When Student Disengagement Meets Worker Disengagement, and a Solution

“Engagement is inseparable from hope and motivation. The top quartile of students most engaged in school are more than four times as likely as the least-engaged students to believe they have a great future ahead of them.”

Student engagement in K-12 schools drops dramatically as young people move from middle through high school. Evidence for this decline in involvement and enthusiasm—dubbed the engagement cliff—comes from the Gallup Student Poll of young people in grades five through 12, which began in 2009. This engagement cliff can be seen in recent Gallup polling on Gen Z 12- to 18-year-olds and in a Brookings Institution and Transcend analysis describing a parent perception gap in student engagement.

Unfortunately, the problem of disengagement is not limited merely to middle and high school students. Gallup polling of workers paints a similar picture of today’s worker disengagement that it calls “the great detachment.”

To be sure, record-high levels of student and worker disengagement from school and work are disturbing trends. However, these trends may be the symptoms of a rational response by students and workers to problems in their environments that must be solved. One solution lies in developing an economics of identity based on the hope cycle.

Student Disengagement

In 2023 and 2024, Gallup polled Gen Z 12- to 18-year-olds in a new annual Voices of Gen Z Study sponsored by the Walton Family Foundation. (Disclosure: The Gallup poll was funded by my former employer, the Walton Family Foundation, during my time there as a senior advisor.) The analysis found ample evidence of student disengagement from school.