Engaging with parents: the relationship between school engagement efforts, social class, and learning

Abstract

Using data from the U.S. Department of Education's (2000) Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998–99 (ECLS-K), this study investigates the relationship between school efforts to engage parents, average socioeconomic status (SES) of families within a school, and kindergarteners' end-of-year reading and mathematics achievement. Drawing from Epstein's (2001) parent involvement framework, the 4 types of engagement efforts explored are intended to promote communication, parent volunteering, parent influence in school decision making, and parenting skills. We apply multilevel methods to explore the impact of schools' efforts to engage parents on student achievement. Our findings indicate certain types of school efforts to engage parents influence achievement. Depending on average school SES, efforts to promote volunteering has a differential impact on reading achievement, efforts to involve parents in school decision making has a differential impact on mathematics achievement, and efforts to increase communication and promote parenting skills have a differential impact on reading and mathematics achievement.

Keywords:

• school engagement
• primary–parent participation
• reading achievement
• mathematics achievement
• socioeconomic status

Notes

1. For a thorough description of the method used by NCES to create this composite scale, see the ECLS-K user's manual (U.S. Department of Education, 2004a).

2. Our analyses employed the school-level (S2SAQW0) and child-level weights (BYCPTW0) provided by NCES. For the multilevel analyses, we created a within-school weight using both weights.