Taking a deep breath. Gotta a major rant coming.
In the New York Times, the top most e-mailed article of the day is “Parental Involvement is Overrated” by Keith Robinson and Angel L. Harris. Robinson and Harris did a quantitative study on various types of parental involvement in schools, including 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. They found that these forms of parental involvement had no impact on a child’s grades or test scores. And, weirdly enough, in some cases, parental involvement was negatively correlated with grades and test scores.
Why is this article so popular? Well, some people have very little involvement in their kids’ education. Either their parenting mojo has burnt out by the time the kids get to school or they are simply working too hard to put in much time into their kids. The title of this article validates their behavior.
The study itself shows the limits of quantitative research. Many of their findings show very little understanding of the real interaction between schools and parents. Please, researchers, go into the schools and talk to people. It makes a huge difference. This study does real damage to our kids, and the researchers should be held responsible.
Parental involvement is a tricky variable. The researchers attempt to find methods of quantifying it, but I think they miss MASSIVE elements of parental involvement and its impact. Okay, let me back up and tell some stories.
I have been a parent with children in public schools for ten years. My children have been in three different school districts. My children have very different educational needs. Over this time, my kids have had good teachers and bad teachers. When they have good teachers, I write a letter to the superintendent that praises the teacher and gives very specific examples of how the teacher went beyond the call of duty. I hope that this letter will help a untenured teacher get tenure or grant an award to a tenured teacher.
When they have had bad teachers, I complain. Most times, my complaints go nowhere. There is no change in the teacher’s behavior, and there is no administrative solution to the problem. In fact, complaints are dangerous. It can piss off a teacher, who will take out his/her grievances on my kid. There may be some long term benefits for my particular kid. A principal might help by assigning my child to a better teacher the following year, but there is no certainty about this. Over the years, I have learned to complain very, very rarely.
In the previous school district, I was on the extreme end of the scale of parental involvement. As the lone complainer, my complaints were completely ignored. In this school district, I’m in the middle on the spectrum of parental involvement. There is a huge difference in how the administration reacts to parental complaints. I haven’t had to complain very often, because other parents do it for me. My kid benefits indirectly from other parents.
This fall, Jonah’s biology teacher went out on a maternity leave. A substitute stepped in for three months. It was a complete disaster. She had a thick accent, which the students couldn’t understand. She lashed out at students in bizarre ways. She refused to answer basic questions, like what’s the difference between atomic weight and the atomic number. When the main teacher came back, she showed up with a huge box of tests and labs that the substitute never bothered to grade. She lost some tests, and the poor kids had to retake them months later.
A month after the substitute took over, I called the chair of the science department to complain. This was the first time that I called to complain about a teacher in this new school district. After I was done ranting, the science department chair said that other parents had also called him, but his hands were tied. It’s apparently very difficult to find science substitutes. Nothing was done immediately. My kid’s grades suffered during those three months; I had to hire a tutor to prepare him for the midterm. But all those complaints may have long term implications. That substitute will never be hired by the district again. And the chair will hopefully do a better job hiring substitutes in the future. He doesn’t want to deal with angry parents.
So, parental involvement in this incident meant no immediately change in my particular kid’s grades or learning environment, but it had a long term, district-wide impact. The impact was magnified, because I wasn’t the only parent who complained.
Also, this example shows the limits of quantifying parental involvement. My involvement consisted of many components. I monitored Jonah’s grades by checking the electronic gradebook. I listened to his stories of the insanity in the classroom. I made phone calls to administration and the guidance office. I went to the school, when the substitute refused to answer the e-mails and confronted her in the hallway. I made her find a lab report that she lost. I hired a tutor to help Jonah, because the work was too difficult for me. All that work had a very small impact on Jonah himself. I think we moved his grade up only one notch during that time, but I think it made him feel less like a victim. All that — the various elements of involvement, the impact on the kid, the long-term impact — impossible to quantify.
Parental involvement has to be measured as a school district-wide phenomenon. There is NO QUESTION that districts that have highly involved parents have higher student achievement than districts with poorly involved parents. I’ll come back to this point in the next post.
Apt. 11d 
What bothers me is that I’m not sure how they could address the reverse causation issue. That is, rather than parental involvement causing poor performance, poor performance drives parents to get more involved. That makes a lot more sense as a causal relationship, no?
Next up from the New York Times: private tutoring is associated with worse achievement, and piano lessons make kids worse at the piano.
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Exactly. Who goes in and observes a kid or contacts the school about behavior when the kid is doing A+ work and is the toast of the teacher’s lounge?
The better my kids are doing in school, the fewer emails I have flying back and forth.
Researchers are dumb sometimes.
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A counterpoint:
A few years ago I was one of 3 parent reps on the hiring committee for the new 5th grade teacher. A question I asked: “What would you do if a parent came to you to complain about a grade their child had received?” The candidate who got the job was the one who observed that a parent could complain about a grade being too high or too low. (Not because of her answer to that question, but more that her answer to the question was part and parcel of the general high quality of her candidacy.)
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Good rant. I am deeply committed to quantitative research, but this article seemed skewed to me, to the point where I was looking for a biased motivation for the research (i.e. one could be against efforts to encourage parent involvement in schools). I never went to the point of trying to quantify the flaws in the study, the potential confounds they didn’t consider, but you’ve identified some of them here, including 1) the value of parental involvement isn’t just an individual measure, but a group measure — it matters how involved parents in the school are generally 2) the value of parental involvement depends on its success (not just its quantity). I haven’t read the original report, but in the summary, the other flaw I see is the attempt to use big data analysis (http://www.wired.com/2014/04/your-big-data-is-worthless-if-you-dont-bring-it-into-the-real-world/), which involves trying to let the big data set deal with all the potential confounds without thinking through the potential interactions and effects of each confound.
I overheard someone, say, in the mall the other day, that “they just can’t be constantly involved in asking about their son in school” and it struck me how resentful some parents are of having to be involved. I get it — about many things (cameras, cars, houses, computers), I just want things to work, without having to fuss to get service. And this study does give aid to those who just want to wash their hands of responsibility (and those who don’t want to support those who want to participate, but can’t, because of time and other demand).
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Here’s a conspiracy theory:
This is designed to lull other parents into complacency so the researchers’ kids can get ahead.
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I feel that way when I read authors who say that many fewer high school graduates should attend college; they are trying to skew the pool in their favor.
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My guess is that parental involvement is a more of a threshold effect rather than a cumulative effect and that is what this study is picking up on. That is, once you reach a certain minimum level of parental involvement, extra involvement doesn’t help that much but reaching that minimum level of involvement is quite important. In my son’s urban school district, parental involvement is completely bifurcated along socio-economic lines with some schools having too much involvement and some almost none. I do think the level of parental involvement at my son’s school to be too much, an actual hindrance to a healthy development of independence. It’s preferable to no involvement though, because reaching the threshold is what is most important.
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And what kind of involvement is it? Teaching your child that they are always right and the school/teacher is wrong – the kind of involvement that creates dependence. Growing a relationship with your child’s teachers, advocating for their particular learning style, holding them accountable for their schoolwork and grades, donating time and funds as possible, teaching them how to work best with a teacher who may not be the most talented – the kind of involvement that creates independence and a sense of community.
I figure that you build a good relationship with your child’s school/teachers so that when you need to call in some favours/advocate for your child, there’s enough good will “in the bank” that you’ll be listened to and respected.
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“I figure that you build a good relationship with your child’s school/teachers so that when you need to call in some favours/advocate for your child, there’s enough good will “in the bank” that you’ll be listened to and respected.”
That’s my approach. I depend quite a lot on that and try not to bug the teachers too much, but it’s hard with E. With S, it’s actually a bit easier. She is very independent to begin with, and she doesn’t want me to get involved (because I embarrass her, of course), and she still doesn’t know we visited her English teacher on the second parent-teacher conference night because she’d bitch at me for the rest of the school year.
With E, they try to reassure me that he is perfectly normal and average, but then I get anxious that they don’t really *know* my kid if they think he is normal and average. I have created a lose-lose situation for myself. 🙂
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“My guess is that parental involvement is a more of a threshold effect rather than a cumulative effect and that is what this study is picking up on.”
Exactly.
Except in high need cases where you will get better results the more you do.
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I agree. There is a “herd immunity” in the education system — involved parents protect the kids of parents who are not able to be as involved. It’s a group benefit, not necessarily an individual student benefit. And scantee’s point is a good one… There’s a threshold that is absolutely necessary, but going over and beyond that might not be necessary.
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There is NO QUESTION that districts that have highly involved parents have higher student achievement than districts with poorly involved parents.
There is nothing to suggest that the involvement the way it’s defined here is what’s causing the higher achievement though.
Either their parenting mojo has burnt out by the time the kids get to school or they are simply working too hard to put in much time into their kids. The title of this article validates their behavior.
The type of parent who is burnt out or is working too hard is neither reading this article nor cares much about it. The audience is people like us: people who obsess over how the little things might impact our children’s long-term trajectories.
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This isn’t about the limits of quantitative research. This is about bad research.
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I think that the bottom line message of the piece — that we should take care to create policy based on empirics and not on assumptions/hypotheses is a good one. I also think that findings that show nuances in how different kinds of involvement affected different populations differently also merits consideration, since it points to the limitations of a one-size fits all policy solution (ala NCLB).
I have a hard time assessing the methodology of the research from this article, frankly. The article is an op-ed piece that, in about 800 words, summarizes the interesting outcomes of a book length study in a way that asks us to think more carefully about what parental involvement means and to consider its effects generalized across communities — something that quantitative analysis does particularly well.
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Yeah, but their empirics are CRAP. Crap, crap, crap. The empirics show that parental involvement by an entire community is closely correlated with the educational outcome of the entire community of kids. It’s very well documented. This was a crapola study. The authors put it out there in the media and they deserve criticism. And they end it with a hugely damaging recommendation — don’t get involved in your kid’s education. They should be held accountable for this.
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I’ve got the hot tar. Who is bringing the feathers and the rail?
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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.
They seem to be suggesting that thoughtful, targeted involvement is what’s best and that it’s the “more involvement for involvement’s sake” that isn’t necessarily better.
My understanding of the parent involvement research is limited to early childhood but for that age group high levels of involvement are highly correlated with greater familial stability, well-being, and access to resources (at all income levels) and its those family factors that are the true drivers of child academic outcomes. I do think it is possible for parental engagement to be “good” in that it adds richness to people’s lives (both the parents and the children) without being “good” in that it has a strong relation to positive child development in empirical research.
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I would tend to suspect that “a community of involved parents” is also “a community of highly educated parents” and “a community of kids who think it’s really, really important to go to a good college”. If individual involvement doesn’t seem to matter, then it seems likely that what we’re really identifying is communities of unusually motivated and academically inclined folks who have kids with the same traits, who create a peer culture that encourages their development.
Too many of these correlation studies seem to be trying hard to make raising kids into a formula, rather than a combination of luck, guessing, and hard work. There have been a lot of terrible policies developed from studies showing that “Families with books in their homes have more academically gifted kids”, as if it was the books themselves that did the work rather than, oh, I dunno, having parents who love to read.
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Exactly – or that the correlation is “families with enough money to buy books” or “families with enough money to have the living space to store books”, etc.
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See, I think parental involvement does matter does lead to higher educational achievement for kids in the community. Though it would very difficult to prove. It would be really hard to find a town of highly educated parents who weren’t also very involved in their schools.
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“I would tend to suspect that “a community of involved parents” is also “a community of highly educated parents” and “a community of kids who think it’s really, really important to go to a good college”.
Yes. My sister has her kid in a fancy suburban public school in Microsoftia, and peer group does a lot of the heavy lifting for her for motivating the kid.
Once the herd is stampeding along in the direction of college, it’s very natural for your particular little calf to stampede right along with it.
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AmyP–that was huge for me. I mean, I was smart, but I also cut a lot of class. In a different high school, I could easily have been the smart kid who drops out.
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I’ve read the op-ed twice. From the piece I can’t tell what sort of data they collected. How did they define their terms? How well did the terms correlate between longitudinal studies?
Did they make any attempt to determine a student’s ability? Parents of sped kids are often more involved than parents of typically developing students. If you don’t correct for a student’s potential, a student might be performing better than expected with parental help, but not as well as the norm. For example, a dyslexic child might improve his reading with parental involvement, but still not read as quickly as his classmates. A child with ADHD might be more organized than he would otherwise be with parental involvement, but still forget to hand in homework.
Also, what do they mean by “test scores?” Not classroom tests, but things like the SAT/ACT? Because I wouldn’t expect parental help to influence those. If you lump in a factor which has not been shown to be changed by tutoring (SAT/ACT), you can depress the apparent influence of parental help. (I haven’t seen any study showing more than about a 30 point increase on the SAT through tutoring.)
When things are going well, we’re not nearly as involved as we were when things were not going well. It varies across the child’s time in school.
I do wish schools would not assign projects which aim to require parental help. I think that is counterproductive.
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“I do wish schools would not assign projects which aim to require parental help. I think that is counterproductive.”
See, that’s exactly what I think of as “parental involvement.”
There really is a school push to artificially increase parent involvement through make-work.
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I think I’ve mentioned this before but my son’s first public-school project, in grade one, was “invent something new that works, complete a 6-page booklet about it and prepare a pitch to venture capitalists.” Yup, that gave a very strong message about how to get your kid through grade one.
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JennG said:
“I think I’ve mentioned this before but my son’s first public-school project, in grade one, was “invent something new that works, complete a 6-page booklet about it and prepare a pitch to venture capitalists.” Yup, that gave a very strong message about how to get your kid through grade one.”
That one never gets old.
Oh my gosh.
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One recent source of that 30 point gain quote has been the College Board itself through a NYT Q &A. I’m not surprised. But I can only speak as a private SAT tutor who works with students for at least eight weeks. I have about 100 students per year. I would be embarrassed to see such a modest gain after providing all the modeling and methodologies that are the components of my lesson plans. That’s very roughly like getting 3 more questions right when there are 170 on the entire test.
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Do you have any links to any study which proves larger gains? Not the gains for a subset of students who prep for the test, but for any student? Not only the students who persist with you, but also the students who start with you, then give up. The students who work with other private tutors. The students who work with college students who did well on the test. etc.
Such a study would also have to take into consideration the natural improvement on such tests of more time in school, and the natural improvement a few more months of maturation can bring. Also, some students may not try their utmost the first time they take the SAT, as they count on taking it again “if I have to.” My oldest child improved by 100 points in about 6 weeks, without any prep, other than her guidance counselor’s tip to write at length and simply for the writing section.
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Julie G, you and husband are actually prime examples of Extreme Parental Involvers. Your husband is a member of a local school board and you are a frequent PTA meeting attender. You guys are further on the Scale of Parental Involvement than I am. Why do you do it? To improve your daughter’s grades? No. All that work might have the slightest impact on her grades and tests, because she’ll avoid the worst of the worst teachers, but it will be a minor impact. She’ll probably get some larger, unquantitfiable benefits from having the reputation as “the cool kid with the dad on the school board.”
Why do you do it? For professional benefits? Ha! For the money? Nope. Why then? Because you and your hubby believe that your involvement will benefit the school and the town, which will indirectly benefit your daughter.
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Laura, we do it for social/civic reasons rather than for individual level outcomes for our kid. The DV of this study is individual student achievement, not the many other effects, socializing and otherwise, that schools provide. We are involved with the *schools*, not our kid individually, in this regard. The study write-up in the NYT referred to many different sorts of involvement with varying effects. I certainly buy it that our parental involvement in the school board and PTA have NO individual effects on our kid’s learning outcomes. But that’s also not why we do it.
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As an FYI, the authors of the article (which I did not read, fwiw), have a forthcoming book (of course) from Harvard UP and have published part of their research in Social Science Quarterly. I’ve snagged a copy if anyone is interested in looking at their data.
I’ve scanned the Robinson/Harris SSQ article, and their focus seems to be on punitive vs non-punitive responses to poor academic performance, which is an interesting way to talk about parental involvement.
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Exactiy. The DV is in this study is a dumb DV. Not recognizing that other research shows massive positive outcomes from parental involvement is dishones.
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I fail to see how a DV of “individual student outcomes” is dumb, since that is how the testing community understands how schools are ranked and are more and more used, at the aggregate, to assess teachers.
From where I sit, and I have not read the book nor the SSQ article that Wendy has found, the op-ed is providing EXACTLY the sort of logic that this blog often asks for in terms of education policy, that is a nuanced approach that doesn’t imagine a one-size fits all way to assess schools or understand a student’s experience in them.
In the op-ed, the authors appear to have measured parental involvement in a number of ways,
from PTA membership to daily reading to a kid, and found that the outcomes on individual achievement vary, sometimes with a negative effect, where the conventional wisdom presumes that the effect would be positive and significant across the board. If one is crafting policy at the national level, such quantitative outcomes are informative in terms of building an empirically based policy that is actually responsive to science.
I frankly am looking forward to reading the book and do plan on pulling up the SSQ article that Wendy found. The method hinted at in the op-ed certainly must have been a difficult one, with issues on causal arrows (what is actually driving the results), sampling, and measurement. But we cannot tell from the op-ed necessarily if the method is terrible.
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Sorry, I’m sounding rather animated and perhaps b#@chy. It just seems that any study published anywhere that DOES NOT find easy confirmation of the belief we all share — that parental involvement unequivocally helps everything — is intriguing and worth a second look. Maybe there are interaction effects or non-linearity that they are not considering in their methodology, but I’m curious. That’s all.
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The most effective parent involvement may be finding a school system with a critical mass of involved parents. The parents in our community do march into the principal’s/superintendent’s office to complain if a teacher is not teaching well. These are scary people when they feel their children are not being taught.
Of course parental education would correlate strongly with the ability to march into administrative offices with academic complaints. A prior superintendent had a habit of forming teacher/parent committees to “study” academic issues. Did it change classroom instruction? Not really. It did, however, mean that administrators really, really want to avoid facing irate parents able to write letters to the local papers. They don’t want to face parents who will torpedo tax overrides.
So a child with educated parents is much more likely to end up in an effective school, even if the parents can rely on other parents to do the scary letter writing and meeting with principals.
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