David Brooks writes today about a new book about American education and parenting skills. The author argues that family environment is a much better determinant of future success than anything a school can dish out.
In “Schools, Skills and Synapses,” Heckman probes the sources of that decline. It’s not falling school quality, he argues. Nor is it primarily a shortage of funding or rising college tuition costs. Instead, Heckman directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years.
Heckman points out that big gaps in educational attainment are present at age 5. Some children are bathed in an atmosphere that promotes human capital development and, increasingly, more are not. By 5, it is possible to predict, with depressing accuracy, who will complete high school and college and who won’t.
I.Q. matters, but Heckman points to equally important traits that start and then build from those early years: motivation levels, emotional stability, self-control and sociability. He uses common sense to intuit what these traits are, but on this subject economists have a lot to learn from developmental psychologists.
Brooks always writes about stuff that we’re talking about at home, which is one of the reasons that I regularly read him.
We live in an economically and socially diverse neighborhood and packed in rather tight to each other, so it makes comparing/contrasting rather easy. During the summertime, when the parents are entirely on their own, the differences are even more stark.
In some homes, the kids are sent to summer camps or swim lessons early in the morning. The parents establish routines, keep bedtime hours, supervise outside play, and take the kids on trips to mall or the beach or the swim club. In other families, the academically struggling kids are allowed to skip summer school classes, are in no activities, sleep until noon, and never leave their homes. There are no books in the house. They curse up a storm. They have hours and hours of free time where they absentmindedly throw rocks at a fence. Broken toys litter the backyard and new ones are provided freely. The kids power up on sugar cereal all day. The parents are overwhelmed and stressed. In one case, a parent was told by the school that her nine year old will never go to college, so she’s entirely given up.
And, yes, it is very clear who’s going to college and who’s going to end up as a pole dancer.
What’s to be done about those gaps in parenting skills? The parents aren’t crack addicts, so social services will never get involved. This is where the schools have to step in. They have to level out these differences. All day nursery schools. Free books for toddlers.Towns need to offer parenting classes and organize babysitting cooperatives. Churches have to organize parent groups.
Brooks says that this book offers evidence that family environment has deteriorated over the past 40 years, but doesn’t give more info. I’m going to have to check out this book.
Apt. 11d 
Yes, I’m curious about the claim about the deterioration of family life over the last 40 years. It sounds (a lot) like many of the claims that globalize and idealize the white, middle-class family of the 1950s and then bemoan everything since.
Montessori made great strides with kids who weren’t expected to succeed academically, based on their family background. But she also was convinced that it was all about separating the kids from their families: she wanted them in school 12 hours a day, if possible, so as to break the cycle of poverty. Schools need to reach out to parents, educating them about parenting while also educating the kids. I wonder sometimes if this isn’t part of the function of homework, these days, although I’m not convinced that the way most schools are assigning homework is the way to go about this — or that the way many if not most jobs are configured allows parents to be as involved in homework as they (and the schools) might like.
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Wait, did Goldin and Katz in their book, “The Race Between Education and Technology,” blame the family environment while exculpating the schools? I don’t think they did, but apparently the Heckman report does.
“The Race” blames the rising inequality on a slowdown in educational attainment. I don’t think it attributes this slowdown solely to families, nor does it have much praise for our educational system. However, I have not read it, so I cannot say for sure.
Since I do not believe our public schools are doing such a great job with educating our children now, I do not want to give them more tax money to take over parenting responsibilities. I believe this is similar to the “Bolder, Broader” approach championed by Randi Weingarten that is being discussed over here.
Ken DeRosa wants evidence that these proposals work.
The extant evidence suggests that pre-k programs will have no or a negligible effect on academic performance.
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A block is a community too. We can ask our kids to befriend those kids, bring them into our book-filled houses, chat with them, take them places. It’s hard, but it’s the only thing that might really work for a few.
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A block is a community too. We can ask our kids to befriend those kids, bring them into our book-filled houses, chat with them, take them places. It’s hard, but it’s the only thing that might really work for a few.
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A block is a community too. We can ask our kids to befriend those kids, bring them into our book-filled houses, chat with them, take them places. It’s hard, but it’s the only thing that might really work for a few.
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And who schleps the kids to swim lessons in the morning? June Cleaver?
Or to summer camp that only lasts from 9:00 to 1:00 or (at most 3:00)?
I go to work for a living.
My kid goes to sleep when she is tired b/c I am too tired for the gigantic battle of the bedtimes. Sometimes she outlasts me.
She told me she didn’t want to be over-scheduled and quit half of her activities. She says she needs time to relax and play. If that means sitting around and staring at the sky, fine with me.
How do you know the kids throwing rocks are not studying projectile trajectories?
I wonder if the lax parents you write about are tired from working 2, 3 or 4 jobs between them?
For the record, my sister and I were raised by a single mother who left us alone during the summer while she went to work. We didn’t own many books because we used the library. We did not get schlepped to swim lessons (though I guess we did that when she was a married SAHM).
We went to college. Big sis became a dot come gadzillionaire and I became a PhD scientist in a govt lab. We were latchkey kids that didn’t go to camp and we watched TV.
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Here in the UK, Diane Reay has written compellingly about how the increased ‘scholarisation’ of the home (e.g. demanding that parents be very involved in their children’s education) tends to penalise children with low skilled and/or poorly educated parents. There is more homework these days, and parents are expected to be ever more involved in their children’s school work and progress. For parents like you and I and those who read your blog, doing this is not only pretty straightforward, but it fits into our ‘middle class’ notions of what a good parent does. (I think Lareau writes about this in the US.) The only real barrier we face in this process is time, if we are two earner or single parent households. (Okay, maybe bit of a math phobia here and there.) For parents who did poorly at school and associate education with personal failure and shame, the barriers to helping their kids with school are huge. Thus like so many other educational trends and interventions, this one actually increases rather than decreases inequality. As you say, this is where the schools have to step in.
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Schools shouldn’t be let off scott-free. In some cases, they prefer the less involved parents. Less involved parents don’t complain or demand that standards are met. There’s a lot of self-fulfilling prophesy going on in schools, too.
Grace – I have a flexible schedule in the summer, but one neighbor works full time and still keeps her kid busy in the summer. She sends her kid to a full day camp. The uninvolved parent that I know is a SAHM. She doesn’t take the kids to the library. The kids don’t leave the property, even though they paid for a summer at the town pool. The uninvolved parent can’t get her act together to schlep four kids to the pool. The bored kids that I’m observed are miserable. They sit on my porch waiting for my kid to come home. Just minutes ago, they were accused of vandalizing another neighbor’s car.
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It all comes down to this: Who you are is more important than what you do, in your child’s life. All the swimming lessons, trips to the zoo, and books won’t make a difference, unless the value for academic, moral, economic success is upheld. That’s nto an easy thing to quantify. But it’s obvious when it’s there.
As a high school teacher, I think the only real way for those lost kids, who do not have educated parents and can be marked as “Will Not Graduate”, is to have a meaningful relationship with someone who cares and can hold them accountable.
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Laura, do you live on my block?
I’m joking of course but as a professor, I have a more relaxed schedule in the summer but my kids are at a day care/camp each day for part of the day, we go swimming in the afternoons, and we come home to the SAHM’s kids sitting on our porch as well. We also keep bedtimes consistent, take trips each weekend (if only to a local pond to look for frogs or the like) but we try to see something different on a walk or on a bike or close by our house. Then we come home to the same kids sitting on our porch. Every day, they stay in our cul-de-sac, not allowed to even go outside those limits. Every single day. I’d go crazy and the kids do. We play with them, we invite them in, we talk about books and the like but we also want to spend time with our kids too. We have to walk them home at night when we’re ready to go in, otherwise they would never leave. They’re not bad kids, they just need more than their mom (and mostly absent dad) is willing to give them. I don’t know if they’ll graduate high school but college isn’t in their future.
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What happened to the days when a group of kids together found things to do? Honestly, I do the active parenting thing, because everyone else in our neighborhood does it. But, I think the world would be a much better place if my kid could just have a few other kids like her to hang out with all the time. She has her brother, and they spent the entire weekend playing (no visits or trips or ponds, though there was a brief break to go to a swimming pool).
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There is more homework these days, and parents are expected to be ever more involved in their children’s school work and progress.
The schools should assign only homework that kids can do on their own, like the good old days when I was a kid. There is too much teaching that goes on outside of school, either by paid tutors or by parents, because the curriculum and instructional methods are failing us. Yes, this contributes to the growing inequality.
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In some homes, the kids are sent to summer camps or swim lessons early in the morning. The parents establish routines, keep bedtime hours, supervise outside play, and take the kids on trips to mall or the beach or the swim club. In other families, the academically struggling kids are allowed to skip summer school classes, are in no activities, sleep until noon, and never leave their homes. There are no books in the house. They curse up a storm. They have hours and hours of free time where they absentmindedly throw rocks at a fence. Broken toys litter the backyard and new ones are provided freely. The kids power up on sugar cereal all day.
Honestly, both extremes sound pretty awful, and having read Heckman’s paper (it’s not a book) I can assure you that the last thing he’s advocating is over-scheduled 8-year-olds. Enforcing bedtimes when there’s no school the next morning or disallowing autonomous play has precious little to do with future academic success.
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You can download Heckman’s paper here.
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There is too much teaching that goes on outside of school, either by paid tutors or by parents, because the curriculum and instructional methods are failing us.
Have you ever had a grade school kid? (A) First, they don’t think to do homework on their own, so if you don’t remind them, it won’t happen. (B) Then, they open the homework folder and, even though they learned the skill that day, there’s one word on the instruction sheet that they can’t understand, and they can’t go on until they are sure they understand everything. (“Solve the equation? My teacher says ‘Solve the problem!’) (C) Then, they do the assignment, and show it to you, and you realize that they weren’t paying close enough attention to the problems, and added all the numbers together, even though half of the problems were subtraction problems. (D) So then make her go back read the problems again and then she gets most of them right.
Now, I understand that some parents will go on and do (E) correct the few problems they got wrong to make sure that every homework paper has 100% right, or (F) hires a tutor to put their kids way above grade level, but that straw mom doesn’t change the fact that there’s a huge achievement gap between parents who do (A)-(D) and those who don’t.
Honestly, both extremes sound pretty awful, and having read Heckman’s paper (it’s not a book) I can assure you that the last thing he’s advocating is over-scheduled 8-year-olds.
Again, any 8 year olds running around? If you keep the kids on a normal schedule, you can have breakfast, a few hours of supervised play in the yard, a trip to the pool or the mall or whatever the planned activity is, and you are home right after lunch.
What you read as “over-scheduled 8-year-old” I read as, “Aw, jeez, now it’s 1:30. What am I going to do with the kids the whole rest of the day!” Well, by now they are probably whining for the Backyardigans, so I let them watch an episode from the DVR while I get some stuff done, and by the time I get back to them a episode of “Blue’s Clues” is finishing up and I say, “NO MORE TV!” and they complain a little, but its 2:30 and I tell them they’ll just have to amuse themselves without the TV for a while. And then there’s quiet, unstructured from the basement until about 3:15, when there is a plaintive request for “Webkinz” and then I have to decide if they’ve had enough running around outside time to let them sit at the computer, or if we’ve got to plan another trip somewhere . . .
I think the “overplanner” is another straw mom argument. Sure, some parents go over the top with lessons every evening after a full-day day camp, but most of us are trying to cobble together enough fun/ enriching activities to keep the kids our of our hair for a few hours every day without rotting their brains all summer.
With three girls, I’m always taking one or the other somewhere for somewhere, but the only one who is overscheduled is ME. The other two are flopping around having a merry time in the random sand-pile while the oldest has softball, or wandering through the park while the middle is in dance class. For most parents who work and take care of the kids, overscheduling is a physical impossibility.
But there’s a huge difference between the kids whose parents work to fit some planning into every day, and those who sleep late and hang out on the porch.
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Garrison Keillor talks about Lake Wobegone, where all of the children are above average. Here in the United States, half of the children are below average (trust me on this, okay?). Many of these below-average kids are born to parents who are themselves dull, and who don’t provide a stimulating home environment. Now that there’s not much work down at the tire plant (and now that school leavers who might want this work are often out-competed for the low-credentials-required jobs by recent immigrants who had the spunk to walk across the Arizona desert), they don’t have much chance of getting a comfortable life.
Klitgaard was writing about educational outcomes for kids who come into schools with different skill/intelligence levels, about ten-fifteen years ago, and as I remember he found results were much better for kids who came into the system with less with precisely the ‘drill-and-kill’ pedagogy which middle class parents are so eager to avoid. This suggests tracking, with different teaching styles for the different classes.
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“This is where schools have to step in.” What? Perhaps this is where the very deterioration that you are talking about comes from. The government cannot take over the rearing of the child and expect that to be the long term solution. They need to support parents and help them to improve.
For example in Hartford Public Schools, students are offered free dental and optical care coordinated while they are in school. No parent attends. The child may have clean teeth and glasses, but if the family moves will it be kept up? When those children have children, will they just expect that the government should take care of these issues?
While I would agree that the support of the family and the richness of family life contributes to the development of a child, I disagree that duplicating this can be done artificially. We would do better to improve the family life and encourage parents. This will not only help the current generation, but will translate to the generations to come.
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We would do better to improve the family life and encourage parents.
Of course this would be the ideal, but the home is by far the most difficult place to effectively pull policy levers.
On the theme of parenting, here [http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10283]is a very well measured and informative Prospect magazine essay on the role of parenting in character formation, and the role of character in public policy issues.
Snippet:
Stephen Scott, professor of child health and behaviour at King’s College London, has conducted a range of studies showing how the behaviour of parents influences the life trajectories of their children, even when genetic predispositions are taken into account. “There’s an interaction between your genetic predisposition and the way you turn out according to the way you’re raised,” says Scott. “When it comes to being antisocial, aggressive, stealing and lying, the interaction is a big one. If you have poor self-control and a rather twitchy, irritable temperament and you’re brought up in a harsh way, it’s bad news. For that group, the rate of criminality aged 17 is about 40 per cent. But if you have that twitchy character and you’re brought up in a reasonably calm, soothing way—your parents don’t overreact, they let you run around in the park after school—you will do well.”
If low-income parents are doing less well on this front—as it seems they are—the question of how poverty interacts with parenting becomes important. Scott is emphatic here: “Financial poverty is a factor, but not a central one,” he says. “I am fond of saying poverty of what? And actually it seems to be poverty of the parent-child experience… that leads to poor child outcomes rather than poverty of a material kind.” Consistent parental love and discipline is the motor of the character production line, and not all children are lucky enough to receive it.
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You mention full-day nursery schools. In Ontario we have something called Junior Kindergarten, which – at risk of explaining that which is self-evident – is the year preceding Kindergarten. Kids age 3.8 years and over are eligible to register. They’re grouped in with “senior” kindergarteners, at least in our school, although the teaching team does have different plans for them, and the JK day is not as curriculum-based.
The Ontario government announced last year that full-day kindergarten will begin in the fall of 2010. Based on the program the government is studying as model (it’s at our school, in fact), I suspect the full day will be optional, not mandatory.
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“What happened to the days when a group of kids together found things to do?”
That’s what Laura’s neighbor kids were doing with that car.
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Here are some other traditional activities for unattended school age children: fireworks, putting foil booties on cats, playing with matches, using a magnifying glass on an ant hill and breaking the remaining windows of abandoned houses.
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Are we confusing neglected with unattended here? Because in the neighborhood where I live there are quite a number of pre-teens who don’t go to summer camps and yet somehow manage to avoid delinquent behavior. And this is an urban area. With San Francisco real estate prices I guess their parents just can’t afford camp or other activities, at least not for the whole summer.
I would guess that family makes the difference here . . . it seems the children from the more stable families can handle themselves better with less supervision. You travel a bit south and east of here where the neighborhood changes and it’s a different story.
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I occasionally got parked in an empty house for a couple of hours. Judging from the stuff I remember enjoying (Sesame Street), I expect this started when I was around five. As a little kid, I remember being really fed up with how little children’s programming was on (3-2-1 Contact, cartoons, etc.), and how many soap operas and talk shows were. There were also experiments involving grandma’s microwave (we didn’t have one at home) and attempts to make Kool Aid, not realizing that it is necessary to add sugar. I also discovered that grandma’s baking chocolate was not as good as it looked and smelled. Later on, as bigger kids, my sister and I cherished our opportunities to flip on MTV (no cable at home) or the Canadian “Good Rocking Tonight” on CBC, as long as adults were safely out of the picture. That was pretty much the extent of my unauthorized behavior, but I was always expecting parents or grandparents back any minute. There was one potentially dangerous episode, but that was while family was at home with company, the kids (home team and visitors) were all outside, and the visiting children turned out to have firecrackers.
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MAK – Yes, I agree. I think that my initial post was too rushed and I did conflate neglected and unattended. I might delete this post, because I’ve been regretting it all weekend.
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“Free books for toddlers.”
Books don’t read themselves, unfortunately.
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Balancing home, work and school is so difficult to do. Thanks for providing this information.
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