Teaching middle school students that academic performance is a key to their future job prospects is more important to student achievement than helping kids with their homework, according to a new study. “Instilling the value of education and linking school work to future goals is what this age group needs to excel in school, more than parents’ helping with homework or showing up at school,” lead researcher Nancy E. Hill, PhD, of Harvard University tells Science Daily. She examined 50 studies with more than 50,000 students over a 26-year period looking at what kinds of parent involvement helped children’s academic achievement.
I clearly recall my late father making sure he instilled in his son the value of education. And the links he established between school and future job prospects were clear and unambiguous:
“Get your @#$%! to school! Do you want to be a #$%@! bum your whole life?
Does that count?
This may explain why parent education is such a powerful predictor of student success. It’s a lot easier for a kid who parents are doctors, lawyers, or teachers to see the connection between education and jobs, than it is for the child of someone struggling in a low-wage job to understand that education could make a difference for them.
I agree with you, Rachel. I often observed that my South Bronx students could recite the homilies (Why is school important? “To get a good education!” And why is a good education important? “To get a good job!”) but it was merely an abstraction. There were no concrete examples in their lives of education as means to any particular end. At worst, it contributed to an atmosphere where the relationship between student and school was fundamentally coercive. (Why are we in school? “Because it’s the law!” And why is it the law? “I have no idea…”)
All that said, studies like this — or at least the coverage of them — irritate me since they tend to oversimplify the inputs. I don’t particularly care for the way the results are framed. Connecting education to jobs is more important that parental involvement and helping with homework? No. It’s ALL important.
I do think something clicked with my daughter around 5th grade in terms of connecting education to her future — making the jump from trying to do well in school because that Mom & Dad wanted her to, to trying to do well in school because she understood that she’d need that to be a marine biologist, or President, or whatever the career aspiration of the moment was.
It’s all kind of moot for a kid with two academics for parents — they’re getting all different kinds of support.
But disentangling the various factors underlying the connection between parent education and student success may be useful in helping students from less educated and academically oriented backgrounds. If parental involvement was all about homework support, a homework club might be able to fill the gaps. But it won’t do all that’s if making the education good job connection is crucial — supporting that connection requires different strategies.
When families all gathered together at the dinner table and talked about their day, children found it helped to pay attention in school in order to have something to report in the evening.