Parenting, Poverty and Academic Success

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"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.

To Those Who Think American Teachers Are Lazy

Here is a chart that documents who pays teachers the best for their time in Industrialized nations.

Photo From GOOD

As you can tell, American teachers work the most hours, but have one of the lowest salaries for teachers.  As a public school teacher, I knew that the criticism of American public school teachers that has come out of the mouths of pundits in the past year are not in line with reality.  Here is proof.

Poverty, PISA, and the Myth About Public Schools in America and Around the World

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Recently in his Class Struggle blog, Jay Matthews has taken on two conventional myths about public education.  The first myth is that at one time, American schools were great and in recent years, they have greatly declined.  The truth is, as Matthews cites Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institute, is that we were never that great, nor are we now that bad.  American schools have always been mediocre.  We have based traditionally based the success of American schools on test scores like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).  On such test scores, American students have always scored less than stellar on such comparative tests, even as far back as the 1960s.  While this is not really a good thing, this does not suggest that America, or American schools, are inferior to others around the world.

For the past 50 years, the United States has been one of the world's superpowers.  We have been the world's dominant country in both economics and military power.  While I would argue that there are better ways to measure the success and well-being of a country, it certainly can't be said that because we have never ranked that great on standardized tests, that we are are some how an inferior nation that struggles compared to the rest of the industrialized world. 

Picture from Finland Educational Guide 

The second myth that Matthew's looks at is that other countries around the world have superior schools because they test better.  These countries include schools such as China, India, and the country many consider to have the top education system in the world, Finland.  While there is certainly a lot to laud about Finnish schools, their superiority in test scores is actually something that is of great debate currently in Finland.  

Loveless is less dismissive of Finland, which has been scoring well for several years. But he says Americans who love the Finnish model of paying teachers higher salaries, decentralizing authority over educational decisions and eschewing high-stakes standardized testing should tune into the debate the Finns are having about their schools. 

Finnish children were doing well on international tests before those reforms were adopted. That suggests that cultural and societal factors might be the more likely reason for their success. Many Finnish mathematicians say that the country is catering too much to PISA, which emphasizes word problems and practical applications of math, and neglecting to prepare students for college math. 

Loveless says more than 200 university mathematicians in Finland petitioned the education ministry to complain of students increasingly arriving in their classrooms poorly prepared. "Knowledge of fractions and algebra were singled out as particularly weak areas," Loveless says. 

 So the reason that Finland tests so well on international scores is because there education system is geared towards testing well.  That alone doesn't make their schools more superior than other countries, and in point of fact, is the topic of great debate in Finland.  This same point was made by both Diane Ravitch and the Wall Street Journal a month ago about China's schools.  As Ravitch writes:

In The Wall Street Journal, Jiang Xueqin, the deputy principal of Peking University High School, lamented that those high scores were purchased by sacrificing such qualities as independence, curiosity, and individuality. Even educators in Shanghai, he wrote, recognize that the singular devotion to test scores was "producing competent mediocrity."  

 In the quote from Matthews above on Finnish schools, I highlighted a sentence that he wrote, but really didn't explain.  That being about "cultural and societal factors" as one explanation why Finland does so well in schools.  What are those factors exactly?  Well, I believe Ravitch stumbled upon the problem in her piece:

The other salient factor about U.S. performance on international tests is that we have an exceptional and shameful rate of child poverty. Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution says that more than 20 percent of our children live in poverty, and she expects that proportion to increase to nearly 25 percent by 2014. As poverty deepens, Sawhill writes, we should be strengthening the safety net that protects the lives of the poorest. Robert Reich, the former treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, says that income inequality is higher now than it has been in many decades. Most of the nations (and cities) that compete on PISA have far lower child-poverty rates. 

In recent years, we have become accustomed to hearing prominent reformers like Secretary Duncan, Michelle Rhee, and Joel Klein say that reference to poverty is just making excuses for bad teachers and bad schools. But there is plenty of evidence that poverty affects students' readiness to learn. It affects their health, their nutrition, their attendance, and their motivation. Being hungry and homeless distracts students and injures their health; living in an environment where drugs and violence are commonplace affects children's interest in academics. Living in communities where many stores and homes are boarded up, and where incarceration rates are very high, affects children's sense of possibility and their willingness to plan for the future. 

Researchers for the National Association for Secondary School Principals disaggregated the PISA results by income and made some stunning discoveries. Take a look at this link ("PISA: It's Poverty Not Stupid"). It shows that American students in schools with low poverty rates were first in the world when they were compared with students in nations with comparably low poverty levels. Thus, the picture painted by doomsayers about American education is false in this respect. We have many outstanding schools and students, but our overall performance is dragged down by the persistence of poverty. Poverty depresses school achievement because it hurts children, families, and communities.

Picture from China Smack 

 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.

I find it interesting that so-called education reformers believe the key to fighting poverty in inner-cities today is battling teacher unions, funding charter schools over public schools, and narrowing the curriculum to focus mainly on reading and math test scores.  While I am sure most of them have good intentions in their actions, their policies will only make things worse for our country.  They are hurting public schools in inner cities, and treating them as if they are the source of so many problems.  True, inner city schools have serious issues, but it is not public schools as a whole that is the source.  Wealthier, suburban districts with low poverty rates don't seem to have the same problems that these school districts have, and those schools have teacher unions, and government regulation.  It seems that so much money and energy that the reformers spend on fighting unions and opening charter schools could go to the root of the problem to begin with.  There are better ways to improve public schools and fight poverty than the current conventional thinking by reformers.