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The Biggest Predictor of Student Achievement
Close ties between parental involvement and school success
by Martha Brockenbrough
encarta.msn.com/encnet/departments/elementary/
When I volunteered to spend half a day each week in my daughter's kindergarten class, I thought I was doing a nice thing for the school.
Sure, it was tough. I had a two-year-old who needed to be kept entertained while I made photocopies, helped with reading, writing, and math, and checked scalps for lice.
What I didn't really realize, though, was that the person who would benefit most from my presence in the classroom was me.
I'm not talking about the shiny, happy feeling people get when they do community service. That glow was definitely gone by the day I found myself wearing rubber gloves and poking at kids' scalps with a cootie stick.
Rather, I'm talking about what I learned about schools, about my child, and about what parents need to do to make sure our kids have all the opportunities they'll need to compete in an increasingly global world.
Though I'm sure my understanding will continue to evolve as my kids advance through the class ranks, the experience last year was enough to make me formulate two principles about parental involvement in schools.
1. There's no such thing as a universally good or bad school.
2. Parents have at least as much to do with school quality as teachers do.
What makes a good school?
When schools are good, everyone benefits--even if there are people who don't see that. They're the ones who write letters to the editor saying, "I chose not to have kids. Why should I have to pay taxes to educate other people's spawn?"
It's pretty easy to dismiss that, though. Whether you have kids or don't, you will at some point be dependent on people who are now waist-high and chock-full of baby teeth. They will someday be your doctors, your soldiers, and your car mechanics, among other things. Equally important, their wages will be taxed to pay for your Social Security benefits. Since everyone stands to gain from an educated community, everyone needs to pitch in.
For parents, the stakes are probably the highest. This is because the people we love most, our kids, depend on getting a good education for their later success in life.
Having "good schools" is a fine starting point. What defines a good school is something much more complex, though. At the high school level, one formula used by a major magazine takes the number of advanced placement (AP) and/or International Baccalaureate tests and divides it by the number of students who graduate.
This has always puzzled me. For starters, this looks at high schools as if they're in a vacuum. But clearly, a high school fed by great elementary and middle schools is going to have an advantage.
Also, the idea behind ranking schools according to tests taken and graduation rates makes sense in only one area. It's increasingly important to have a college degree. A high school diploma and good score on an AP exam are reasonable indications a student is ready for college--at least academically.
Beyond that, though, the measure falls a bit flat. If a school wanted to score high on those measures, it could do so by encouraging kids to do what they're told, memorize, and perform like robots--instead of learning to think on their own, pursue individual, sometimes idiosyncratic passions, and work well in groups. All of these things are at least as important in life as displaying a body of knowledge in a timed test.
Even at the lower school levels, schools are very often judged by the test scores of their students.
A reliable mark?
When I was researching what made a school good, one professor told me that test scores were the most reliable mark. Perhaps this is the case. It is how I chose my daughter's first elementary school. I looked at the scores, visited the schools with the best ones, and then chose the one that seemed like the closest fit.
With hindsight, though, and with the perspective of a parent who's more concerned with the fate of her daughter than the overall performance of the school, I don't think test scores tell the whole story.
Test scores can show some things: that the environment supports certain types of learning. But they have their limits.
For example, a school with lower-than-average test scores might be full of kids who don't speak English as a first language. Those kids might actually be learning a great deal, and, ultimately, might be at a huge advantage because they will be bilingual adults in a global economy.
But until they get caught up, they're at a big disadvantage when it comes to competing with kids who've spoken English their whole lives. The lower scores don't mean kids aren't learning, necessarily; they're just facing extra challenges that aren't reflected in standardized tests. I'd probably think twice before sending my child there, but I wouldn't consider the school a failure just because of the low scores.
When the fit isn't right
Another problem with judging a school by its test scores is that even great schools don't make a great fit for all kids. As I explained to my mother-in-law, who was crabby when my niece left one of Chicago's top-rated high schools, schools are a bit like clothing. You can have a dress made by the world's greatest fashion designer. But if it's not your size, or not your color, it's not going to work for you.
I had to remind myself of this when my five-year-old kindergartner did not thrive in her class. It didn't matter that she'd gone to a good preschool, had plenty of art, music, dance, and sports classes, ate healthy foods, and had supportive parents at home who sat with her while she did her homework.
Unlike some other kids in the class, she just wasn't fully engaged. I could see it myself in the time I spent volunteering there. She was in a world of her own. And when I asked her what she did in school, she said she couldn't remember. Worse, she told me she felt stupid.
What my child was good at didn't fit the formula the school was using to evaluate kids. Her quirky skills were invisible to her teacher, who had 22 other kids to manage. What this meant was that my daughter didn't have enough opportunities to shine, which diminished her enthusiasm for school. And from there, it spiraled downward.
The size of the class, which apparently was smaller than average for elementary school, also was a problem. My daughter, who's the opposite of a shy, retiring person, complained that the noise level in the room made it impossible to concentrate. I knew that the next year, when her class swelled to 30 students, things would only get worse.
As good as the school was on paper, in practice it wasn't a good match for my daughter, and so this year she will be going to a school with smaller classes and a different academic focus, and repeating kindergarten there.
What her experience taught me was that even a great school isn't great if it's not a fit for a particular student. I also learned that parents really have to pay attention to make sure our kids thrive in the classroom; sending them to a "good school" just isn't enough.
What parents can do to help kids succeed
The Phi Beta Kappa magazine published an article recently that summarized several studies investigating how we can improve "underperforming" schools, which are often defined as the ones that score below average on tests and show a below-average rate of improvement.
Of five studies that examined how schools got better, three cited parental involvement as essential, the article said.
Even when schools aren't underperforming, family support matters a lot. The U.S. Department of Education cites 30 years of research showing that parental involvement helps kids get higher grades and test scores, complete more homework, graduate in greater numbers, and enjoy school more.
A 1994 report by Anne Henderson and Nancy Berla, for example, compiled results of 66 studies and concluded that family involvement was the biggest predictor of student achievement, and that family involvement not only helped students, it also improved teacher morale, helped teachers earn higher ratings from students, and bolstered the reputation of the school in the community.
Whoa. It's the biggest predictor. In other words, a kid from a supportive family in a mediocre school will fare better than a kid with an indifferent family at a great school.
That's pretty eye-opening, but it definitely jibes with the feeling I got as a parent of a first-year elementary school student. Even though my daughter was at a great school, it took a lot of work on my part--involvement, as it were--to make sure she didn't sink.
What's family involvement?
But "family involvement" is a vague term. Does it mean dropping kids off on time? Joining the Parent-Teacher Association? Making food for a bake sale?
It's actually a lot more, and it requires a real mental shift.
A lot of parents--and I include myself here--thought the time-intensive part of parenting would end once the kids were out of diapers and in school. Au contraire.
You can't just pick a good school and drop your kids off, trusting that teachers will do their work and everything will end up hunky-dory. If I'd done this, my smart five-year-old would have ended up in real trouble. For kids to succeed, students, parents, and teachers have to work together.
I just got the back-to-school letter from my daughter's teacher, and it contained a good reminder: "As parents," she wrote, "you are your child's first teachers."
The way I see it, if we're going to point the finger at teachers, then we're the first ones to blame if our kids aren't doing well in school. It's harsh, yes. But no one else will care this much, and no one else can possibly have the same influence.
If we're going to succeed as teachers, we have to consider our involvement in our kids' education to be a daily thing, like watering a garden.
We have to ask them how school is going, and show them that their success is important to us. We have to support them as they do their homework, making sure they understand their assignments and complete them on time.
We also have to make sure they're learning what they need to, which means spending the time to make ourselves familiar with the classroom curriculum and academic goals. We also need to make sure they take in assignments, have permission slips for activities, and are ready to learn each day, which means feeding them (or signing them up for school breakfasts) and making sure they're well rested.
This sounds like a lot, but really, it's a bare minimum. Parents should also get to know their kids' teachers and attend back-to-school nights. It's even better when parents can spend time helping out in the classroom and at school events.
Building capacity
Less concrete, but no less important, is helping our kids build their capacity for work. One of the biggest differences between students in U.S. schools and higher-performing ones overseas is that kids in some other countries spend much more time studying than ours do.
As one teacher pointed out to me, you can have a great instructor for a class, but if the students don't work on their skills, they won't learn. On the other hand, even in a mediocre classroom, hardworking kids will learn.
Effort matters, and parents are in the best position to nurture this.
This, of course, requires that we put in the effort ourselves, which can be very difficult. After all, we're also supposed to do well on the job, take care of our homes, exercise, and make regular trips to the dentist. Even if we don't work outside the home, caring for children is grueling, and doesn't receive nearly enough respect. And single parents, bless them, have to do it all on their own.
So yeah, it's tough. But it makes a difference, and we can encourage ourselves, knowing our kids will thank us later.
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