Back to the Future: Revisiting the Studies that found Parenting is As Important As Schools

Many of you may remember the Time Magazine story that proclaimed that parenting is more important than schools. It’s worthwhile to revisit that story and the research on which it is based because important findings are often forgotten or missed in the clamor and bustle of everyday life, work, social media, and a constant stream of news and information.

The author of the Time story, Annie Murphy Paul wrote:
Given all the roiling debates about how America’s children should be taught, it may come as a surprise to learn that students spend less than 15% of their time in school. While there’s no doubt that school is important, a clutch of recent studies reminds us that parents are even more so. A study published earlier this month by researchers at North Carolina State University, Brigham Young University and the University of California-Irvine, for example, finds that parental involvement — checking homework, attending school meetings and events, discussing school activities at home — has a more powerful influence on students’ academic performance than anything about the school the students attend. Another study, published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, reports that the effort put forth by parents (reading stories aloud, meeting with teachers) has a bigger impact on their children’s educational achievement than the effort expended by either teachers or the students themselves. And a third study concludes that schools would have to increase their spending by more than $1,000 per pupil in order to achieve the same results that are gained with parental involvement (not likely in this stretched economic era).
The bottom line: parenting matters. But does you school know how to reach out to Spanish speaking parents in a meaningful way?

Even more importantly, Paul wrote that the content of parents’ conversation with their children makes a difference. If parents talk with their children about what they read together that will have an impact on children’s future achievement in that area. Parents play an important role in the academic lives of the children. How parents engage with their children will affect how their children do in school and how they progress academically.

Teaching parents to read and talk with their children from infancy will ultimately help children become ready for school. Check out these Bilingual Infant and Toddler Books by Lectura Books that will engage Spanish speaking parents to read with their infants and toddlers, but they will also help parent develop English language vocabulary.

Visit Lectura Books for more bilingual books in Spanish and English for your Parent Involvement Programs.