Making schools better “should be only one part of our national strategy” on education, writes Harvard’s Ronald Ferguson. “Life at home has been a relatively neglected topic and needs to come out of the shadows.” In a commentary at CNN.com Ferguson, who heads the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University, says helping parents do their best needs to be as big a priority as achieving excellent schools.
This goes beyond public policies. I am talking about changes in mindsets and lifestyles in a national social and cultural movement to close achievement gaps between groups — a movement to achieve excellence with equity. More reading at home is a place to start….Black and Hispanic students reported less leisure reading at home compared to whites, watched television more, were much more likely to have televisions in their bedrooms and (perhaps as a consequence) were more prone to become sleepy at school. Also, blacks and Hispanics, including those with college-educated parents, reported fewer books in their homes than whites whose parents had fewer years of schooling.
Ferguson cites research indicating that high achieving students across racial lines have parents who are “both responsive and demanding.”
According to the study, white parents were much more likely to be both responsive and demanding than black and Hispanic parents; whereas black parents, in particular, were often highly demanding, but tended not to be as responsive in the ways the study measured. Among early adolescents, differences along these dimensions helped account for the higher test scores of whites as compared with blacks and Hispanics.
“Findings like the above should be part of the conversation among black and Hispanic community leaders as they respond to the fact that even the children of college-educated parents often achieve at lower-than-expected levels,” Ferguson writes.
I think that the Obama administration and Sec. of Ed. Arne have been heeding this type of research (summer drop-off, culture of poverty, etc.) and that this is why they’re trying to move to longer days and longer school years, as well as taking all kids into head start.
Along with this conversation though, should be another one about removing some students away from community values and cultural practices that are invaluable and make them better achievers and people. Ferguson cites research that highlights important behaviors that we should carefully understand, organize and implement. Some home-culture behaviors should be carefully explored by ed policy, some with less clear-cut relationships to academic success should be left alone for the sake of healthy cultural identity and difference.
This is another reason for community schools. Bring kids out of school buildings and introduce them to the full diversity of the world, and bring the full diversity of the community into the buildings. That includes parents who may be imperfect. If a parent needs additional education in reading or child-rearing or just career skills, why not offer that continuing education in public schools? And pay the parents for helping at school.
Yes, many poor Black kids, just like other kids, are sleepy because they watch TV too late, or because their parents are working the night shift and can not monitor their bedtime. But plenty of Black kids, just like other kids, are working at 1:00 am to help support the family. Rather than pay for grades, why not pay people for helping make schools better?
The essense of a learning culture is that we’re all learning from each other.
I’d love to turn back the clock on the “Big Sort” and fight segregation. But if we can’t do that, lets create less segregated school buildings and classrooms. What would happen, for instance, if 1/3rd of the people in classes were parents? Before long, at least 1/3rd of the class would be adult co-teachers and that would be a huge step towards the other 2/3rds being student co-teachers.
We’re leaving town tomorrow & I don’t have time to track all this stuff down…but I distinctly recall Lawrence Steinberg finding that “authoritative parenting,” which is the most successful form of parenting, and could roughly be characterized as high-demand/high-responsiveness, produced less successful black children than white.
In other words, when white parents have an authoritative parenting style, their kids soar.
When black & Hispanic parents have an authoritative parenting style, their kids don’t reap as many benefits.
Culture matters.
Beyond the Classroom by Laurence Steinberg
I’ve got time this morning to look up the passages:
“Parents may launch their child on an academic trajectory, but if there is no academically oriented crowd for that student to connect up with, the launching will have little effect. On the other hand, if there are only academically oriented peer crowds in a given setting, what parents do at home, in terms of the trajectory they launch their child on, will make relatively less difference, since their child will likely end up in a crowd that emphasizes school success anyway.” (p. 151)
Asian parents did not, on the surface, appear to be doing anything particularly special that would account for their children’s remarkable success, nor were Black parents doing anything noteworthy that would explain their children’s relatively weaker performance. Overall, ;Asian stuents in our study were performing better than we would expect on the basis of their parents’ practices, and Black students were performing worse. Something in Asian students’ lives protects them, even if they are exposed to less than perfect parenting, while something in Black students’ lives undermines the positive effects of parental involvement and authoritativeness.
According to our study, this “something” is the peer group. One clear reason for Asian students’ success is that Asian students are far more likely than others to have friends who place a great deal of emphasis on academic achievement. Asian-American students are, in general, significantly more likely to say that their friends believe it is important to do well in school, and significantly less likely than other students to say that their friends place a premium on having an active social life.
[snip]
When we look at friends’ activity patterns for adolescents from different ethnic groups, we see quite clearly that the friends with whom Asian students socialize place a relatively greater emphasis on academics than other students do, whereas the opposite is true for Black and Hispanic teenagers.
[snip]
When I first saw these findings, my presumption was that they were due entirely to racial segregation in adolescent peer groups.
[snip]
It turns out that the segregation argument is only partly true….there are sufficient numbers of cross-racial friendships in any school to ask whether the pattern described above holds for students who travel in integrated circles. The answer is that it does, at least for the most part. Even if we look solely at youngsters whose best friends are from a different ethnic background, we still find that Asian students’ friends place a greater emphasis on doing well in school, and Black and Hispanic students’ friends, relatively less. Once again, White students fall somewhere in between.
Peer pressure among Asian students and their friends to do well in school is so strong that any deficiencies in the home environment–for example, parenting that is either too authoritarian or emotionally distant–are rendered almost unimportant. (p. 155-157)
Beyond the Classroom by Laurence Steinberg
Steinberg’s book reports the results of a 10-year study of 20,000 teenagers in 9 high schools. Abstract here.
The last post matches my observations from my older kids’ high school, which had a substantial Asian population. The kids on the all-honors/AP track (mostly white and Asian) tended to socialize together and reinforce success. Asian kids also felt that at Chinese school and at home.
The post also tends to explain the trajectory of a Black teammate of my son’s when he changed high schools. Both schools had kids from all four racial groups, but the peer culture in the new (private) school was toward academic success for all groups and that community became his social group. In the old school, Black success was defined by that group as selling out and the kid treated accordingly. His removal from that social group produced an 180-degree turnaround in academics, sports and behavior.
The importance of peer culture was also addressed by Ogbu, in his study of Cleveland schools. It would also fit the recently reported increase in the achievement gap between 4th and 8th grades, since the peer culture effect probably strengthens during those years, although it might also be because of strictly academic issues.
Catherine Johnson & Momof4: Interesting posts. My question would be, “Where is the cause and effect of these relationships? Are the high-achieving students picking out friends who mirror their values, or are the students’ friends influencing the students to change their values, or is it something in-between?”
In the case of the kid moved to a private high school, it was definitely the latter. Removal from contact with a group of kids with toxic attitudes was the key, and the parents wished they had done it several years earlier and avoided two miserable years for the whole family. The next kid was moved into private school in 7th grade.
I am just a bit reluctant to place the blame on “peer culture,” given that the peer culture has not evolved in a vacuum, but exists within a context that includes not only home but school. I believe Ferguson has also done a fair amount of work to disconfirm the suggestion that black kids socially recoil from “acting white” (or seeking academic achievement). His results come up with richer findings having to do with belief systems, the amount of effort vs pay-off in learning/grades, likelihood of receiving help when it is needed, etc. I think that the issue is that the best of parents/families cannot adequately overcome the effects of systemic biases (for lack of a better word). For that matter, neither can the best efforts of individual teachers. So long as a stranger can be dropped blindfolded into a high school anywhere in America and make some fairly accurate predictions about the income levels of the students who attend, discussions of improving parenting skills or combatting the toxic attitudes of peers are going to be falling short of the mark.