Kids These Days '99

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ON THE AGENDA

The High Stakes of Stakeholder Engagement: A Plea for Careful Planning from Public Agenda

Alison Kadlec
Feb 1, 2012

This post was written for the 20 community colleges participating in Completion by Design, a five-year Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation initiative that aims to significantly increase completion rates for low-income students under 26. As a “National Assistance partner” for Completion by Design, Public Agenda provides direct assistance to the colleges to help them build capacity for solutions-oriented dialogue among faculty, staff and administration. Here, Public Agenda's Alison Kadlec discusses best practices for authentic internal stakeholder engagement. While the post is geared toward Completion by Design planning teams, the principles are useful for any authentic engagement process.

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You Can't Do It Alone: A New Guide to Creating Sustainable Change in Education Reform

Allison Rizzolo
Jan 24, 2012

Far too often, throughout our work in the education field, we've seen even the most earnest and promising ideas from experts and reformers for improving schools and ramping up student learning met with confusion, anxiety or even anger from teachers, parents, students or community members.

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Press Releases

Kids These Days '99:
What Americans Really Think About the Next Generation

A Report from Public Agenda
Prepared by Ann Duffett, Jean Johnson and Steve Farkas

Click Here to download the full text of this report (pdf)

Introduction

Two years ago, with support from Ronald McDonald House Charities and The Advertising Council, Public Agenda, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization, released a landmark opinion survey exploring Americans’ attitudes about children and teens. Entitled Kids These Days: What Americans Really Think About the Next Generation, the study revealed a pervasive concern among Americans that the nation’s children face a crisis—not an economic crisis brought on by extensive poverty or joblessness, but rather a moral crisis, one that has emerged because adults have failed to teach them about character and values.

Kids These Days attracted widespread attention from journalists, policy makers, educators, and professionals in law enforcement and the religious, charitable and philanthropic communities. It sparked a nationwide discussion about values among children, teens, and their families. Congressional Quarterly selected the study as one of the most significant documents published in 1997.

To determine whether Americans have changed their views on children and youth over the last two years, Public Agenda conducted a “tracking” survey—that is, a survey asking respondents to answer identical batteries of questions. We report the findings of this follow-up survey in the following pages. These results are based on a random sample telephone survey of 1,005 members of the public, including 384 parents of children under 18. The study also included a survey of 328 teenagers. This is the second in a series of five surveys, the last one scheduled for 2002.

Americans’ concerns that too many children and teens are not absorbing the moral lessons that will allow them to grow into respectable, respectful, compassionate, and honorable human beings remain virtually unchanged. The consistency of opinion over time is notable: it both confirms the soundness of the benchmark study, and suggests how deep-seated and deeply felt Americans’ anxieties about the next generation are. But while identifying and describing public concerns—and calling the country’s attention to them—is important, it is merely a first step.

Ronald McDonald House Charities plans to use the research results to effect change in the communities it supports by awarding grants to organizations whose programs will significantly impact the lives of children and their families.

For the Ad Council, the results of this year’s study only strengthen the need for communications programs that “help parents help kids.” The Ad Council will continue to apply the research findings to its public service advertising campaigns that target parents and kids, and will actively develop new media partnerships aimed at positively influencing attitudes and behaviors towards these two critical segments of American society.

Kids These Days ‘99 was prepared by Ann Duffett, Jean Johnson, and Steve Farkas of Public Agenda.

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