Teachers Say Parental Engagement Can Make or Break Efforts to Close Learning Gaps

The recent unveiling of national reading and math scores revealed some disheartening trends about learning recovery with the collective main headline: Students Are Doing Worse Than Before the Pandemic Started.

The factors behind the continued dip in scores are multilayered, but teachers might tell you that the key reason why some students aren’t making progress is that parents aren’t making schoolwork a priority at home.

That’s according to a survey of 700 elementary and middle school teachers by Study.com, an online learning platform, that queried educators in January about student achievement.

Forty-six percent of teachers surveyed named “lack of family prioritization of academics” as the primary reason some students have fallen behind.

Teachers also identified parents as the biggest potential buoy to students’ progress, with 87 percent saying that increasing support for families and parents would have the greatest impact.

Dana Bryson, senior vice president of social impact for Study.com, says a closer look at teachers’ responses revealed their desire to get parents more engaged with their children’s schooling.

“My big takeaway is that it was not like, ‘Hey, parents, you’re apathetic,’” Bryson says, “but it was actually more, ‘We need to do a better job at making sure parents can be involved.’ And all kinds of parents from all walks of life — not just parents, but caregivers.”

Unequal Impact

Results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also called the “nation’s report card,” don’t look too bad until the scores are broken out into groups by factors like ethnicity, income and whether students are learning to speak English.

“The only reason the average is up, the way I interpret it, is because the highest folks are just moving up,” Bryson says. “But the lowest folks are — many of them, in reading, especially — are moving down, and socioeconomically disadvantaged folks particularly.”

Hispanic, Black and Native American students have historically scored lower than their white and Asian counterparts — sometimes by a 30-point difference depending on subject and grade level.

In fourth grade reading, for example, 47 percent of economically disadvantaged students met at least basic reading proficiency by NAEP standards, while that percentage was 74 percent for students who were not considered economically disadvantaged. There was also a 23 percentage point difference in fourth grade math proficiency based on income category, with 88 percent of higher income students meeting basic standards and low-income students lagging behind.

Bryson says parents and caregivers can likewise be unequally affected in their ability to participate in their children’s education. Some parents may have difficulty understanding the classwork or what’s happening in school because they aren’t fluent in English. Others might have a barrier when it comes to technology.

While nearly 70 percent of surveyed teachers said tech tools help students catch up academically, Bryson points out that Latino adults are less likely to have a computer at home than other groups.

“We know there’s a gap in access, especially for families at home,” she says. “Even in districts like [Los Angeles Unified School District] that have a one-to-one ratio with computer-to-student, that doesn’t mean that the parents have one or have access to it.”

Path to Solutions

Parental involvement has been shown to increase student achievement in subjects like reading and math, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that parents have to be able to help with homework. Some data suggests that parents trying to help with math homework make students do worse. Students improve in math when parents motivate them, set high expectations and connect them to help at school.

Schools are trying to get parents in the mix. One district in Illinois is piloting a weekly summary for parents of their children’s grades and behavior.

Steven Barnett, founder and senior co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, was disappointed but not surprised by the NAEP results — particularly in reading. Survey data from his organization found that the percentage of parents who report reading to their children at least three times per week has dropped about 12 percent since the start of the pandemic.

“I think this engagement with literacy is probably not just with their 3- and 4-year-olds, that it’s just fallen off across the board,” Barnett says. “What concerns me is that the next cohorts coming onto NAEP will have had even more years of this low level. So I’m going to expect them to do even worse in the next one than they did this time, unless we do something to turn this around.”

Barnett is a proponent of expanding high-quality preschool to improve academic outcomes, and he says English learners in particular benefit from the extra year or two of schooling before Pre-K.

English learners have consistently scored lower than their classmates in both math and reading, regardless of grade level.

“A strong preschool program has a tremendous focus on oral language development,” Barnett says. “There’s huge differences in the vocabulary — in particular, what we might call the academic vocabulary — between children who go to a strong preschool program and kids who don’t. This is a foundation on which they’re going to apply the skills that they learn. If they don’t know the words, they’re not going to be any more successful than I would be in Russian or Swahili.”

While Barnett’s solution focuses on fundamentals, Bryson says she and her organization’s partners are looking at how artificial intelligence could play a role in personalizing learning to help middle and high school students catch up. One of the first roadblocks they’ll have to manage, though, is combating the budding misconception among some Latinos that using AI to study is a form of cheating, Bryson says.

“If we can really understand what is appropriate and get the right learning interventions, there is an opportunity,” she says. “To demystify the use of AI [is] going to be important because what we see happening is that families and communities who have been left behind are going to continue to be left behind — because they don’t understand [AI] or got a message [that they] shouldn’t be using it.”