American parents are much more optimistic about the quality of school education than their children, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution. Although substantially less than half of all high school students say they think they learn a lot every day, more than 70% of parents say they do.
The report, released Monday by the Washington think tank’s Center for Universal Education, shows that parents also appear to overestimate how many students “enjoy” going to school. The difference in perception between adults and children only grows with age, mainly due to a significant decline in the number of students reporting positive experiences at school after primary school age.
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The numbers indicate a failure not only to keep students engaged in school, but also to keep families informed about the true state of their children’s learning, said Rebecca Winthrop, lead author of the report and senior fellow at Brookings. Parents themselves, she added, find it “difficult to admit” that primary education does not offer everything it should.
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“It’s psychologically difficult for parents – and I say this from personal experience – to send their children to school every day knowing that they’re just not challenged, they’re not interested and they’re not enjoying their time,” Winthrop says.
The data for the report comes from the nonprofit Transcend Education, which conducts an ongoing Student Voice Survey of students at public, charter, and private schools in the United States. A nationally representative sample of more than 66,000 students in grades 3 through 12 were asked about their time in school – including their feelings of self-direction, community ties and the relevance of the material they studied – between 2021 and 2024.
In addition, Transcend contacted nearly 1,900 parents of school-aged children in 2023 and 2024, generating a wealth of responses that have not previously been shared with the public. The findings, along with five years of personal interviews and reporting, have also been compiled into The disinterested teenagera book to be released by Brookings later this week.
The data indicates a profound level of academic and social disengagement among teens. Although students report relatively high levels of enjoyment and freedom of choice in school, less than a third of high school students said they felt that what they were learning was relevant to life outside the classroom, that their classmates persevered “when the work gets hard.” or whether they had any say in what happened to them during the school day.
Brookings Institution
Older students were also more likely to report feeling disconnected from their learning environment, with less than half saying they felt part of a community or that adults respected their suggestions. Overall, only 36% of respondents from grades 6 to 12 said they were able to develop their own ideas at school.
Perhaps not surprisingly, jaded responses increased significantly as children matured into adolescence. While 86% of third graders said they learned a lot in school, only 44% of twelfth graders said the same. The share of students who said they “liked” going to school dropped from 74% to 29% over those ten academic years.
Although higher percentages of parents always responded more positively to these questions than children, the gap in perceptions also grows significantly as time goes on. In their first year, only 30% of students say they “liked” going to school; In contrast, nearly 70% of parents said they believed their children enjoyed their time in the classroom.
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Particularly after the pandemic, when extended periods of virtual schooling disrupted connections between families and schools, parents have been left in the dark about the quality of education their children are receiving. Many report being inadequately informed about students’ academic progress, leading to surprise and concern when standardized test results reveal gaps in knowledge.
The growing alienation of rituals and relationships in elementary schools — especially evident in the high rate of chronic absenteeism, which skyrocketed during the COVID era — ultimately led to “missed opportunities to forge bonds with students,” according to Hedy Chang, executive director of the interest group Attendance Works.
“Presence and engagement are inextricably linked,” Chang wrote in an email. “When chronic absenteeism reaches high levels in classrooms, attrition affects all students, making it harder for teachers to teach and for students to learn from each other and their teachers.”
Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said it would be helpful if schools and districts gave parents more feedback on the level of student involvement. But it could be a tall order given existing data dissemination requirements, he wrote in an email.
“Despite quality testing and plenty of communication, parents’ perceptions of their students’ academic progress do not match what the tests show,” argued Malkus, who has carefully monitored student engagement and attendance issues over the past five years. “So I’m skeptical that an extra layer of data collection and communication will be a breakthrough.”
Winthrop said that, on top of the apparent lack of information from families and COVID-related disruptions to educational delivery, older students simply need to be given more independence and options than they currently get in conventional schools. Alternative forms of education, such as those that emphasize student choice and even work experience during the school week, could build a healthier sense of self-determination in young adults, she added.
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“Whichever model you look at, if it gives kids more autonomy – holding them to high standards, but also giving them the freedom to apply what they learn in the real world – those kids become unstoppable and love school . So I think this is essentially a design problem.”
