The School Cliff: Student Engagement Drops With Each School Year

By Brandon Busteed, Executive Director of Gallup Education

Many Americans are relieved that government leaders in Washington avoided the fiscal cliff. However, there is another cliff to be aware of, one with implications that are far more frightening for the future of our country: the school cliff.

Gallup research strongly suggests that the longer students stay in school, the less engaged they become.

The Gallup Student Poll surveyed nearly 500,000 students in grades five through 12 from more than 1,700 public schools in 37 states in 2012. We found that nearly eight in 10 elementary students who participated in the poll are engaged with school. By middle school that falls to about six in 10 students. And by high school, only four in 10 students qualify as engaged. Our educational system sends students and our country’s future over the school cliff every year.

Student engagement with school and learning is a gold standard that every parent, teacher, and school strives to achieve. If we were doing right by our students and our future, these numbers would be the absolute opposite. For each year a student progresses in school, they should be more engaged, not less.

These results are from the fourth annual administration of the Gallup Student Poll. Schools opt to participate in the poll to measure the hope, engagement, and wellbeing of their students in grades five through 12. Gallup measures these three constructs because our research shows these metrics account for one-third of the variance of student success. Yet schools don’t measure these things. Hope, for example, is a better predictor of student success than SAT scores, ACT scores, or grade point average.

The drop in student engagement for each year students are in school is our monumental, collective national failure. There are several things that might help to explain why this is happening -- ranging from our overzealous focus on standardized testing and curricula to our lack of experiential and project-based learning pathways for students -- not to mention the lack of pathways for students who will not and do not want to go on to college.

Imagine what our economy would look like today if nearly eight in 10 of our high school graduates were engaged -- just as they were in elementary school. Indeed, this is very possible; the best high schools in our dataset have as many as seven in 10 of their students engaged, akin to the engagement levels of our elementary schools. In fact, in qualitative interviews Gallup conducted with principals of these highly engaged high schools, we heard quotes such as, “Our high school feels like an elementary school,” when describing what they are doing differently.

What’s more, among the many types of students whose engagement wanes during their time in the educational system are those who have high entrepreneurial talent. These are literally our economic saviors -- the future job creators for America.

We not only fail to embrace entrepreneurial students in our schools, we actually neutralize them. Forty-five percent of our students in grades five through 12 say they plan to start their own business someday. That’s a ton of entrepreneurial energy in our schools. Yet a mere 5% have spent more than one hour in the last week working, interning, or exposed to a real business. That would be our economic stimulus package right there. With each year that these students progress in school, not engaging with their dreams and thus becoming less engaged overall, the more our hopes of long-term economic revival are dashed.

Many of us will worry about the federal debt ceiling and the U.S. economy over the coming months. But if we want to secure our country’s future, we need to save our kids from going over the school cliff.

Gallup Student Poll Methodology

The annual Gallup Student Poll is offered at no cost to public schools and districts in the United States. The online poll is completed by a convenience sample of schools and districts each fall. Schools participating in the annual Gallup Student Poll are not randomly selected and are neither charged nor given any incentives beyond receipt of school-specific data. Participation rates vary by school. The poll is conducted during a designated survey period and available during school hours Tuesday through Friday only. The Gallup Student Poll is administered to students in grades 5 through 12. The primary application of the Gallup Student Poll is as a measure of non-cognitive metrics that predicts student success in academic and other youth development settings.

Updated Jan. 7, 2013 with additional methodology information.

Gallup on Al-Jazeera: Most and Least Positive Countries Worldwide

Gallup’s Jon Clifton appears on Al-Jazeera to discuss a Gallup study revealing that Latin American nations are among the most positive in the world, while Singapore is the least positive. He also addresses why wealth alone does not drive emotions, whether cultural differences affect the survey findings, and how Gallup measures emotions.

Watch the video:

Learn more in our World Poll Knowledge Center and sign up for news alerts to get the latest World News stories as soon as they are published.

One Million Interviews Worldwide: What We Have Learned From the Gallup World Poll

By Jon Clifton, Partner

In 2005, Gallup committed to surveying nations worldwide, as often as possible, for the next 100 years. As of July 2012, Gallup has scientifically measured the attitudes and behaviors of 1 million people from 160 countries -- representing 98% of the world’s population.

The World Poll systematically tracks wellbeing, community attachment, approval ratings of leadership, confidence in national institutions, employment rates, and other critical issues affecting people’s lives. The idea is to give people everywhere a voice and to give leaders valuable intelligence about the attitudes and behaviors of their citizenries. Dedicated teams throughout Gallup go to great lengths to ensure we achieve accurate, nationally representative samples. Our interviewers worldwide have overcome challenges such as proper language translation, difficult terrain, and adapting to local customs.

Gallup Senior Scientists and other renowned researchers analyze this incredible wealth of global data and use it as the foundation for innovative global studies. Gallup partners with the World Bank to use the World Poll infrastructure to collect data about the financial behavior of adults worldwide, with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to understand how sub-Saharan Africans manage their money, and with Healthways to annually measure the emotional, physical, and financial wellbeing of people worldwide. Numerous institutions, including the United Nations, OECD, and ILO now use the information that Gallup collects through the World Poll in their own work.

Dr. George Gallup’s mission was to measure and report on the will of all of the world’s citizens. By interviewing 1 million people, we have taken another significant step toward fulfilling that mission.

Watch the video below to see Gale Muller, Ph.D., vice chairman and general manager of the Gallup World Poll, explain how Gallup scientifically measures the will of the people in 160 countries. Muller also discusses the mission behind Gallup's World Poll.

The Gallup World Poll


Watch the video below to see Gale Muller reveal some of Gallup's greatest discoveries from the more than 1 million interviews it has conducted with citizens worldwide. He highlights metrics that indicate the potential for social unrest and new ways of assessing global employment.

The Greatest World Poll Discoveries

Read more about Two Powerful Metrics for World Leaders and What World Leaders Must Know Now.

God Is Alive and Well: The Future of Religion in America

In God Is Alive and Well, which hits bookshelves today, Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport reveals that religion is as powerful and influential as it’s ever been in America. Newport argues that religion may be more significant in years ahead, and we may be on the cusp of a religious renaissance.

Popular books by the “New Atheists” dismiss religion as a delusional artifact of ancient superstitions. “However, millions of Americans’ religious beliefs and behaviors should not be tossed aside that quickly,” says Newport. “Whether or not God is a ‘delusion,’ religion has enormous personal and social consequences, particularly for those who are extremely religious,” Newport explains.

The book is based on the more than 1 million interviews Gallup has conducted with Americans since 2008. Dr. Newport analyzes this unparalleled and unprecedented database of information about Americans and their religions -- revealing just how powerfully intertwined religion is with every aspect of society.

Key findings from the book include:

• Religion is good for your health -- religious Americans have higher wellbeing. 
• Religious institutions will probably have to give women more power in the future because of this contradiction: Even though women are more religious than men, some religious institutions deny women access to higher positions in their organizations.
• Religious intensity is correlated with Republican political identity in the United States today. Democrats will most likely realize that they will have to relate their political philosophy to religion if they are to compete for the valuable bloc of religious voters.
• Based on their religious characteristics and their stance on many moral and values issues, blacks in America should identify as predominantly Republican, but they do not. 
• Increasingly, Americans don’t have a religious identity, or they identify with broad religious labels rather than with specific denominations. 
• Unbranded, nondenominational religions and megachurches are growing.
• Baby boomers will most likely become more religious as they age. Given the sheer size of the baby boomer generation, the entire nation will thus tilt more religious in the years ahead.
• No matter what your religious identity, if you live in Vermont (least religious state in the country), you are less religious than if you have the same religious identity and live in Mississippi (most religious state in country).
• Upper-class, more educated people use religion less for its personal value and more for its communal, social value compared with Americans in lower classes.
• Religiousness is strongly correlated with being married, but it’s unclear if marriage causes religiousness or if religiousness causes marriage -- or if there is no causal relationship at all.

America will likely become a more religious nation in the years ahead, albeit different than it is today. “The evidence in this book suggests that America could continue to blaze its own religious trail with religion changing, morphing, and transmuting itself into new but still vibrant forms,” says Newport.

God Is Alive and Well is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and anywhere books are sold.

Read more findings about religion from Gallup and sign up for news alerts to get new articles as soon as they are published.

German Workers Equally Satisfied With Male and Female Managers

By Marco Nink, Senior Strategic Consultant

Nine countries, including Germany, have already expressed their reservations about the European Commission’s desire to put into place a binding gender quota for the boards of corporations across Europe. The new regulations, if approved, would stipulate that women occupy 40% of the seats on the non-executive boards of Europe's publicly traded companies.

While there are many arguments one can make both for and against a legally binding gender quota based on fairness, Gallup data show that female and male leaders likely affect employee engagement to a similar degree. In Germany specifically, a nationally representative Gallup survey of 1,920 employed adults, conducted Oct. 25-Nov. 18, 2010, found that a manager’s gender made no difference in a team’s overall level of satisfaction with that manager or in the team’s collective level of engagement. Both male and female supervisors received an average rating of 3.65, based on a five-point scale, with "1" being the lowest possible rating and "5" being the highest possible rating.

Although women in politics, such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, already hold top positions, the boards of the top 200 companies in Germany are staffed almost exclusively with men. Of 942 board positions in 2011, women held only 28, according to a study of the Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung. A precursor to this may be that men are more likely than women to work in supervisory roles according to a Gallup survey conducted in Germany; 34% of male employees are responsible for other staff compared with 22% of female employees. Since management experience is an important prerequisite for a board position in Germany, it would thus follow that male managers would be more likely to be considered for higher level positions, such as placement on a company board.

Decades of Gallup research indicates that employee engagement, which is highly correlated with productivity and the company’s market value, will soar or plummet depending on the employee’s relationship with their manager. Each employee feels the impact of a good manager’s ability to meet his or her needs and expectations -- or a bad manager’s incompetence. On 11 out of 12 questions about engagement at work, male and female managers received similar scores. For example, male and female managers are rated equally well when it comes to giving positive and constructive feedback and creating opportunities for employees to express their opinions or ideas.

The one exception is that employees with female managers are more likely to agree with the statement, "My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work," than employees with male managers (3.91 average for those with female managers compared to 3.69 for those with male managers on a five-point scale). This difference may mean that female managers are better at providing clear quality standards and keeping those standards at the forefront of their team members' minds -- a quality that could be valuable among board members.

Whether Germany decides to implement a legally binding quota, the bottom line is that managers should be chosen based on their ability to meet the needs of their employees -- as that is what makes employees and organizations thrive.

New Metrics for World Leaders

By Jim Clifton, Gallup Chairman and CEO

World leaders need more than just GDP and other traditional economic metrics to run their countries. Indicators like GDP remain important, however, today’s leaders need to know much more than how much people are spending -- leaders need to know what people are thinking. GDP isn’t enough if you are watching for instability, and GDP certainly isn’t enough if you are trying to figure out levels of hunger, hopelessness, or suffering.

Recent events bear this out. Institutes worldwide knew GDP was rising in Tunisia and Egypt. They knew what 11 million Tunisians and 80 million Egyptians were buying and selling -- but they didn’t know what they were thinking. As a result, revolutions in those countries came as a shock.

Arguably, no institution of leadership foresaw the most significant events in recent memory because these institutions tend to use backward-looking metrics -- the trailing indicators that are classical economics. They build leadership strategies with “after the fact” data.

To help solve this rather serious problem facing world leaders, Gallup presents the first-ever “Global States of Mind: New Metrics for World Leaders.” The report was presented to global leaders and ambassadors in October at the Meridian Global Leadership Summit. It provides all world leaders in government, business, and NGOs with a new set of more timely, forward-looking economics on what their citizens are thinking.

Here’s a glance at who is the best and the worst in the world, not counting statistical ties, on the key metrics included in this report:

Gallup plans to provide a global report on these metrics every year. And we will continuously report to the world when we see shifts of interest -- so that leaders have the information they need to lead their nations toward a better future.

Explore the complete report.

Learn more in our World Poll Knowledge Center.

Time for America to Go to Entrepreneurship School

by Brandon Busteed, Executive Director of Gallup Education

Here’s a new, old idea for America: Let’s identify, recruit, develop, and make a welcoming home for all the entrepreneurs in the world. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again. But to do it again, it will require all of us to go back to entrepreneurship school.

Gallup Chairman and CEO, Jim Clifton, has sent leaders worldwide back to their drawing boards on job creation with his book The Coming Jobs War. What Gallup has learned, and what Jim has convincingly argued, is that new job creation is almost entirely in the hands of small and medium-sized businesses. In other words, it’s all about startups and shoot-ups. And those come from entrepreneurs.

America’s economic engine rises and falls on the backs of entrepreneurs. The cities and countries with more entrepreneurs win. It’s that simple. And yet everyone is missing this point. This year’s presidential election was a good example: Americans cited “the economy” as their number one issue. The candidates spent billions of dollars making the case that their plan for the economy was better. And yet, throughout all the debates and all the ads, there was barely a mention of entrepreneurs.

If we want to win the coming jobs war, or at least avoid getting wiped out by China, we need to create the world’s most potent entrepreneurial talent pipeline. This pipeline is our education system. And in it, everyone counts: K-12 public schools, private schools, charters, colleges and universities, and all the vocational training programs. But our current system not only fails to embrace entrepreneurs -- in many ways it holds them back.

Gallup’s findings on entrepreneurs tell us they are not typically the kids with the best grades, the kids who pay the most attention in class, or the kids who follow the traditional education paths. If we made this idea of becoming the world’s “entrepreneurial talent pipeline” a national priority, we’d start by reimagining and reinventing our entire education system. And we’d want to move real fast. So, in particular, we’d focus on building alternative pathways through our educational system that identify and develop entrepreneurial talent in the same way that we identify and develop sheer IQ and knowledge tests. The SAT would have a new counterpart -- the ETA (Entrepreneur Talent Assessment) -- and there would be scholarships and special programs for entrepreneurs.

This is not a crazy idea. In fact, Gallup has just launched a scientifically valid assessment of entrepreneurial talent, one which provides developmental guidance for the entrepreneur and for their mentors and teachers.

The first school Gallup is rolling this program out to is not Harvard, nor Princeton, nor any of the traditional names most of us may think about. It’s the International Culinary Center -- one of the most prestigious and productive culinary schools in the world. They have been the launch pad of many world-renowned chefs, and they will soon be seen as a rocket for new job creation. You see, chefs are entrepreneurs. The success of their restaurants depends on how well they can cook and on whether they are good at starting and running a business. Culinary schools have always taught cooking. Now, the International Culinary Center is not only developing entrepreneurs as part of their curriculum, but also looking to identify and recruit them.

Vocational training in the U.S., tragically, has a negative connotation. It’s seen as second or third place to college. But that’s about to change. Vocational training is entrepreneurship. And entrepreneurship is the hottest ticket on the planet. Farmers, restaurateurs, and trades such as electricians and plumbers – all of them entrepreneurs. You don’t need a degree to start a company. But if we do this right, we’ll have a lot more entrepreneurs with degrees and trade skills, simply because we engineered these programs to embrace them and their talents, as opposed to neutralizing or marginalizing them.

All educational institutions can and must move in the direction of embracing entrepreneurs, but those who move fast will win the most talent, prestige, and alumni financial windfalls. Vocational programs have a history of moving real fast. And they will be leading the way in getting America back to entrepreneurship school.

In the meantime, Gallup is ready to play our role in identifying all the entrepreneurial talent in the country, and that starts with our entrepreneurial talent pipeline -- aka schools.