Parental Involvement In School: Research Says Teens With Involved Parents Learn Better

 
By Laura McMullen
First Posted: 02/20/2012 2:12 pm Updated: 02/20/2012 2:16 pm                                   

As kids get older and advance to high school, talking to them about their school life can become more difficult for parents. With younger children, parents may have been required to sign off on report cards and progress reports, attend more parent-teacher conferences, or simply drive their kids to school. But when students reach high school, connecting with children over school can become challenging.
Even if parent engagement in academics is hard, it's incredibly important, says Sherri Wilson, senior manager of family engagement at the National Parent Teacher Association (PTA). Wilson helped organize the recent National Take Your Family to School Week, designed to build partnerships between families and schools through individual school events such as teacher-parent breakfasts, game nights, and workshops for applying to college.

Wilson cites a report from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) that surveyed the same 25,000 students, once in eighth grade, again in 10th, and lastly in 12th. The students' responses—along with surveys of their parents and educators, and academic data -- showed that parental involvement in school correlates with higher grade point averages.

The most important way for family members to get involved is to show interest in the student's academics at home, says Wilson.

"Unfortunately [engagement] often tapers off as children get older," she says. So, parents and other family members who care for students should be "making sure their children are taking the right classes and maintaining passing grades."

Wilson also says parents should be working with their high school kids on pre-college activities, such as filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). "It's about making sure that their child is going to be able to leave high school and go to college or start a career," she says.
For students who could become the first in their family to seek higher education, Wilson says, "Having an expectation that their child should go to college will have a profound shift for them."
While offering support and guidance at home is the first step in engaging in a high school student's academics, it's certainly not the last. Families should work with the school, too, specifically by communicating with teachers and giving them helpful background information on their children, Wilson says.

[Learn why parents and teachers should teach students personal finance.]
Usually, she adds, the parents and high school teachers are on the same team in that they both want the child to succeed.

"It really needs to be a partnership between the school and the parents," Wilson says. They should "build trusting and respectful relationships."

When Teachers Fail: Who Should Be Held Responsible?

By Franklin Schargel, Huffington Post, March, 2012

Posted: 03/ 9/2012 4:12 pm

Hunting season has begun and educators are the targets.
Governors, state legislatures, and the United States Department of Education want to hold educators responsible for low school performance. But are they the only ones? Unfortunately, there is enough guilt to go around.

Let's start with politicians who underfund education and therefore show that they do not value it even as they say they do. We are told that America spends more money on education than other countries. And while this is true, America spends less of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on education than many industrialized countries.
 
Current funding formulas used to fund schools is another major cause. Using property tax assessments to fund schools deprives areas with low taxable property of the funds needed to operate their schools. This causes low-income areas like Detroit and Newark to have less money to spend than Princeton, New Jersey or Bloomfield Hills, Michigan where median income is greater and property taxes are high.

President Obama's Race to the Top rewards successful schools and states. Shouldn't money be given to schools that need to improve?

Schools of Education need to fill seats and they accept students who have low SAT scores and may not be accepted in business or medical schools. Teacher education programs need a complete overhaul led by educational practitioners who understand what is taking place in America's classrooms. For many of those who prepare K-12 educators, the last time they were in a classroom was the day they graduated from high school. Some have never been in an American school. In many colleges, student teaching takes place in the last year of preparation so the individual being prepared has no expectation of what confronts them in the classroom until the end of their college career.

Shortages exist in certain educational fields, such as special education. The Obama administration has put a major effort into the hiring of S.T.E.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering or Math) teachers, but is having difficulty in attracting enough warm bodies to fill classrooms. They may be looking for highly qualified but not highly effective teachers. Highly qualified teachers know what to teach; highly effective teachers know how to teach it. We have experienced teachers who knew the material but lacked the ability to teach it effectively.

Some individuals enter the classroom because they see it as an opportunity to get a job and plan to leave as soon as another opportunity opens up. There exists a misunderstanding of what it takes to teach and for many, the preparation they receive at Schools of Education fails to adequately prepare them.

Politicians are trapped by simplistic views that educational outcomes are linear. Measurable outcomes of a student cannot and should not be used to make evaluative decisions about the behavior of a teacher because the student may not be able to learn because of out-of-school factors or may choose not to learn. For example, should teachers be held accountable for habitually truant students?
Why are educators being held to a higher standard than surgeons? Do we expect lawyers to win every case, police to end all crime? Do we expect coaches to win every game? No Child Left Behind and the Obama version, Race For The Top, envisions that by December 31, 2014, all students will be reading at grade level.

The governors of Wisconsin, Florida, New Jersey, and Ohio have determined that educators and public education make highly visible, easy targets. They are attempting to balance their budgets on the backs of public servants. But not all "public servants," only those who are "not essential." Educators did not cause this problem. But it is easier to target educators rather than the financial, insurance and banking industries that did.

Education, in most states, is a major component in the makeup of state and local budgets. Many states spend close to 50% of their budget on schools. But politicians tell their constituents that education is expensive. Ignorance is far more expensive. Estimates of the percentage of prisoners who are school dropouts range as high as 82 percent. Prisons cost taxpayers more than $37 billion a year. Some states are spending more money on prisons than education. Over the course of the last twenty years, the amount of money spent on prisons was increased by 570% while that spent on elementary and secondary education was increased by only 33%.

Education affects parents, businesses, and law enforcement. But as importantly, it affects our future and our global competitiveness. It was not long ago that the president, business people and state governors were decrying the fact that our schools were not "globally competitive." States need to spend money on education and job programs in order to attract economic development. But since children don't vote, they are easy targets.

Is it possible that the attack on education and the vilification of educators is a gender issue? Police, fire, sanitation and prison guards are not being subjected to the size of the cuts being made in education. Could it be that since the majority of educators are female they are less likely to complain when jobs and salaries are reduced?

Are International Comparisons Useful?

Friday, March 9, 2012

Are International Comparisons Useful?

By Edward B. Fiske, Education Week, March , 2012

Americans have become increasingly curious about how other countries run their school systems. Delegations of U.S. educators, policymakers, journalists, and others routinely travel to Singapore, South Korea, and other countries with high-performing students and return with lists of "best practices" to emulate. The Finns get so many requests that they have started charging visitation fees.

Such efforts make sense in our increasingly interconnected world. A global marketplace has emerged for ideas of how best to equip young people with the knowledge and skills they need to function in the early 21st century. American policymakers need to be active in this marketplace—both as consumers and suppliers.

The usefulness of learning from other countries, however, is by no means self-evident. Educational policies and practices are closely tied to national cultures, which can differ in fundamental ways. Are there really any "best practices" to learn from schools in Asia that pack 40 or more highly disciplined students into a single class? A rational reaction on the part of an American visitor to such a school would be, "No way!"

These cross-cultural differences start with the basic purpose of schooling. Most countries define the job of young people as learning, and schools spend almost all of their time on academics. By contrast, Americans ask their schools to shoulder tasks ranging from driver education and drug-abuse prevention to building community sprit around Friday-evening football. Academic learning is only one purpose of schooling—and not always the most important one.

—iStockphoto/Globe: Paul Pantazescu/Children: rhoon/Composite Illustration: Vanessa Solis

Despite the pervasiveness of the Internet, the nature of the youth culture and family life varies across countries in ways that shape school policies and practices. Japan bars students from working part time except in the most serious cases of financial hardship, while Scandinavian and other countries limit high school athletics. I recently visited a high school in South Korea that keeps its students until 11 p.m.—not to provide more instruction, but to prevent middle-class parents from enrolling their children in evening cram schools and giving them an advantage over their less affluent peers.

Most developing countries are still struggling with issues of universal access and gender parity, which are no longer central issues for us. India's fabled strength in math, science, and engineering came about because of its decision to concentrate its resources on a relatively small number of elite students. Only now is it grappling with the challenge that we share of educating substantial numbers of disadvantaged students.

Most Asian and European countries place ultimate responsibility for academic success on the individual student and rely heavily on exams to sort students. By contrast, we assign accountability to districts, schools, and even individual teachers. Politicians in Japan tend to defer to professional educators when it comes to matters such as curriculum. Our legislators have no compunctions about imposing the latest fads regarding class size, curricular priorities, or student testing, regardless of what professional educators have to say.

So how should we go about participating in that "global marketplace" of school improvement ideas?

As a start, we need to move beyond the "here's a country that got it right" syndrome. No country has come up with the answer to all of the major educational problems of the day. For that matter, no country has come up with an answer to perhaps the most urgent education issues of all: how to effectively educate large concentrations of disadvantaged students in urban areas.

Some of the lessons we have to learn fall into the category of what not to do. New Zealand's national experiment with market-based education policies in the 1990s, for example, might have forewarned us about the problems we are now facing with regard to our failure to balance parental choice with policies that protect the public interest.

We would also do well to remember that the global marketplace works both ways. Other countries see strengths in the U.S. system and have no hesitation about learning from us. Several years ago, I participated in a discussion in Beijing where Asian policymakers expressed amazement that their Western counterparts were looking to emulate the performance of Asian students on standardized tests at a time when China and other Asian countries were trying to move beyond a testing culture. American schools, they said, were models for how to teach problem-solving, creativity, and other skills central to the 21st-century workplace. (Debate ensued about whether U.S. schools really do teach creativity, and some consensus emerged around the notion that the real strength of the United States is the context of freedom in which education exists. U.S. students may not know as much as peers in some other countries, but they are much freer to apply what they do know. But that's a topic for another time.)

As we think about what we can realistically learn from the educational successes of other countries, the most obvious point is to look for ideas and practices that have proven to be applicable across a variety of cultural settings. Three such themes come to mind:

First, a national understanding of—and commitment to—the importance of education. Lacking natural resources, countries with cultures as diverse as Finland, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore understand that as nations they will live or die by what comes out of their heads. Serious investments in teaching and learning become a national priority in ways that, rhetoric notwithstanding, are lacking here.

Second, the importance of good teaching. High-performing education systems across diverse cultures have found ways to recruit many of their brightest young people into the teaching profession. They train them well, pay them living middle-class salaries, and—most important—treat them as professionals with wide discretion to make decisions on how best to teach their particular students. Education in these countries operates within a culture of trust.

"We need to move beyond the 'here's a country that got it right' syndrome."

We take a very different approach. Rather than create a culture of respect and professionalism in teaching and learning, we embrace an industrial model, set impossible goals, and then make teachers scapegoats for school failures. It's a wonder that anyone with other options would want to become a teacher, much less make it a career.

Third, the availability of good schools regardless of students' ZIP codes and socioeconomic status. Our funding and accountability systems inevitably foster huge achievement gaps between disadvantaged and middle-class students. By contrast, other countries with successful education systems studiously avoid concentrating the best teachers and highest-quality public schools in homogeneous geographic areas. They also seek to make sure that all students are ready and able to learn through early-childhood education, school-based health services, and other support services. Every country has achievement gaps between students from poor and wealthy families, but nowhere are these gaps as wide as they are in the United States. To our shame, we readily tolerate the largest concentration of low-performing poor students of any developed country—a fact of life that is both unfair and immoral.

So when it comes to international comparisons: Caveat emptor. What we have to learn from other countries with top education systems has less to do with strategies and tactics than with the underlying values that they bring to education. These include making education a national priority, fostering a professional climate in schools, and becoming serious about helping all students fulfill their fundamental right to a high-quality education.

If we can ever get our values right, the "lessons from" will take care of themselves.

Edward B. Fiske, a former education editor of The New York Times, edits the Fiske Guide