The Core Knowledge Blog

Thoughtful heresy over at eduflack, who blogs about a new Washington Post poll on DC schools. Seven in 10 surveyed believe the District’s public schools are inadequate. Dog bites man. But more than three out of four point a finger at parents. And eduflack, bless him, has the temerity to agree.

Heresy, because to suggest that parents bear even some of the responsibility for poor school performance is to risk a charge of “blaming the victim” in many quarters. We all know that great schools and great teachers make a difference. However to insist a school can overcome all of the effects of parental disengagement or neglect is, in my experience, setting it up to unfairly be judged a failure. The Post poll shows that the consumers of education, parents, are ahead of the education establishment on this score.

“True parental involvement has mothers, fathers, grandparents, and such involved in the learning process. They know what’s happening in the classroom,” writes eduflack. “They ensure their kids are doing their homework. They identify learning experiences in the home or in the community. They take responsibility for their kids, and hold them accountable for maximizing their school hours….Many of the problems our schools face — rising drop-out rates, limited reading and math skills, truancy, etc. — can all be attributed, in part, to parent apathy.”

In my classroom, one of my best students was the daughter of an indifferent mother who had nine children with seven different fathers. One of my most difficult students was the son of a highly engaged, devoutly religious mother who worked herself to exhaustion to support her family, yet still found time to come to school whenever asked. But these were the outliers. I’m not suggesting there’s a cause and effect relationship between student achievement or classroom behavior and parental involvement. The race is not always to the swift, but it is the way to bet.

This “gut” assessment on my part is roughly validated by an under-discussed and appreciated report from ETS, The Family: America’s Smallest School, which examined child care quality, parental involvement in schools, student absences and home environments. The research identified four factors—single parent families, parents reading to young children every day, hours spent watching television, and the frequency of school absences—which “taken together, account for about two-thirds of the large differences among states in National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) eighth-grade reading scores.”

In his post, Eduflack alluded to having performed recent focus groups with eighth and ninth graders on dropping out. “Student after student said they wouldn’t drop out because their parents won’t let them,” he noted. Presumably this was done on behalf of one of his PR clients. I hope he’ll have more to say on this research as soon as he’s able. I’m intrigued.