Parental Involvement Is Overrated
Most people, asked whether parental involvement benefits children academically, would say, “of course it does.” But evidence from our research suggests otherwise. In fact, most forms of parental involvement, like observing a child’s class, contacting a school about a child’s behavior, helping to decide a child’s high school courses, or helping a child with homework, do not improve student achievement. In some cases, they actually hinder it.
Over the past few years, we conducted an
extensive study of whether the depth of parental engagement in
children’s academic lives improved their test scores and grades. We
pursued this question because we noticed that while policy makers were
convinced that parental involvement positively affected children’s
schooling outcomes, academic studies were much more inconclusive.
Despite this, increasing parental involvement
has been one of the focal points of both President George W. Bush’s No
Child Left Behind Act and President Obama’s Race to the Top. Both
programs promote parental engagement as one remedy for persistent
socioeconomic and racial achievement gaps.
We analyzed longitudinal surveys of American
families that spanned three decades (from the 1980s to the 2000s) and
obtained demographic information on race and ethnicity, socioeconomic
status, the academic outcomes of children in elementary, middle and high
school, as well as information about the level of parental engagement
in 63 different forms.
What did we find? One group of parents,
including blacks and Hispanics, as well as some Asians (like Cambodians,
Vietnamese and Pacific Islanders), appeared quite similar to a second
group, made up of white parents and other Asians (like Chinese, Koreans
and Indians) in the frequency of their involvement. A common reason
given for why the children of the first group performed worse
academically on average was that their parents did not value education
to the same extent. But our research shows that these parents tried to
help their children in school just as much as the parents in the second
group.
Even the notion that kids do better in school
when their parents are involved does not stack up. After comparing the
average achievement of children whose parents regularly engage in each
form of parental involvement to that of their counterparts whose parents
do not, we found that most forms of parental involvement yielded no
benefit to children’s test scores or grades, regardless of racial or
ethnic background or socioeconomic standing.
In fact, there were more instances in which
children had higher levels of achievement when their parents were less
involved than there were among those whose parents were more involved.
Even more counterintuitively: When involvement does seem to matter, the
consequences for children’s achievement are more often negative than
positive.
When involvement did benefit kids
academically, it depended on which behavior parents were engaging in,
which academic outcome was examined, the grade level of the child, the
racial and ethnic background of the family and its socioeconomic
standing. For example, 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). Regularly
reading to elementary school children appears to benefit reading
achievement for white and Hispanic children but it is associated with
lower reading achievement for black children. Policy makers should not
advocate a one-size-fits-all model of parental involvement.
What about when parents work directly with
their children on learning activities at home? When we examined whether
regular help with homework had a positive impact on children’s academic
performance, we were quite startled by what we found. Regardless of a
family’s social class, racial or ethnic background, or a child’s grade
level, consistent homework help almost never improved test scores or
grades. Most parents appear to be ineffective at helping their children
with homework. Even more surprising to us was that when parents
regularly helped with homework, kids usually performed worse. One
interesting exception: The group of Asians that included Chinese, Korean
and Indian children appeared to benefit from regular help with
homework, but this benefit was limited to the grades they got during
adolescence; it did not affect their test scores.
Our findings also suggest that the idea that
parental involvement will address one of the most salient and
intractable issues in education, racial and ethnic achievement gaps, is
not supported by the evidence. This is because our analyses show that
most parental behavior has no benefit on academic performance. While
there are some forms of parental involvement that do appear to have a
positive impact on children academically, we find at least as many
instances in which more frequent involvement is related to lower
academic performance.
As it turns out, the list of what generally
works is short: expecting your child to go to college, discussing
activities children engage in at school (despite the complications we
mentioned above), and requesting a particular teacher for your child.
Do our findings suggest that parents are not
important for children’s academic success? Our answer is no. We believe
that parents are critical for how well children perform in school, just
not in the conventional ways that our society has been promoting. The
essential ingredient is for parents to communicate the value of
schooling, a message that parents should be sending early in their
children’s lives and that needs to be reinforced over time. But this
message does not need to be communicated through conventional behavior,
like attending PTA meetings or checking in with teachers.
When the federal government issues mandates
on the implementation of programs that increase parental involvement,
schools often encourage parents to spend more time volunteering, to
attend school events, to help their children with homework and so forth.
There is a strong sentiment in this country that parents matter in
every respect relating to their children’s academic success, but we need
to let go of this sentiment and begin to pay attention to what the
evidence is telling us.
Conventional wisdom holds that since there is
no harm in having an involved parent, why shouldn’t we suggest as many
ways as possible for parents to participate in school? This conventional
wisdom is flawed. Schools should move away from giving the blanket
message to parents that they need to be more involved and begin to focus
instead on helping parents find specific, creative ways to communicate
the value of schooling, tailored to a child’s age. Future research
should investigate how parental involvement can be made more effective,
but until then, parents who have been less involved or who feel
uncertain about how they should be involved should not be stigmatized.
What should parents do? They should set the stage and then leave it.