The Broken Compass

Keith Robinson, Angel L. Harris

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674727427
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

It seems like common sense that children do better when parents are actively involved in their schooling. But how well does the evidence stack up? The Broken Compass puts this question to the test in the most thorough scientific investigation to date of how parents across socioeconomic and ethnic groups contribute to the academic performance of K-12 children. The study's surprising discovery is that no clear connection exists between parental involvement and improved student performance.Keith Robinson and Angel Harris assessed over sixty measures of parental participation, at home and in school. Some of the associations they found between socioeconomic status and educational involvement were consistent with past studies. Yet other results ran contrary to previous research and popular perceptions. It is not the case that Hispanic and African American parents are less concerned with education than other ethnic groups--or that "tiger parenting" among Asian Americans gets the desired results. In fact, many low-income parents across a wide spectrum want to be involved in their children's school lives, but they often receive little support from the school system. And for immigrant families, language barriers only worsen the problem.While Robinson and Harris do not wish to discourage parents' interest, they believe that the time has come to seriously reconsider whether greater parental involvement can make much of a dent in the basic problems facing their children's education today. This provocative study challenges some of our most cherished beliefs about the role of family in educational success.

1

The Role of Parental Involvement in Children’s Schooling

In the end, there is no program or policy that can substitute for a mother or father who will attend those parent/teacher conferences, or help with homework after dinner, or turn off the TV, put away the video games, and read to their child. I speak to you not just as a President, but as a father when I say that responsibility for our children’s education must begin at home.

—President Barack Obama, address to a joint session of Congress, February 24, 2009

It is safe to say that most adults in this country believe that parent involvement is critical to improving educational outcomes for all children. Parents’ contributions of time and effort are thought to be greatly beneficial in helping schools meet various state and community educational goals. This sentiment is well captured by Epstein (1996, 213), who claims, “We have moved from the question, Are families important for student success in school? To If families are important for children’s development and school success, how can schools help all families conduct the activities that will benefit their children?” The idyllic conception of an effective school is one in which the responsibility of educating children is shared equally between parents and teachers—where teachers provide formal instruction and implement school curriculum, and parents reinforce these efforts by creating a cultural milieu outside of school that facilitates the learning process.

The benefits of parental involvement are thought to be important throughout youths’ K–12 schooling careers. Involvement during early education is encouraged as a means of promoting positive attitudes and behaviors toward learning and mathematics development, and of improving student literacy (Englund et al. 2004; Jordan et al. 2009). For older children, parent involvement is thought to be important for reducing school delinquency, improving discipline, and increasing college enrollment rates (e.g., Domina 2005; McNeal 1999). Overall, parents who are active participants in their child’s education are thought to promote children’s social, emotional, and academic growth (Green et al. 2007). Accordingly, it seems reasonable for educators to place increased responsibility on parents as a solution for enhancing school effectiveness and countering the academic failure of disadvantaged groups. In a system consumed with promoting value-added practices, parents are viewed as a policy lever integral for helping administrators outrun the juggernaut of high-stakes accountability.

The importance placed on parental involvement by educators is guided by their belief that poor achievement results from lack of involvement or valuing of schooling on the part of parents. For example, Souto-Manning and Swick (2006) report that a lack of parental involvement is the primary reason teachers cite for the achievement of students who perform below federal and state standards. Bol and Berry (2005) find that teachers (grades 6–12) invoke family support as more important than curriculum and instruction or school characteristics for youths’ academic orientation. Their findings show that many teachers depict poor families as not valuing academic achievement or making education a priority (2005, 38). DeCastro-Ambrosetti and Cho (2005) show evidence that pre- and in-service teachers have negative attitudes toward parents of ethnic minority groups, question the value they place on education, and attribute low achievement to factors at home and the extent to which parents value education.

One cannot overstate the great deal of importance placed on parental involvement within the education arena. One indicator is the centrality of parental involvement in the discourse on school reform and education in general, particularly among policy makers. Several states—including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and West Virginia—have declared one month a year, typically October, as parental involvement month. In fact, in 2011, the New Jersey State Parent Information and Resource Center (NJPIRC) offered fifteen stipends to public schools to host a family involvement activity and free Parent Involvement Pledge Cards to mark the importance of parent involvement in the educational process. The proclamations signed by governors that introduce Parental Involvement Month typically include a clause that states, “Research indicates that there is a positive relationship between high student achievement and the high expectations and educational involvement of parents. When schools, parents, and communities work together in partnership, our children succeed” and/or “the role of parents in creating a successful pre-school through college education system for [state’s] children cannot be overstated.”

Regardless of the discourse on parental involvement among academics, there is clear evidence that policy makers believe that parental involvement is a major factor in positive academic outcomes. For example, as then governor of Tennessee, Phil Bredesen stated, “Parents are a child’s first teacher and we must encourage strong interaction between families, communities and schools… Family involvement in a child’s education can only lead to success and higher achievement” (Newsroom and Media Center, 2009). In his weekly address to Delawareans, Governor Jack Markell stated that “One point that’s made over and over is how critical parental involvement is to student success … what happens at home has a huge impact on what they are able to do at their desks… This Monday … educators and employers, PTA members and policy makers will be getting together to proclaim October ‘Parental Involvement Month’ in Delaware” (Markell, 2010). In a 2010 speech regarding the awarding of the Governor’s Education Initiative Award for Parental Involvement to two school districts, Nebraska’s governor Dave Heineman stated that “since 2007, the Nebraska Association of School Boards and my administration have been working together to focus on parental involvement. Parents play a critical role in education … I applaud each of these school districts for the emphasis they place on getting parents involved in education. Parents and teachers working together is an essential element in student learning and academic achievement” (Heineman, 2010).

Statements that parental involvement “can only lead to success,” has a “huge impact,” and plays “a critical role” are often supported by the views held by high-ranking officials within the education sector. For example, the Department of Education of West Virginia states that “research shows that when families take an active interest in their children’s schoolwork, students display more positive attitudes, behave better and learn more. Parent involvement is critical for children from diverse cultural backgrounds, who tend to do better when families and school staff join forces to bridge the gap between home and school cultures” (West Virginia DOE, 2010). In fact, some administrators attribute greater importance to parental involvement than socioeconomic factors. State Superintendent of Schools Steve Paine states that “caring, involved parents, not income or social status, is the most accurate predictor of student achievement in school… Parents can make a difference in their children’s achievement” (West Virginia DOE, 2010). State Board President Priscilla Haden states “If we want West Virginia students to be successful, and we do, parents must be encouraged to support their children’s learning… By working together, we can assure our children will be prepared for global success in college, in the workplace and in life” (West Virginia DOE, 2010). Even politicians at the national level have expressed similar confidence that parental involvement leads to high achievement, as evidenced by President Obama’s quote at the beginning of this chapter.

This book represents our attempt to evaluate the enormous policy effort that has been administered toward this issue. Are the resources expended in efforts to increase parental involvement justified? Put another way, does existing evidence support the notion that parental involvement is the answer to underachievement? Our analytical endeavors in this book bring us closer to answering this question, yet we recognize the answer is partially based in one’s own judgment and perspective. We are less concerned with the question of whether parents should be more involved and more concerned with whether greater parental involvement will solve many of the problems currently facing our schools. Ultimately, we are motivated by a high interest in identifying factors that can improve the state of education in this country. This book provides us an opportunity to examine a factor deemed critical to children’s academic success and advance the discourse on parental involvement several steps further. We believe that an extensive study on the role of parental involvement in children’s academic lives and the racial achievement gap is long overdue. Given the dawn of the high-stakes accountability era, we hope that this work ultimately helps to maximize whatever benefits are associated with parental involvement.

In this study we define “parental involvement” as practices that entail parent communication with their children about education, beliefs or behaviors parents hold or engage in with the exclusive aim of increasing academic outcomes, and parental engagement with schools and teachers. Some of these elements are included in other popular conceptions of parental involvement. For example, Epstein (2010) summarizes the ranges of family involvement within a classification system that includes school-home communications, parent involvement within the school and the community, home learning activities, and parents serving as decision makers. However, we are interested in factors parents employ that can be directly linked to achievement. This focus led us to exclude some activities that have been viewed as forms of involvement in previous research (Domina 2005), such as taking the child to museums and involving them in extracurricular endeavors such as ballet or piano lessons. We consider these activities as intended to generally cultivate or to enrich the child rather than to specifically affect academic outcomes. There are forms of parental involvement that might be beneficial to youths’ social and emotional development, psychological well-being, or general enrichment that we do not consider. Those outcomes can be regarded as stemming from good parenting. This is not a study about “parenting” in general or about whether parenting is beneficial for academic achievement.

Given our definition of parental involvement, it is more accurate to characterize our study as focusing on aspects of parental involvement parents employ only because academic outcomes exist. Therefore, in this study, a finding that parental involvement (for a given academic outcome) is not beneficial for achievement does not mean parental involvement is not important for other dimensions of child development or that parents should become less involved in their children’s lives. Such a finding would simply mean that parental involvement measure x is not associated with increases in achievement. Another interpretation is that parental involvement measure x as currently implemented by parents—on average—is ineffective. This could be useful because these types of results highlight aspects of parental involvement educators and parents should focus on adjusting.

In this chapter, we describe the existing educational problems in this country, giving particular focus to differences in academic performance both by social class and by race within America’s schools. We then discuss the policy and research response to these problems as they relate to parental involvement. We conclude this chapter with an overview for the rest of the book.

Despite the limitations of testing, we focus much of our discussion in this chapter on achievement as measured by test scores. Although school is also very much about students’ grades, it is standardized test scores that concern policy makers most. Despite being one assessment of students’ academic proficiency, standardized tests have become the defining motif of school reform initiatives. For this reason, standardized testing has been characterized as the tail wagging the dog (McNeil 2000; Meier 2000; Sacks 1999). In fact, in many cases good grades are not enough to graduate from high school or to gain admission to top-flight colleges, graduate programs, and professional schools. Twenty-six states (encompassing two-thirds of the nearly seventeen million youth in high school) require high school exit exams (Center on Education Policy 2009), and standardized tests serve as the primary mechanism of stratification for colleges (Scholastic Assessment Test/American College Testing), graduate programs (Graduate Record Exam), and professional schools (Medical College Admission Test/Law School Admission Test). Since policy makers seem to focus entirely on test scores, any discussion of achievement (and achievement gaps) must document the trends in standardized test scores.

The Problem of Raising Achievement in America’s Schools

Determining whether greater parental involvement leads to higher academic achievement is an urgent policy issue, particularly given some of the worrisome trends in U.S. education. Data from national and international assessments indicate that America’s students are performing at relatively low levels. A 2006 report from the Program for International Student Assessment (Baldi et al. 2007) compared the scientific literacy of fifteen-year-olds in the thirty member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and twenty-seven non-OECD countries and found that the U.S. scientific literacy score was 489, which was below the average score of 500 for the thirty OECD countries. The average U.S. score in math was 474, lower than the OECD average score of 498, and lower than thirty-one jurisdictions (23 OECD and 8 non-OECD). Additionally, among public high schools in 2005–6, only three-fourths of incoming freshman graduated on time, and the graduation rate was below 70% in eleven states and Washington, DC—which account for over one-third of all students in public high schools within the U.S. (Planty et al. 2009).

In 2009 the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assessed the proficiency in reading and math of U.S. students in grades 4 and 8. Among fourth graders, only 33% scored “Proficient” or greater in reading, and 39% scored “Proficient” or greater in math. Among students in the eighth grade, roughly one-third attained “Proficient” scores in both reading (32%) and math (34%). Writing was assessed in 2007 for students in grades 8 and 12. Less than one-third of these students tested at the “Proficient” or greater level in writing. The proficiency levels were even more alarming for U.S. history in 2006, in which less than 20% of students in grades 4, 8, and 12 tested at levels considered to be “Proficient” or greater. These percentages are clear indicators that this country has much ground to cover in ensuring a quality education for its youth.

Further Cause for Concern: Achievement Gaps

Another major problem facing American schools is the struggle to close achievement gaps. There are drastic differences in achievement by social class and by race. These differences have persisted for decades and remain a vexing problem for parents, schools, and policy makers. Its implications can be felt at all levels of schooling ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1. The Role of Parental Involvement in Children’s Schooling
• 2. Parental Involvement and Social Class
• 3. Implications of Parental Involvement at Home by Social Class
• 4. Implications of Parental Involvement at School by Social Class
• 5. Academic Orientation among Parents at Home by Race
• 6. Effectiveness of Parental Involvement at Home by Race
• 7. Parental Involvement at School by Race
• 8. Implications of Parental Involvement at School by Race
• 9. Parenting and Poor Achievement
• 10. Setting the Stage for Academic Success
• 11. Conclusion
• Appendix A: Sources of Data
• Appendix B: Methodology
• Appendix C: Descriptive Tables
• Appendix D: Guide of “Effects” by Race
• Notes
• References
• Acknowledgments
• Index