Giving Compass' Take:

• Superintendents responding to a Gallup poll say that it is challenging to prepare students to be engaged citizens, and shared other attitudes regarding student engagement and testing.

• Some researchers think that the students potential desire to start organizing and become activists stems from the Parkland shooting and the protests around issues of school gun violence. How will educators respond to this newfound inspiration?

• Read about some lessons for adults during the youth-led movements.

Three-quarters of district superintendents say preparing students to be engaged citizens is a challenge for schools. This is a huge jump over past years. In fact, the number of superintendents concerned about this rose by 24 points — from 50 percent to 74 percent — in just one year, according to an annual Gallup poll of nearly 2,000 U.S. district leaders.

Tim Hodges, director of research at Gallup Education, said the reason might be the nation’s heated political climate combined with the wave of student activism that followed the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, in February. In the months after the shooting, thousands of students across the nation walked out of their classrooms to protest gun violence.

This finding is one of several from Gallup showing that superintendents continue to be most concerned about educating the whole child, and less concerned with the outcome of standardized test scores.

Since Gallup began polling district leaders in 2013, superintendents have never placed standardized testing at the top of the list. But even so, fewer are ranking it as very or somewhat important, and more are saying it’s not very or not at all important — from 2016 to 2018, these numbers saw a 10-point drop in importance and 10-point increase in non importance.

Student engagement continues to be a problem as children progress through school. In a separate survey, Gallup found that 74 percent of fifth-graders say they are engaged, while only 34 percent of 12th-graders say so. This finding comes from a student survey service that schools can opt into, and while it’s not nationally representative, it does include responses from 3,000 public and private schools in the U.S.

Read the full article about student engagement by Kate Stringer at The 74