The Core Knowledge Blog

Want to see improvements in education?  Start insisting that your children fully apply themselves in school, counsels Daniel Akst in the Wall Street Journal, in an essay that will surely be clipped, copied and passed out on curriculum nights and at parent teacher conferences.  “Let’s face it,” he writes, “more than budgets or bureaucrats, more than textbooks or teachers, parents are the reason that kids perform as they do in school.”

Citing a summary of research by the Michigan Department of Education, Akst notes “the most consistent predictors of children’s academic achievement and social adjustment are parent expectations of the child’s academic attainment and satisfaction with their child’s education at school. Parents of high-achieving students set higher standards for their children’s educational activities.”

He also shoots down the stereotype of the overachieving, upper-middle-class parent “bombarding their precious little ones in utero with Mozart and then hectoring teachers and hiring tutors right up until the Harvard application essay.”

Researchers at Brigham Young and the University of Michigan found that parents preferred teachers who make their children happy over those who emphasize academic achievement. My experience in a nonobsessive school district is consistent with this. Our family’s intense focus on learning is regarded warily by some parents, whose dissatisfactions with school are mostly about testing and creativity but never about a lack of foreign-language instruction or overall academic rigor. Indeed, teachers have reported watering down the public middle-school curriculum in response to parental complaints that it was too difficult.

The lack of demand for serious schooling is the least of it, writes Akst. Too many kids are growing up in homes with little emphasis on reading, learning or culture.  “Kids form lots of habits over the years, some good and some bad,” he concludes.  “What a nice surprise that doing well in school can be one of them.”

I suspect a lot of teachers will hurt their necks vigorously nodding in agreement with Akst’s essay.  There may not always be a cause-and-effect relationship between engaged parents and student performance.  But like the race going to the swift and the fight to the strong, it is the way to bet.