In our weekend reading roundup, we shared a story about a report that found parental involvement yielded no benefit for students.
From The Atlantic’s “Don’t help your kids with their homework”:
The researchers combed through nearly three decades’ worth of longitudinal surveys of American parents and tracked 63 different measures of parental participation in kids’ academic lives, from helping them with homework, to talking with them about college plans, to volunteering at their schools. … What they found surprised them. Most measurable forms of parental involvement seem to yield few academic dividends for kids, or even to backfire—regardless of a parent’s race, class, or level of education.
But like all education stories there’s a counterpoint. The New York Times’ Upshot responded with the headline “Yes, Your Time as a Parent Does Make a Difference.”
The upshot of the Upshot article was that the study was flawed because of how it measured parent engagement:
This nonfinding largely reflects the failure of the authors to accurately measure parental input. In particular, the study does not measure how much time parents typically spend with their children. Instead, it measures how much time each parent spends with children on only two particular days — one a weekday and the other a weekend day.
That brings us to our question of the week:
Powered by TypeformEach week, we ask readers a question about a timely or timeless question about their experiences in education. Readers who want to share their opinions should leave a response in the comment section below, tweet us @ChalkbeatCO, send an email, or leave a comment on our Facebook wall. Every Friday we round up the responses. Here’s last week’s.