By Laura J. Colker, Ed.D., Reading is Fundamental
Published: September 17, 2009
“When parents are involved in their children’s education at home, they do better in school. And when parents are involved in school, children go farther in school and the schools they go to are better.”
A New Generation of Evidence: The Family is Critical to Student Achievement. (Henderson & Berla, 1994)
As the above quote suggests, it is a well-established fact that parental involvement is linked to children’s success at school. Thirty years of research—including the oft-cited studies by Joyce Epstein and her colleagues at Johns Hopkins University and Anne Henderson and colleagues at the Center for Law and Education—demonstrate the strong correlation between parental involvement and increased academic achievement. In fact, a home environment that encourages learning is more important to student achievement than the family’s income, education level, or cultural background. (Henderson & Berla, 1994). In addition, Herbert Walberg found that family participation in education was actually twice as predictive of academic learning as family socioeconomic status. Kellaghan, Sloane, Alvarez, and Bloom (1993), in their book Home Environment and School Learning, summarize the phenomenon this way:
