| Stacey Farber
University at Buffalo, SUNY
The space between: Roles parents play in their children's educational success (or non-success). Examining a model of parental influence across family race and child gender.
FINAL REPORT:
With a continued and recently growing difference in achievement between African American and White students and between African American boys and their female peers, attention is re-focusing on parents as agents of positive change. ÒNo Child Left BehindÓ calls on schools to reduce intergroup achievement gaps in part by making parents instruments of their children's success. However, to effectively engage parents in their children's education and reduce the achievement gap, we must understand better the nature and effects of parental engagement and how the construct, as it is enacted, may differ across race and child gender.
With data for 3,877 African American and White parents of kindergarten boys and girls from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class 1998-1999, this study tests, via multiple group structural equation modeling, a multidimensional conceptualization of Òparental engagement,Ó its predictors (parent expectations and parent-related, school-related, and logistical constraints), and its effects on classroom effort and cognitive performance. Confirmatory factor analysis results support a theoretically-based, five-factor, behavioral conceptualization of Òparental engagementÓ for African American and White parents of boys and girls - each factor representing a role parents play when engaging in their children's learning: Resource Agent, Manager, Teacher, Encourager, and Relational Advocate. In general, parents (regardless of race or child's gender) engage in similar types of behaviors when (a) providing resources for learning in the home (Resource Agent), (b) managing their children's television viewing (Manager), (c) scaffolding their children's learning through one-on-one activities (Teacher), (d) encouraging children's literacy and community involvement activities (Encourager), and (e) advocating for their children by interacting with their child's school, teacher, and classmates' parents (Relational Advocate).
Results of latent mean analyses suggest that African American parents tend to engage less than White parents in their children's education, particularly with respect to their roles as Resource Agent, Manager, and Relational Advocate. However, while African American and White parents experience similar levels of Òschool-related constraintsÓ (parent perceptions of school and teacher efforts to inform and engage them) and Òlogistical constraintsÓ (such as inconvenient meeting times), African American parents experience far more Òparent-related constraintsÓ (such as lower socioeconomic status and less education) than White parents; this difference in Òparent-related constraintsÓ may explain in part the racial gap in engagement.
ÒParent-related constraintsÓ was the strongest negative predictor of parental engagement and parental expectations across all groups, while Òschool-related constraintsÓ was a particularly strong negative predictor of parental engagement for African American parents of girls only. ÒLogistical constraintsÓ and Òparental expectationsÓ were weak predictors of actual parental engagement for all four groups. For African American and White boys and girls alike, parental engagement was a moderate, positive predictor of their classroom effort, while parental engagement and effort were both strong, positive predictors of cognitive performance.
Results suggest that future research should consider using a multidimensional, behavioral framework for conceptualizing and measuring Òparental engagement.Ó Policy makers might best support parents' efforts to engage in their children's education by promoting and appropriately funding programs of social equity as well as school performance equity. Parents can be valuable partners in educating children and reducing intergroup differences, and schools and teachers should consider doing more to make them Òknowledgeable partnersÓ in their children's learning; this may be particularly true for African American parents, who may be differently affected by teacher and school efforts to involve them and who, on average, have more educational and financial constraints than White parents.
Back to Funded Dissertation Grants Page |