Just in time for Father's Day, a new survey suggests that the fathers of America are playing a more active role in children's schooling than they did 10 years ago.

Released this morning, the report was sponsored by the National Center for Fathering and the National Parent Teacher Association. (Coincidentally, the PTA's leader, Byron V. Garrett, is a dad himself—the first African-American male to head the group.) The findings are based on May telephone surveys of 1,000 homes across the country.

Compared to 1999, the results show, more dads are taking their children to school, visiting their child's classroom, volunteering at school, helping their child with homework, and attending parent-teacher conferences and other school-based parent meetings. The biggest gains have come in the percentage of fathers who say they meet with other dads for support, a figure that has grown by 20 percentage points, from 17 percent in 1999 to 37 percent this year.

The increases are important because research shows that children fare better academically when their fathers are actively involved in their education. But note that, in many of these cases, we're still talking about a minority of fathers here. The number of dads visiting the classroom, for instance, grew a substantial 11 percentage points, but it's still represents 41 percent of the fathers surveyed. The number of fathers volunteering or attending class events in 2009 was 28 percent and 35 percent, respectively—possibly because those kinds of activities tend to occur during normal work hours.

On the other hand, a clear majority of fathers—77 percent—are now turning up for parent-teacher conferences and 59 percent are attending school-based parent meetings.

The big disappointment for me, though, was the statistic for reading, which is arguably the most direct way in which a father can contribute to his child's learning. Fifty-five percent of fathers said they read to their child once or twice a month—the same percentage as in 1999. Sadly, 39 percent of the respondents said the father in their household never reads to his child at all.

There were socioeconomic differences in these statistics as well, but they weren't always predictable. Nearly 40 percent of the "never readers," for instance, were in families earning more than $75,000 a year.

You can read the executive summary on the National Fathering Center's Web site. Parenting resources are also available on the Web sites for both groups. My advice to moms: Print out a copy of the study and leave it on top of dad's TV remote.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

In education, encouraging parents to be involved in their children's schooling is like motherhood and apple pie. Everyone likes it, and who would argue against it?

But a study published last month in the American Journal of Education suggests that parent involvement can have a downside, too.

Researchers Elizabeth McGhee Hassrick of the University of Chicago and Barbara Schneider of Michigan State University spent more than 200 hours observing classrooms and interviewing parents and teachers at an unnamed charter elementary school in a large city. The school's 100 percent African-American enrollment included families from a range of income levels, from working poor to upper middle class.

According to the study, the middle-class parents essentially "surveilled" the teachers in the school. They kept close tabs on the goings-on by volunteering in their children's classrooms during the school day, networking with other parents, and peppering teachers with questions during their free time.

The low-income parents, on the other hand, rarely engaged in such activities. They relied on their children to tell them what went on at school.

The teachers chafed under the scrutiny, but the constant presence of the middle-class parents did persuade educators to open up the proverbial closed-doors of their classrooms. The problem, though, was that the middle-class parents used the information they gathered to advance their own children's education, which further disadvantaged the classmates from poorer families.

That's food for thought.

I don't know whether the scenario that the report lays out is typical, but I have met parents like those the authors describe. And I've not been above buttonholing other parents myself for intelligence on the best teachers and classes available at my local public schools. But where is the line between responsible and over-zealous parent involvement? And is it up to educators to let us know where that line ought to be?

Posted by Debra Viadero at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)