“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.
On eight measures of classroom engagement—such as having supportive teachers, feeling motivated and challenged by their schoolwork, and completing coursework that lends itself to their strengths and interests—a distinct minority of students responded positively. Only 11% to 33% of Gen Z students strongly agreed they have any classroom engagement experiences. In comparison, nearly half (46%) do not strongly agree that they have had even one such experience.
Nearly every engagement measure declined among middle and high school students who completed the survey in 2023 and 2024, with the steepest drop in the percentage of students who report being interested in and challenged by their schooling. About one in ten Gen Zers (12%) look forward to attending school every day, while an additional one in three (34%) look forward to school on most days.
Engagement declines as students advance along their middle and high school journey, particularly among students not planning additional education after high school. Students who say they do not expect to go to college are less likely to feel motivated, interested, or excited by what they are learning in school than college-bound students. They are also significantly less likely to think their schoolwork allows them to do what they do best.
Types of Student Engagement
A recent book, The Disengaged Teen, by Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, sheds more light on the problem of student disengagement. It is based on the aforementioned research conducted by Brookings Institution and Transcend, including a nationally representative survey of over 65,000 students in grades three to 12 between 2021 and 2024.
Anderson and Winthrop also document a parent perception gap across all grade levels between what students report on their engagement in school and what parents perceive student engagement to be. “Kids check out of school as they get older, and parents are in the dark,” writes Kevin Mahnken, a senior reporter for The 74.
The authors propose a framework in their book for understanding four modes of student engagement in school and learning. Students can move between these modes or identities depending on factors like the classes they take and the teachers they have.
- Resister mode. Young people resist and struggle, often silently, and feel inadequate. They are paralyzed by inaction, leading to behaviors like ignoring homework, playing sick, or missing classes.
- Passenger mode. Young people struggle and coast along, doing the bare minimum because they see classes as pointless. This is a form of quiet quitting.
- Achiever mode. Young people see their self-worth as tied to high performance. They experience the perils of perfection, like getting high grades, while also having a high fear of failure that can overcome them.
- Explorer mode. Young people are driven by internal curiosity. They respond to external expectations and learn to persist when pursuing their goals.
The Great Employee Detachment
The problem of disengagement goes beyond the classroom to affect the American workforce, too. Gallup measures employee engagement worldwide by asking full- and part-time workers about workplace characteristics that link to organizational outcomes. They include profitability, productivity, customer service, retention, safety, and well-being.
Gallup reports that American employee engagement fell to its lowest level in a decade in 2024, with only 31% of employees saying they are engaged, matching 2014 levels. The percentage of actively disengaged employees, at 17%, also reflects 2014 levels. While the overall percentage of engaged employees has declined by two percentage points since 2023, it has been particularly pronounced among workers younger than 35. In particular, Gen Z employees were five points less engaged than the prior year.
In Gallup’s trend data going back to 2000, employee engagement peaked in 2020 at 36%, following a decade of steady growth. It has generally trended downward since then. While a few percentage points might not sound like a dramatic shift, remember that each point change in engagement represents approximately 1.6 million full- or part-time employees in the United States. The declines since 2020 equate to about eight million fewer engaged employees, including 3.2 million fewer compared to 2023.
Hope And The Economics of Identity
Why does engagement matter so much? Because disengaged students and workers are at a higher risk of underperformance, absenteeism, and dropping out. For example, the most important predictor of whether Gen Z students feel excited about and prepared for their future—even considering demographic differences such as gender, race, and household income—is the extent to which they feel engaged at school.
Engaged students feel like their learning is interesting and challenging and allows them to use their talents—or what economists of identity like Harvard’s Roland Fryer call their “comparative advantage.” They also report that their teachers excite them about the future and encourage them to pursue their goals.
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. They are also ten times more likely to strongly agree that they feel prepared for the future.
In a 2002 Journal of Economic Literature essay on “Identity and Schooling” and later in a 2010 book titled Identity Economics, economists George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton explain the importance of incorporating the notions of individual identity, norms, and social categories into economics. This identity model of economics describes how the incentives and motivations for connections or disconnections—the engagement or disengagement—that individuals experience with institutions like schools and firms shape our sense of self.
A 2024 Wall Street Journal piece by Roland Fryer extends this insight to how individuals should be placed in institutional “environments in which diverse talents are recognized, and where [they] feel encouraged to invest in areas aligned with their comparative advantage.” This approach suggests that student and worker engagement must involve individuals developing the capacity to hope for and achieve a positive future. That insight gives us a clue for one solution to solving the engagement cliff and employee detachment.
For example, many Gen Zers feel most excited about what they are learning when they can see how it connects to the real world (35%) or when it is something they can use in their future job (25%) or everyday life (28%). These career-related activities—including learning to apply and interview for jobs, learning job-related skills in the classroom, or obtaining an internship or industry certificate—also improve Gen Z students’ career confidence.
Students whose schools offer career-related activities and curricula are six to 16 points more likely to feel prepared to succeed in their careers than those whose schools do not provide these opportunities. However, schools have much room to improve in this respect: 35% or less of students say their school offers such career-related activities or curricula.
In his 2013 book Making Hope Happen, the late psychologist and senior Gallup scientist Shane J. Lopez describes the three essential elements of the hope cycle that apply to students and workers. The first is “future casting,” or goals thinking, which helps us define and set achievable future outcomes. The second is “triggering action” or pathways thinking, which creates a specific route to those outcomes. The third is agency thinking, which produces the mental energy and self-reliance needed to pursue one’s goals along defined pathways. Pathways thinking and agency thinking work together to foster the pursuit of goals. This framework clarifies that mastering a discipline results in more than just the utility of acquiring a marketable skill.
A critical way to reengage young people and workers in schools and jobs must be anchored in this hope cycle. To do this, K-12 and worker education and training programs should help them acquire general and technical knowledge and skills along with social capital or people networks. This approach ensures that individuals acquire profitable knowledge, priceless relationships, and an identity that elevates their self-worth and promotes human flourishing. In short: Knowledge + Relationships + Identity = Opportunity.
Bruno V. Manno is a senior advisor at the Progressive Policy Institute and leads its Pathways to Opportunity What Works Lab. He is a former United States Assistant Secretary of Education for Policy. He can be found on LinkedIn.
