The Story of Just Getting By…
I get back to my office after some classroom walkthroughs and I hear a conversation between a staff member and a student regarding grades.
The student was being placed on academic probation for the upcoming soccer season. The conversation was going back and forth about studying, completing homework, getting after school tutoring by the school’s teachers, etc. It was a typical academic probation conversation until the student said, “I don’t put much effort into school because my parents told me that I just need to get ‘C’s’ to play soccer. So, I have always just done the minimum to get by.”
“Parental communication of high expectations is key: A meta-analysis of 31 studies (Fan & Chen, 2001) found that the extent to which parents regularly communicate high academic aspirations for their children had a greater effect size (.87) than any other parental behavior, including how strictly they supervise their children’s free time or monitor their homework, which had an effect size of 18. Similarly, Jeynes’s 2007 meta-analysis of 52 studies arrived at a similar conclusion: Parental expectations had nearly twice the effect on students’ achievement that parenting style (like providing a supportive home environment with adequate discipline) did” (Goodwin, 2017, p. 80).
With an effect size of 0.50, parents regularly communicating high academic expectations has the potential to accelerate student achievement. This means a student at the 50th percentile will increase 19 points to the 69th percentile if their parents regularly communicate high expectations. Put another way, parents regularly communicating high academic expectations has the potential to accelerate student achievement, increasing a student’s chances of success by 64% and placing them in the top 69% of their peers.
As Hattie (2009) notes, “Parental expectations are far more powerful than many of the structural factors of the home (e.g., single or two-parent families, families with resident or non-resident fathers, divorced parents, adopted or non-adopted children, or only children and non-only children). It is not so much the structure of the family, but rather the beliefs and expectations of the adults in the home that contributes most to achievement” (p. 71).
Parent expectations are not just edicts of “you will go to college.” They are not monitoring homework or engaging in more school talk (“tell us what happened at school today”), which have little effect on student achievement (Goodwin, 2017). Rather, parent expectations are “everyday enforcements of the value of education, sacrifice, and hard work that students come to internalize as high aspirations for themselves” (Goodwin, 2017, p. 81).
Think of the possibilities for student achievement if we could couple Teacher Expectations (17 percentile point increase in academic achievement) and Parent Expectations (31 percentile point increase in academic achievement).
So…How can schools support parents in helping students internalize high expectations for themselves?
By having customer friendly schools where we treat parents with kindness and respect. “Ultimately, respecting parents and sharing our high aspirations for their children can model the subtle, yet powerful messages we know help students succeed—akin to the everyday reminder of a collegiate sweatshirt proclaiming our highest hopes for their future” (Goodwin, 2017, p. 81).
Or better yet, “parents need to hold high aspirations and expectations for their children, and schools need to work in partnership with parents to make their expectations appropriately high and challenging, and then work in partnership with children and the home to realize, and even surpass, these expectations” (Hattie, 2009, p. 70).
References
Goodwin, B. (2017, September). Research Matters / The Power of Parental Expectations. Educational Leadership, 75 (1), 80-81.
Hattie, J. A. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. New York: Routledge.
Categories: Teaching and Learning