In 2007 when Anna Markowitz, PhD, was teaching English at a low-income middle school in California, she saw many students expressing stress, anxiety, anger and depression. The teachers and students were struggling with the academic requirements of No Child Left Behind, which had been in place for six years. Like many schools, the school was failing to meet the law's rigorous standards, and the pressure meant teachers were focusing almost exclusively on academics. "[Fellow teachers] would say things like, 'Don't get too attached [to the students]; do what you need to do,'" Markowitz recalls. "But it seemed to me that my kids were asking me all the time to get attached and to bond with them."
In 2011, when she started graduate school in psychology at Georgetown University, Markowitz decided to take a closer look at these issues. Was it in fact important that students feel emotionally connected to their schools, something suggested by research but not tested rigorously? And could policy influence students' engagement with school?
A $25,000 Elizabeth Munsterberg Koppitz Child Psychology Graduate Student Fellowship from APF enabled Markowitz to address those questions. She was one of six who received the fellowship in 2015.
In her dissertation, Markowitz found that youngsters who were more emotionally engaged with their schools — who felt safe, liked their school and evaluated their teachers and peer community positively, for example — had higher self-esteem, fewer depressive symptoms and less delinquent behavior than those with more tenuous connections to school.
In a second analysis, she examined the effects of No Child Left Behind on students' sense of school engagement. Students in states that rigorously implemented the law were more engaged with their schools than students in states that followed the law less strictly, she found. But as time went on, students in states that adopted the policy more rigorously became less engaged with school. These findings suggest that policies like No Child can have complicated effects.
Now, as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Virginia's EdPolicyWorks center, she will continue exploring these topics with the help of the APF grant.
Graduate students can apply for a Koppitz fellowship by Nov. 15.
