence is. You’re literally trying to separate from your caregivers, find your own tribe, find a mate. That is the sort of biological imperative. And you are meant to be exploring to do those things. You need to be doing things other than sitting in a chair and absorbing, you know, knowledge from someone sitting in front of a classroom. It doesn’t make sense to how we learn and in particular how adolescents learn. So, we need to balance. Knowledge is incredibly important. We’re not anti-knowledge. We’re not anti-schools. But we need to better balance what they’re doing and how they apply it, giving them opportunity. And a lot of schools do this, by the way. There are schools all over the United States that are — have redesigned their day. So, the kids can spend hours in the classroom doing the learning and then they go out and they apply it, right. I will be a big picture learning. There are schools all over the U.S. that let kids go do projects that are community oriented, that are real problems. You watch a teenager solving a real problem and that kid is on fire, that is — they know that is not what they’re doing in that classroom every day. They’re just doing what everyone else is doing. They feel anonymous. They feel unseen and they feel that they’re not being prepared. So, we just need to give them more opportunities to get out of the classroom and do those things. And that — it does exist. It is happening. It’s just happening at the margins and we need to make it more of the mainstream. But to your point, yes, absolutely. We should listen to them when they say a lot of their day sucks and it feels like prison because it’s true.

MARTIN: Rebecca, before we let you go, since you’re the policy person here, is anybody listening to you? I mean, are people hearing what you’re hearing, seeing what you’re seeing? Is anybody listening?

WINTHROP: There is a very strong coalition of nonprofits, often, and innovative school leaders and district leaders who are really interested in tackling the disengagement crisis and giving students an education experience that lets them train to be the author of their own lives, giving them some choice, helping them make decisions. But unfortunately, those are the minority. And what we are hoping is that this book will help parents not only help their kid at home, but also increase the demand from parents, from community members, from the public to help innovative school leaders be the model and spread this approach across the country.

MARTIN: Rebecca Winthrop, Jenny Anderson, thank you so much for talking with us.

ANDERSON: Thank you so much for having us.

WINTHROP: Thank you for having us.