Parents and Homework

As another school year has begun, I saw in a syndicated advice column called Living With Children a question that addresses the idea of parental responsibility and school homework.  I had mixed reactions.

The letter writer, the parent of a child entering the first grade, says that they were notified that the local school expects all parents to check a website, called the Parent Portal, every night to keep up with their children’s homework assignments and to help them when they get stuck.  This parent doesn’t like the idea, feeling that “in effect, we are being made responsible for what, in our estimation, is a teacher’s responsibility.”  Other parents agree.

The columnist also agrees, arguing that such websites take advantage of parental anxiety based on an erroneous belief that “children’s grades reflect the quality of their parenting.”  He worries that these setups will turn parents into “micromanaging enablers” by transferring “a significant amount of responsibility for academic instruction to the home.”  The column continues that enabling in any form shifts responsibility off the children (and possibly the teachers) producing over the long term less mature and effective adults.

The final advice is to not check every night but to help occasionally, letting the “children know that they are responsible for their homework and that there will be consequences should they require [their parents] to get involved." 

My mixed feelings arose from the columnist letting the parents too much off the hook.  The writer seems to want to ignore the website, which was probably too aggressively pushed on them; but this website could also be seen as a tool.  Should those parents wait around as in pre-Internet days for a teacher’s conference to find out their child is lagging behind or not doing assignments as expected?  With this modern tool, parents can spot check what is expected and reinforce those expectations without becoming overly involved.  When parents ask, “Do you have any homework?” and are met with the shrug or the vague answer, they have a tool to fall back on to find the answer.  Reinforcing expectations or answering questions is not enabling.  Nagging constantly and checking answers before they are turned in is.

I also don’t buy the idea that parental involvement has no impact on student performance.  In their book, The Why Axis, Gneezy and List studied the effect of motivation and incentives on student performance.  They tried different incentive programs with students, parents and teachers in Chicago Heights public schools and found that when the incentives were properly designed, the minority students performed just as well as their suburban counterparts in rich, white neighborhoods.  All three parties:  students, parents and teachers, must be motivated and involved.

It’s true enabling weakens – if only Washington could figure that out – but parents should not use the fear of enabling as an excuse to drop the ball or pass all the responsibility back to the teachers.  This lack of parental involvement is one reason more and more decisions about our schools are moving away from the local level toward state capitals and Washington.