Dialogue research follows strict rules. Participants are encouraged to:

• listen rather than to argue;
• suspend judgment rather than debate;
• dig behind their surface opinions in order to explore their own tacit assumptions;
• engage other dialogue participants to help uncover likely consequences of the strong emotional positions that people take on controversial issues.

The general findings from a variety of these dialogues are quite revealing and consistent across dialogue subjects.

One-day dialogues do not lead to consensus. At the end of a day of difficult dialogue, widespread disagreements persist. Yet, people’s positions do evolve to some degree, and there is almost always some narrowing of differences. For example, on dialogues about illegal immigration, strong opponents of legalization usually soften their opposition as they wrestle with traditional American pride in being a nation of immigrants.

Far more dramatic is the attitude change toward dialogue participants who hold opposing points of view. Almost always, a shift occurs from hostility and contempt to friendliness and cordiality. After a dialogue on abortion, for example, it is not unusual to see pro-choice and pro-life opponents walking out of the room engaged in cordial conversation.

To me the most dramatic finding is what happens when individual participants gradually realize that the group is genuinely interested in their input and thinking. It is not an exaggeration to observe participant attitudes shift abruptly from expressing what I call “raw opinion” – mindless, thoughtless, superficial, irresponsible ventilation – to thoughtful, responsible forms of judgment.

The American public voice is remarkably responsive to being invited to engage. When ignored, neglected and left outside the tent, people lack the motivation to be thoughtful and responsive. In their frustration, they sound off, they ventilate, they shoot from the hip verbally, they don’t stop to think.

But when invited to shape their own and their community’s and nation’s future, the transformation is almost magical. (This is why I titled my book on dialogue, The Magic of Dialogue).

I am convinced that a large part of the foul mood of today’s public – its apparent polarization, mistrust, skepticism, selfishness and lack of pragmatic commonsense – is an artifact of being uninvited to citizenship. We have become bystanders in the great game of democracy.

And we don’t like it.

Rebooting Democracy is a blog authored by Public Agenda co-founder Dan Yankelovich. While the views that Dan shares in his blog should not be interpreted as representing official Public Agenda positions, the purpose behind the blog and the spirit in which it is presented resonate powerfully with our values and the work that we do. To receive Rebooting Democracy in your inbox, subscribe here.

Would eating less margarine reduce the divorce rate in Maine? Could we increase the number of graduate engineering degrees by upping mozzarella consumption? Some correlations are ridiculous, which is exactly the point of the very clever web site “Spurious Correlations."

In K-12 education, though, the link between parent involvement and student achievement makes intuitive sense, and it is backed by extensive research. According to Education Week, multiple studies have shown that "students with involved parents” get better grades and test scores and are more likely to go to college.

You don’t need to convince parents that what they do matters. Nearly 8 in 10 say that parents are more important than schools in determining whether children learn. Teachers are on board too. The vast majority say they’d rather work in a school with strong parent support and good student behavior than in one where they could earn more money.

But there’s less clarity beneath the surface. One key issue: there's a lot of haziness around what we mean by “parental involvement in education.” When surveys ask parents to describe parental involvement, they’re most likely to mention checking homework and going to meetings at school, at least at first. In longer interviews and focus groups with parents, many add in activities like volunteering at school or advocacy on behalf of local schools.

But in extended discussions, it doesn’t take long for parents to turn to concerns closer to home—being mothers and fathers who help their children develop the strong values and good behavior that will help them succeed in life and become honorable, effective adults. Many parents focus on the importance of teaching their children “respect.”

“My son knows he has to respect adults,” one father told us. “He knows the teachers—he could come home and give me an opinion if a teacher did this or that—but [if] the teacher tells you how to do your work…you have respect. Every teacher says he's so respectful. Maybe I'm lucky. I think it all comes from my wife and me at home.”

A mother made a similar point: “All I can do is teach my boys, ‘Listen, you know that you need to be respectful and you’re going to hear things’ . . . They need to just understand that there’s a certain level of respect that you should know.”

Some parents mention the need for “structure’ at home and why it’s crucial to “set limits” for children. Others talk about emphasizing perseverance and hard work. “For my kids?” a father said, “it’s my responsibility for everything . . . . [Too many] kids don’t know what hard work is. . . If it’s too easy at home, then that would be my fault because I made it too easy at home.”

Are parents ill-advised to think that emphasizing good attitudes and behavior is a key to helping their children succeed in school? Not according to teachers. Seven in 10 say that it is “absolutely essential” for parents to teach their children the importance of education and following school rules. Perhaps surprisingly, less than half of teachers say that checking on homework is equally important.

Of course, just as there are different ways to think about parent involvement, there are also different ways to define student success and achievement. Researchers often focus on test scores because they are concrete and easily-handled in a research study. Unfortunately, this narrow definition—which most teachers and parents would either question or expand—sometimes leads to bewildering results.

Here are “findings” from a study of parental involvement and student success summarized in The New York Times earlier this year:

“Regularly discussing school experiences with your child seems to positively affect the reading and math test scores of Hispanic children, to negatively affect test scores in reading for black children, and to negatively affect test scores in both reading and math for white children (but only during elementary school).”

Huh? To be fair, the researchers here were probably just trying to be specific and transparent about their results—not suggesting that black and white parents avoid talking to their children about what happened at school. Still, “results” like these demonstrate the limits of this kind of research.

Looking at data and thinking about correlations can put good ideas on the table and help us all question our top-of-the-head reactions and assumptions. That’s extraordinarily useful. But we also need to listen to what parents, teachers, students, and others in the community have to say before we leap to conclusions. Without the human factor, the numbers don’t really mean that much.

Long weekends are great, but, man, those short weeks really make you pay for it.

I suppose the problem is that while there’s only 4 days of time, there’s still 5 days of work.

And even though you know it’s coming, somehow, it’s always surprising.

The week before, you’re working away, cranking things out, doing your thing, whatever. Then suddenly, around Thursday, you find yourself saying, oh man. I guess that’s not going to get done on Monday.

And maybe you feel like you should panic about that, but, you know, it’s hard to panic because there’s a nice, long weekend coming up.

So then you go and enjoy your weekend. You relax a bit and roll in Tuesday morning feeling pretty darn good about the world.
And things go okay for the first few days. But about half way through the week – on Wednesday, no I mean Thursday, because Wednesday is Tuesday in a short week – you realize you don’t know what day it is and there’s a ton of stuff to do.Maybe then you panic, I don’t know.They say that taking time off helps you be more productive. And I can believe that. I’ve had more than one bout of staring dead-eyed at a screen trying to will productivity from my zombified form. Not a great use of time.And as much as I enjoy relaxing over the long weekend, by end of day Friday on a short week, I find myself thinking, man, that was a long week……If only there was a long weekend coming up so I could recover.

My colleagues and I have a stream of work that argues that civic engagement is valuable economically–it helps the individuals who engage and their whole communities. I would never argue that civic engagement is the only thing that matters; an economy can be crushed by external, macro-level changes, such as the demise of an industry or a bad policy. But how we associate is an important factor.

A strong contribution to this literature is by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez, “Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States,” NBER Working Paper No. 19843 (January 2014). The authors examine the tax records of 40 million parents and then their children as adults. They find that where you grow up has a major effect on your mobility–on whether you move up the income distribution compared to your parents when you were a child. The raw differences between a childhood in San Jose and in Charlotte, for example, are striking.

The next question is what about these communities matters. In a model that also includes many other plausible factors, the authors find the largest effects from racial segregation (not being African American, but living in a community that is predominantly African American is bad for mobility); inequality (being a child in a more equal community boosts mobility); the quality of primary schools; social capital (“proxies for the strength of social networks and community involvement in an area”); and family stability.

The authors find that these factors are statistically independent, but I would argue they are conceptually related and tell a coherent overall story. For example, segregation is a different empirical construct from social capital–you can have a community rich in associations even though it is racially segregated. And Chetty et al find that both factors matter independently for mobility. Yet the fact that they both count seems to suggest a broader story: we are better when connected. Likewise, school quality is a different matter from family stability, and yet both may reflect a greater capacity to provide structure and care for our children. And certainly, social capital is good for school quality.

[Some cautions here about using empirical evidence to make a case for something that you would value anyway, such as civic engagement.]

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