Talking About Children: A Focus Group Report

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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

Talking About Children: A Focus Group Report

A Report by Public Agenda for The Advertising Council
By John Immerwahr with Janice Kamrin

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

Americans generally express great concern about the nation's children. Public Agenda studies of attitudes toward education, for example, document high levels of support for providing a high quality of education to children. People express deep concern about the problems of education both in their own and in other communities, and they also express concern about the children of other races. The support is equally broad across all demographic categories.

Yet, as a society, Americans tolerate a climate that is increasingly hostile to children's well-being. Children are experiencing declining amounts of time with parent s and inadequate and often underfunded education. The indicators of children's well-being are shocking: large numbers of American children are living in poverty; many have inadequate prenatal care and suffer low birth-weight; and there are high levels of infant mortality. Despite these problems, there is strong political support for cutbacks in poverty programs for children.

What accounts for this gap between the public's values and the realities they are willing to live with? Is there anything that can or should be done to close this gap? There are at least two common responses to this problem:

Some observers have suggested that people do not understand how many children are at risk, and believe that if people had a clearer picture of the situation they would be more motivated to action.
Other hypothesize that the public's commitment to pro-child values is "a mile wide and an inch deep," such that while people say they care about children they are unwilling to stand behind their commitments.

Our Research suggests that neither of the two explanations posed above is completely on target. Our findings indicate that people are sincerely concerned about children and that they think children are very much at risk. However, they define the problems that children face in a way that differs from the approach taken by many experts and children's advocates. The public's definition of the problem – which focuses on broad moral and economic problems – makes them feel that there is very little that can be done to help children. Their tolerance for the problems of children stems, in other words, nor from indifference but from a feeling of helplessness.

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