Narrowing the Achievement Gap

Parental Engagement with Children's Learning

Janet Goodall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317373230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Narrowing the Achievement Gap proposes a radical change to our conception of learning, education and schooling, arguing that parental engagement is the best lever we have for school improvement and closing the achievement gap. Unique in its focus on original research linking underachievement and parental engagement, this book uses a range of international case studies to demonstrate that achievement isn't only reliant on what happens in school and that what happens out of school is equally important.

Each chapter explores how schools can actively engage with parents and communities to reinstate education in the home, and to generate support to combat issues out of their control, including poverty, deprivation, and a lack of social capital. Although schools have an integral part to play in this process, it argues that parents and society must reconsider their own educational responsibility, regardless of background, and offers a solid research base and practical suggestions to help do so.

Consisting of an in-depth and contemporary study of this significant issue in educational achievement and written by an expert in the field, this text will appeal to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of education, schooling, sociology of education, school effectiveness and improvement, school policy and school leadership.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Style of this book

Based on an extensive research base, covering a wide range of topics, this book also aims to be accessible.

The market is replete with books telling readers how to parent, and these may just be outnumbered by books telling teachers how to teach. Added to this there are burgeoning libraries (and ever-increasing, web-based repositories) full of learned journal articles detailing (more or less) robust and (more or less) reliable research on these topics.

The parenting books appeal to parents in spite of the obvious fact that no two children are alike and no one particular practice is likely to succeed with every child. The books about teaching are read by teachers, again, in spite of the fact that whenever the question arises, teachers are clear that the best way to improve their practice is to talk to other teachers (Harris et al. 2006). Academics of a certain stripe might read books in either or both categories as a form of research, and academics certainly read each other’s learned, peer-reviewed articles.

This book, then, sets out to be of use to all the groups mentioned. It assumes that the reader is entirely capable of grappling with complex issues but does not assume a predefined lexicon of educational jargon (and indeed, provides a glossary for this purpose). The overarching goal of this book is to help bridge the gap that exists between the academic outcomes of children from different socioeconomic backgrounds; how large that gap is, and some of the reasons for it, will be examined. This book also attempts to cross the gap between the academic research and those best placed to make use of it. While there is a distinct focus on the UK, and England in particular, research is drawn from a much wider sphere, and many of the recommendations made are applicable in other places.

Overall aim

The overall aim of this book is to support the work of school leaders and staff, and parents, family members and other members of our communities, to support students. At the moment, there is a wide gap between the educational – schooling – achievements of young people, a gap that can be correlated to their socio-economic backgrounds. We hold that such an achievement gap is iniquitous and that it is amenable to change. This work sets out the background to the achievement gap and proposes a mechanism to narrow that gap significantly.

Why should we care that there is an achievement gap?

One of the drivers for state funding of (at least primary) education is the desire to ensure a level playing field so that ‘individuals are not disadvantaged by their family background’ (Hannon 2005, 1). The state needn’t fund schooling, of course, for it to occur and did not do so for centuries. In this case, schooling was undertaken by families (to suit the child for the life envisioned for him/her) or by institutions such as the church either for their own purposes or as a charitable act.

The move toward universal education, at least universal primary education and an arrival at a basic level of skills, is not simply an altruistic one undertaken for the good of the children involved. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has recently shown that

the quality of schooling in a country is a powerful predictor of the wealth that countries will produce in the long run. Or, to put it the other way around, the economic output that is lost because of poor education policies and practices leaves many countries in what amounts to a permanent state of economic recession and that can be larger and deeper than the one that resulted from the financial crisis at the beginning of the millennium.

(OECD et al. 2015, 9)

Educating everyone in a population to a basic level of literacy and maths has a profound, beneficial effect on economies. For example, if Ghana (currently with the lowest enrolment in secondary schools and the lowest level of achievement for 15-year-olds) could attain a minimum level of education for all, the country would see a gain of up to 38 times its gross domestic product (GDP) over the life of today’s children. Even for more developed countries, the gains could still be up to 16 times GDP (OECD et al. 2015). The costs of educational under-achievement accrue not only to those children and young people who do not reach their educational potential but to societies as a whole.

For countries at the upper level of economic success, the OECD suggests that the gains to be realised by eliminating underachievement are still over 3 percent of GDP, which would effectively cover the spending on primary and secondary education in these countries (OECD et al. 2015). The OECD suggests that if the 24 percent of teenagers in the US who currently do not attain the baseline level 1 tasks could be supported to do so, this would yield greater than $27 trillion to the US economy, projected over the working lives of these young people (OECD 2015). The Prince’s Trust estimates that the educational underachievement by young people in England costs £22 billion over a generation (Prince’s Trust 2010). These numbers are all but incomprehensible in terms of economics, but for the young people affected, such a change could well mean the difference between health and illness, between employment and joblessness and between contact with the penal system and the avoidance of same. The achievement gap can be related to higher levels of teenage pregnancy, lower earnings and even the likelihood of serving a prison sentence (Clifton and Cook 2012). Educational underachievement is cyclical, so changing outcomes for one group of children is likely to have long-term, beneficial effects not only for them but for their own children (and thus, for the national economies of the future).

The chances of economic gains, particularly for countries with lower levels of universal education, are startlingly large and go a good way towards explaining the interest of organisations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in the issue. In all OECD countries, it’s been found that people with lower literacy skills are more likely to be in poor health (thus putting pressure on health care systems) (Clifton and Cook 2012) and to have less faith in their possible impact on politics and less trust in other people. ‘Inequity in the distribution of skills across societies is thus reflected in broader social inequities’ (OECD and PISA 2013, 27).

If we consider that one of the elements of state-supported schooling is socialisation (see Chapter 2), and if we also accept that as a society, we wish to socialise our children into an egalitarian world in which worth is not based on socioeconomic status, then it follows that we should ensure that our schools provide the best possible education for every child and, in particular, that educational provision is not affected by factors such as poverty (or wealth).

We accept the implicit irony of centring our arguments to support a society with greater levels of social justice around academic measures of achievement; however, these are not merely arbitrary markers but are, instead, gateways to further experiences as well as markers of specific skills.

The costs of child poverty

There are also good economic arguments that alleviating child poverty is, to put it mildly, a good idea. Hirsch (2013) estimates that the cost of the current levels of child poverty in the UK is in the region of £29 billion. This is of course an estimate but is based on the costs of services to deal with children in these situations (including the pupil premium and early-year entitlements), lost tax revenue due to lower earnings as a result of having been raised in poverty, benefits for those who, as a result of same, are not in work, and a loss in private earnings. Unfortunately, these problems, and therefore costs, are likely to increase as predictions are for an increase in child poverty to 3.4 million young people by 2020 (Hirsch 2008).

Poverty can have a detrimental effect on personal relationships, parenting, mental health and overall well-being. Children raised in poverty are more likely to be out of work and/or work in low-paying jobs as adults (Griggs and Walker 2008). Young people who leave school at (or before) 16 and who fall into the category of being not in education or training (NEET) were considered to add £15 billion to public expenditure by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) in 2002 (Godfrey et al. 2002). Over a lifetime, a man with five good General Certificates of Secondary Education (GCSEs) can expect to earn more than £28,000 more, and a woman with the same £23,000 more than someone without these qualifications (Hayward et al. 2014). Most importantly for our purposes here, child poverty can be clearly linked to lower educational (schooling) achievement; ‘family income causally impacts educational attainment’ (Clifton and Cook 2012, 5). Of course the relationship between poverty and schooling outcomes is complex and, as with all such statistics, predicts a general pattern rather than individual outcomes. Yet the general findings are clear. Children who grow up in poverty tend to have lower aspirations around education (although this view has recently been challenged, see Cunningham 2002], are less likely to attend preschool and reap the benefits thereof, are more likely to leave school early (Bradshaw 2012) and are up to six times as likely to leave school without qualifications as their more advantaged contemporaries.

In the UK, child poverty appears to be not uniquely but overwhelmingly an issue of urban life, peaking in areas of London with up to 49 percent of children living in poverty in some districts (MacInnes et al. 2014). Yet other areas do not escape as the area ‘from Scarborough to Gateshead has more than one in four children in poverty’ (MacInnes et al. 2014, 34).

One of the more pernicious outcomes of being raised in poverty is the cyclic nature of the experience: children who grow up poor do not tend to escape and in turn raise their own children in impoverished circumstances (Griggs and Walker 2008). The link between childhood and adult poverty has become stronger over the past 40 years (Hirsch 2007). This is particularly true in relation to schooling outcomes; family background is one of the best predictors of how well children will do in school (Ansalone 2001, Griggs and Walker 2008). Within the OECD, the UK has one of the strongest associations between poverty and educational outcomes (Hirsch 2007). In other words, in comparison to other OECD countries, children in the UK are more likely to achieve along socio-economically predictable lines: well-to-do children will tend to achieve higher outcomes than children raised in poverty.

For example, Lara-Cinisomo et al. (2004) found that ‘mother’s education is a key predictor of school readiness’ (33). Korat’s (2009) work reinforces this link between parental education and the achievement of subsequent generations. In work with 88 mother-child dyads, Korat found that more highly educated mothers interacted with their children in ways that supported their children’s reading capacity and in ways which were more responsive to the individual child’s own levels of ability. There appears to be a correlation between socioeconomically advantaged students and highly educated parents (95 percent of parents in this category in OECD countries were educated to tertiary level) as well as to high-status employment (97 percent worked in skilled occupations). This is again correlated to outcomes for children; students whose parents were highly educated scored an average of 77 points more on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests (at age 15) than did those whose parents had low levels of education (Griffiths 2000).

Potter and Roksa (2013) suggest a mechanism by which a mother’s educational levels prove beneficial to children. Having found that there was a positive correlation between the level of education attained by women and the reading attainment of their children in kindergarten (at about 5 years of age), they report that ‘children with more educated mothers are exposed to more beneficial families experiences’ (1025). These experiences include having more books in the home as well as higher parental expectations relating to education and living in a situation of greater parent-to-parent contact than other children. This is significant because it makes clear that it is not mothers’ education per se which is advantageous for their children but rather the things which mothers with more education do with their children which is of value. This again lends hope to the drive to close the achievement gap through support for parents and families. What is necessary to support children is not to raise the mother’s level of education (although this may well be a part of the interventions taking place) but to help parents raise their expectations, increase time spent reading with their children and, above all, increase parents’ engagement with their children’s learning.

Overview of the book

In the next chapter, we will examine three key ideas: learning, education and schooling. These may be conceived of as a series of nesting Russian dolls, with learning containing education, which itself ideally contains schooling. We will find definitions for these terms and argue that while all are legitimate and worthy, they are not synonymous, and it is dangerous to see them as such. The rest of the book is centred around a series of three premises or statements.

The third chapter will look at the concept of the achievement gap: at what the gap is, how it has come about and who it affects. We will look at some of the successes so far in narrowing the gap and at what remains to be done.

The fourth chapter suggests that the achievement gap arises from systemic, rather than intrinsically personal, issues and that the gap can be, if not entirely closed, then significantly narrowed.

The fifth chapter moves on to explore the concepts of parenting and parental involvement and then parental engagement in children’s learning.

The sixth chapter looks at the need to change our paradigm of schooling to narrow the gap and to support and increase parental engagement in children’s learning. Schools have made great strides in closing the gap, but it is both unfair and unrealistic to expect them to close it completely. Doing so is outside of their remit, and the burden is not theirs to bear or at least not theirs to bear alone. The only way to continue to narrow the gap in achievement between children raised in poverty and their more advantaged peers is for schools, parents and communities to realise the burden and the responsibility rests with all of us. These ideas are brought together to show how revamping our ideas about schooling, education and learning can lead to a situation in which the achievement gap may be, if not entirely closed, then significantly narrowed.

The final chapter sums up the ones which have preceded it. It highlights interventions around parental engagement which have been shown to support children’s learning. There is a short discussion of the problems which exist around the literature base, and then the chapter moves on to make recommendations for policy, for schools and for communities.

Parents – an inclusive term

Throughout this work, we use the term ‘parents’ as a sort of shorthand: children have been clear in research that a wide range of adults can have a significant impact on their learning (Adelman 1992, Siraj-Blatchford 2010). By the term, ‘parent’, here, we mean any adult who has a significant caring role in relation to a child, particularly those with an interest or involvement in the child’s learning. (The non-gendered nature of this term will also be examined).

Caveat

It is as well to begin this work with a caveat. Throughout this book, the reader will encounter a large number of categorisations of human behaviour, parenting styles, academic achievement, attitudes toward learning and so on. These are useful ways of understanding the ways people interact with each other and with institutions. However, such discussions are only really of use on a macro level and will rarely, if ever, apply exactly to any given individual. As an example, a family might have most of the characteristics associated with authoritative parenting (warmth, clear rules, etc.) and yet miss out on others (such as treating children in ways which are appropriate to their ages, e.g., still using babyish language with a toddler). Categories function very well as boxes to contain conceptualisations of group behaviour but should be seen as descriptions of individuals (who are not, as a rule, box shaped).

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements and dedication
• List of illustrations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Learning, education and schooling – clarifying the terms
• 3 Premise 1: the achievement gap is significant
• 4 Premise 2: the achievement gap is systemic and malleable
• 5 Parental engagement for all parents
• 6 Premise 3: parental engagement with children’s learning offers the best lever to narrow the achievement gap
• 7 Narrowing the gap through parental engagement
• 8 Recommendations and conclusion
• Appendix 1: Glossary
• Appendix 2: Practical suggestions for schools
• Appendix 3: Barriers and their relationship to research
• References
• Index