No, Parental Involvement is Not ‘Overrated’
By Tim Walker
Anyone who follows education news and trends has come to expect that, every three or four months, a new research report or book will be released that dishes up a counter narrative too irresistible for the media to pass up. On April 14, we had a whopper, courtesy of The New York Times (and probably an overzealous headline writer) On that day, the Times ran an op-ed by two sociologists, Keith Robinson and Angel L. Harris, with the headline … drum roll please … “Parent Involvement is Overrated.”“Most people, asked whether parent involvement benefits children academically, would say ‘of course it does,’” Robinson and Harris wrote. “But evidence from our research suggests otherwise. In fact, most forms of parental involvement … do not improve student achievement. In some cases, they may actually hinder it.” This finding was fairly consistent, they noted, regardless of race, ethnic background or socioeconomic status.
Their advice? “Set the stage” for your kids by instilling the importance of education and then “get off.”
In supporting their claims, Robinson and Harris trumpeted their analysis of numerous longitudinal surveys covering demographic and socioeconomic data on American families, information about various forms of parental engagement, and academic outcomes (translation: test scores) of elementary middle and high school students.
The Times is actually just the latest, although most visible, media property to spotlight Robinson’s and Harris’ findings. In March, Dana Goldstein discussed their research in a widely-shared story for The Atlantic Monthly called, referencing one of the parental involvement activities singled out out in the research, “Don’t Help Your Kids With Their Homework.” And their book, The Broken Compass: Parental Involvement With Children’s Education was published by Harvard University Press in December 2013.
On one hand, it’s not surprising that an attempt to upend decades of research that demonstrate the value of parental involvement scored big in the media. Still, the general lack of skepticism – glaringly apparent in Goldstein’s story for The Atlantic - is pretty discouraging. As developmental psychologist Marilyn Price-Mitchell wrote in Psychology Today responding to Robinson and Angel, “when researchers use ‘big data’ to draw simple conclusions that can potentially harm children.”
Anne T. Henderson, a senior consultant at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform and a leading expert on the relationship between families and schools, agrees and says Robinson and Harris draw upon a No, Parental Involvement is Not ‘Overrated’ | NEA Today: