I don’t know a thing about the Harlem Children’s Zone that David Brooks writes about in his most recent column but I’d be willing to bet that one of the criteria on which they select their students, either explicitly or implicitly, is parental involvement. It’s one of if not the most important predictor of a kid’s educational achievement.
I don’t mean by this to let the public schools off the hook. However, it does demonstrate the difficulty of the task they have before them.
The thing is, though, is that most public schools basically expect the parents to be involved to create a good education, turning the parent into a kind of informal, unpaid teacher’s aide. They assign the kids a lot of homework to make up for limited time of instruction in class, and expect parents to help with the homework, as well as participate in things like PTA and so forth.
I wonder if you could design a public school system that didn’t rely on that. You’d at the very least need more class time per subject, as well as lots of tutoring after school available for parents.
I believe admission to the Harlem Children’s Zone is by lottery only. That may not matter, as engaged parents are far more likely to self-select into the lottery in the first place. Such has been a persistent criticism of HCZ, KIPP, and other successful reformers.
On the other hand, one of the purported achievements of HCZ is that it has increased parental engagement through their community center and caseworker programs. I don’t know of any formal studies that establish the efficacy of these programs, but there’s certainly plenty of anecdotal evidence.
That’s usually what they try to do – they have a lack of parental involvement, usually for either social (lots of single parents who work) or economic reasons (those parents need to work, and can’t spend a lot of time helping with homework – assuming they can even do so if they had the time, a big if for new immigrant families – or attending school-parent activities), so they try to create incentives to get parents involved, like creating community centers, family assistance, and even (I heard this from my boss when I worked for the local city government) ideas like paying people to come to parent-teacher conferences.
But is it necessary? Perhaps you could try, instead, to re-design the public school system (particularly in poor neighborhoods where opportunities for parental involvement is limited) so that it minimizes the necessary parental involvement.