Closing gaps in achievement is an ongoing priority for all educators and schools. Over many decades, both national attainment data and research findings have consistently shown that, on average, pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds achieve well below their more advantaged peers.
This is a result of a multitude of things, one being the amount a parent can be involved in their child’s education. Parent involvement is seen in a variety of ways, such as joining the PTA, driving their child to school, reading or doing work with their child, packing nutritious lunch and snacks, and other ways that affect a child’s education. The achievement gap is greatly influenced by the amount of time a parent can spend with their child focusing on their education, especially when they are younger, but there are other ways a school can supplement a child’s parental involvement.
A parent’s involvement in their children’s education seems like an obvious goal in raising a child, but for many low-income families, participation in their child’s education is one extra step that parents have to surrender. Research such as, The impact of parental involvement, parental support and family education on pupil achievement, backs up these seemingly obvious claims, which proves that students coming from a disadvantaged household are prime candidates to fall prey to the achievement gap. Key research summarizes that home-based factors that make the strongest contribution to the child’s achievement in the primary years including the extent of one-to-one interaction between parent and child, and parental involvement in educational activities and outings with their child. Another key point from this study is that in the primary years, family influences have a more powerful effect on children’s progress than school factors. Finally, parental engagement has a significant effect throughout a child’s school years. Gains in pupil achievement that comes from parental engagement tends to be permanent, which means that once a parent is involved with their child’s education when they are younger, they are basically permanently academically ahead of children who did not receive this kind of care. This research points to the importance of finding solutions to match children who did not receive as rigorous parental educational care with children who did as a means of lowering the achievement gap.
Fixing the quality of parental involvement as a result of inequality is a lofty goal for educators trying to diminish the achievement gap, but as stated above in from the research, home-based factors make the strongest contribution to a child’s achievement in the primary years, so we must focus on this if we want to make a change. In order to equalize the playing field between different home-based factors, the schools can partake activities that take place of a parent that might not have the luxury taking care of a child’s education. Some examples of these activities are, school buses, after-school enrichment programs, after-school sports, and nutritious school meals are all programs that provide the support that busy, low-income parent cannot. These programs are crucial to a child’s development and although replacing a parent is almost an impossible task, these programs are the second best thing a child can have to bring them to the same level as their more advantaged classmates.
post by: Eliza Dean