Parenting, Poverty and Academic Success

Photo from Cool Health Tips  

"How About Better Parents?"  That is what Thomas Friedman suggests in one of his most recent editorials in the New York Times.

In recent years, we’ve been treated to reams of op-ed articles about how we need better teachers in our public schools and, if only the teachers’ unions would go away, our kids would score like Singapore’s on the big international tests. There’s no question that a great teacher can make a huge difference in a student’s achievement, and we need to recruit, train and reward more such teachers. But here’s what some new studies are also showing: We need better parents. Parents more focused on their children’s education can also make a huge difference in a student’s achievement.

He uses research from the often-cited Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which decided to look at factors from outside of the classroom to see what made successful students.  There were three major findings they found:

• Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all.


• The performance advantage among students whose parents read to them in their early school years is evident regardless of the family’s socio-economic background.


• Parents’ engagement with their 15-year-olds is strongly associated with better performance in PISA.

Friedman also cites a study by the Center for Public Education, and the Center's Director, Patte Barth, to support this.

“Monitoring homework; making sure children get to school; rewarding their efforts and talking up the idea of going to college. These parent actions are linked to better attendance, grades, test scores, and preparation for college,” Barth wrote. “The study found that getting parents involved with their children’s learning at home is a more powerful driver of achievement than parents attending P.T.A. and school board meetings, volunteering in classrooms, participating in fund-raising, and showing up at back-to-school nights.”

To say that good parenting is important in the academic quality of a young person may seem blatantly obvious to some.  But the reality is that it is probably the most important component in a young person's success.

This simple truth often get's overshadowed in our current national education debate by issues of teacher quality, and how those evil teacher unions want to keep bad teachers in our schools.  That is not to say that good teachers, or good schools for that matter, can't make a difference.  I would even argue that there are probably some things we could do to improve the way teachers are assessed, and there are reforms that can be made to the way schools manage tenure.

But that quote about how "there is no substitute for a good teacher" can be applied tenfold to a good parent.  All teachers know this to be true.  That doesn't mean they give up on student's who struggle or refuse to work.  Often times, they will make extra efforts to reach out to those students.  This isn't to suggest that there aren't good parents who have children that perform poorly in school, or vice versa.  But that general correlation between good parenting and academic quality becomes blatantly obvious whenever a teacher makes a phone call home to a parent, or when parent-teacher conferences come around (if the parent even picks up the phone or shows up to conferences at all). 

Going back to the editorial, something that Friedman barely touches on is the issue of poverty.

Yes, students from more well-to-do households are more likely to have more involved parents. “However,” the PISA team found, “even when comparing students of similar socioeconomic backgrounds, those students whose parents regularly read books to them when they were in the first year of primary school score 14 points higher, on average, than students whose parents did not.”

I won't say that Friedman was wrong to gloss over poverty in his editorial, because the point of the piece was about good parenting.  Yes, good parenting is a more important factor in a student's academic success than what type of socioeconomic background that student comes from.  But what type of parent a person can be to their child is highly influences by their socioeconomic status.

 

Image from The Affordable Housing Institute

 
There are numerous factors that play into this: Do the children live in a one-parent or two parent household?  Is one or both of the parents working multiple jobs with late hours?  Do they have time to read to their children (or taken them to a museums or get them involved in other enrichment and supplemental activities)?  Are the parents homeless (thus putting the emphasis of their time on finding food and shelter rather than what book are they going to read)?

None of this is to suggest that an adult living in a lower-socioeconomic background can't be an excellent parent, or a child from a lower-socioeconomic background can't be an excellent student.  But the conditions of poverty make parental and academic success a lot harder to achieve.  This cannot be underestimated.  I would like to close this post by citing a post I wrote back in February on the issue of poverty and academic success of students in American schools:

 The truth of the matter is that, all things considered, American schools are no worse than most countries around the world.  If anything, our schools as they exist in many neighborhoods are just as capable of outperforming schools in Finland, China, or any other industrialized nation.  There certainly are things that our country can do better to improve the quality of schools and education as a whole.  But the main reason that a school district usually struggles to begin with is poverty.  The reason that inner-city school districts struggles with lower test scores, higher drop-out rates, violence, increased teen pregnancy, and so on is because of the poverty that most of the students and their parents live in.  Everyone knows this is the case, and has known it for years.  For all of the well-being and economic success our country has had compared to the rest of the world, poverty (and all of the societal problems that are linked to it) is the great albatross around America's neck.