Half of Students Are Just “Doing School”
In a recent episode of The Table, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Denise Pope, senior lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education and co-founder of Challenge Success, a nonprofit that has spent years partnering with K-12 schools to improve student well-being and engagement. The conversation covered a lot of ground, and I want to share some of what she brought to the table, because it is exactly the kind of thinking more schools need right now.
Dr. Pope’s research began with a simple but revealing observation: many students have mastered the art of compliance without connection. They turn in assignments, show up to class, and move through the day, but they are not genuinely engaged. She and the students she shadowed for her dissertation called it “doing school.” Going through the motions. Performing the role of a student without any of the curiosity, meaning, or investment that makes learning stick.
Using longitudinal data from over 350,000 middle and high school students collected over 15 years, Challenge Success has found that roughly half of their survey sample falls into this category. Half. These are students who report not having time to stop and think, who are moving from task to task without pause. That number has remained stubbornly consistent over time, and another 10 percent are disengaged entirely.
If that figure gives you pause, it should. And it raises the question that drives all of Dr. Pope’s work: what are we actually preparing students for?
Belonging Is Not a Given, Even in “Caring” Schools
One of the more clarifying findings Dr. Pope shared is that a school’s reputation for warmth does not always translate into students feeling like they belong. Challenge Success surveys schools on belonging alongside well-being and engagement, and what they frequently find is a significant gap between how caring adults perceive their school culture and how students actually experience it.
Students at schools with attentive, dedicated teachers still report not having a trusted adult they could go to with a problem. Some do not feel free to be their authentic selves. Some describe being bullied. Dr. Pope put it plainly: the adults care, but the students are not feeling it.
This matters beyond the relational. The neuroscience is clear. When students do not feel like they belong, their brains are in an alert state, focused on social safety rather than learning. As Dr. Pope explained, it is not just hard to learn under those conditions, it is neurologically impossible. Cognitive processing is directly tied to social and emotional states. Schools cannot separate the two and expect academic outcomes to hold.
This means belonging is not a soft add-on to the academic program. It is a precondition for everything else.
Over-Scheduling: The Problem Schools Can See But Struggle to Address
Dr. Pope’s data on over-scheduling is striking. Challenge Success has surveyed students doing 35 hours a week of extracurricular activities, on top of school and homework. That is a full-time job. Students are at school until 10 or 11 p.m., sometimes later during tech week or robotics tournaments. Average sleep in their high school sample sits at 6.7 hours a night, when adolescents need between eight and ten.
Schools often feel powerless here because so much of this happens outside their walls, in club sports, private lessons, and activities families have independently chosen. But Dr. Pope pushes back on the idea that schools have no agency. She shared concrete examples of structural changes schools have made: rotating when major arts productions are scheduled so student-athletes are not trying to do both simultaneously, shifting tech week to a single intensive weekend so students can recover sleep during the week, and building into the schedule what she calls PDF, playtime, downtime, and family time.
PDF comes from research on protective factors for adolescents. Playtime, as in genuine free choice. Downtime, including sleep and unstructured reflection. Family time, which research suggests occurs around five times a week at roughly 25 minutes, whether that is a shared meal or a walk. Schools can create their own versions of these: advisory structures that function like small family units, open gym time, and transitions that give students actual breathing room between demands.
The schedule, she argues, is a values document. It tells students what the school thinks matters.
What Parents Are Getting Wrong, and How Schools Can Help
A significant portion of Dr. Pope’s work involves parent education, and this is an area where student life professionals have real influence. The problem she identifies is not that parents do not care. It is that their fear is driving counterproductive behavior.
Parents believe that admission to a highly ranked college is the clearest path to their child’s future success and security. That belief leads them to push students toward hyper-specialization, overloading extracurriculars for resume purposes, and prioritizing grades above almost everything else. Dr. Pope points to a small but telling habit: the first question many parents ask when their child walks through the door is about a grade. That single question, she argues, sends a clear message about what the family values, regardless of what parents actually intend.
Challenge Success has published a paper, written for a general audience, called “A Fit Over Rankings,” which challenges the assumption that where a student goes to college determines outcomes. The research largely supports the view that how students engage in college matters far more than institutional prestige, with some meaningful exceptions for first-generation students and those navigating specific learning needs. Schools that share this kind of research with families during the college process are giving parents something they genuinely need: permission to exhale.
Dr. Pope is also direct about the limits of parental involvement. Checking the learning management system multiple times a day, correcting homework, or removing every obstacle from a student’s path is not preparation. It is scaffolding that never comes down. The goal, as she frames it, is to gradually release responsibility so that students can function independently well before they are expected to do so.
AI, Academic Integrity, and the Real Question Schools Should Be Asking
The conversation turned to AI, and Dr. Pope offered a framing I found worth sitting with. Challenge Success had been tracking academic integrity data for years before ChatGPT arrived. What they found was that around 72 percent of middle and high school students reported engaging in some form of cheating before November 2022. AI did not create the problem. It made it more visible.
What AI has genuinely complicated is the clarity of expectations. Students are confused about what is and is not permitted when policies are inconsistent across teachers or left ambiguous. They are anxious about accidentally violating a rule they cannot clearly identify. Dr. Pope’s recommendation is that schools stop investing in AI detection tools, which she sees as an increasingly losing proposition as the technology advances, and instead bring students into the policy conversation directly.
That last piece is not just procedurally smart. It reflects something Challenge Success holds as a core value: centering student voice. Students will ask the hard questions when given the space, including the fundamental one, if AI can do most of what we are asked to do, what is school actually for? That is a question worth engaging with seriously rather than avoiding.
The most useful reframe she offered is that AI is a forcing function. It is pressuring schools to get clearer about what evidence of student thinking actually looks like, what skills cannot be outsourced, and where the meaningful friction in learning needs to stay.
The SPACE Framework: A Starting Point for Schools
For student life professionals looking for a practical organizing structure, Challenge Success uses a framework called SPACE:
- S – Schedule and student use of time, including homework load
- P – Pedagogy that engages, built on the principle that rigor does not equal load
- A – Alternative and authentic assessment, moving beyond tests as the primary measure of learning
- C – Climate of care, which Dr. Pope identifies as the most important starting point for schools experiencing attendance issues, bullying, or belonging gaps
- E – Educating everyone, including families, about the developmental needs of students and the science of learning
The climate of care piece is where Dr. Pope consistently points student life professionals first. When students are avoiding school, when discipline concerns are high, when belonging scores are low, everything else is downstream of that. And she is clear that even a single person in a school, a dean, a student activities director, a counselor, can move the needle without waiting for full institutional buy-in.
Challenge Success offers free resources, toolkits, and research briefs at challengesuccess.org, and their team works school by school, customizing their approach based on what the data shows rather than applying a one-size-fits-all model.
What This Means for Student Life Professionals
The through-line of this conversation is that student life is not peripheral to academic success. It is foundational to it. When students feel seen, connected, and given space to breathe, they learn better. When they are overloaded, sleep-deprived, and anxious about where their value comes from, they cannot. The research has been saying this for years.
Dr. Pope’s work offers a useful reminder that the role of a student life professional is not just programming and event management. It is culture work. It is the intentional construction of environments where students can show up fully, struggle productively, and feel like they belong.
If you want to go deeper into Dr. Pope’s research, you can find her books, Doing School and Overloaded and Unprepared, at most major booksellers, and Challenge Success’s free resources are available at challengesuccess.org.
This is exactly the kind of thinking our field needs more of, and I am grateful Dr. Pope brought her research, her honesty, and her years of experience to The Table.
