Back to Goal 10From Measures and Milestones 2002
p. 36-37, published 2002
Creating and sustaining partnerships that engage parents, interested citizens, businesses, and community institutions in improving the quality of our schools is a central goal of education reform. The social capital of broad public engagement in the life of our schools is a powerful driver of positive change. On this key goal, more than half of citizens expressed confidence in our progress in 2002, and the overall rating of progress ranked third.
Table 1: Where Citizens Think We Stand
An objective of school-based decisionmaking, established in 1996 by Kentucky statute, is to provide an environment that will enhance educational quality. At present, 1,238 schools in Kentucky are managed by school councils comprised of parents, teachers, and school principals. This joint decisionmaking vehicle also includes committees charged with overseeing the school policies, for example regarding curriculum and school scheduling, established by the Council. Each school has about five committees with approximately two parents serving on each committee.
Figure 1: Number of Parents Serving on School-Based Councils or Committees
Parent-teacher meetings are gradually becoming as important as report cards. Precise measures of this benchmark are unavailable; here we show data from Education Week which suggest poor parent participation in these conferences in Kentucky relative to most surrounding states, even though progress has been made.
The Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center has been tracking parental involvement in school activities in Kentucky since 1996. The propensity of parents to volunteer for school-related activities tends to increase with education. That is, the data show that higher parental education levels are associated with high percentages of parents volunteering in or for the schools for all three polls. This is generally consistent with other research regarding parental outcomes and educational attainment.
Studies have shown that not only the activity of reading to children but also the frequency of this activity can have a significantly positive impact on future school performance. The same Kentucky polls asked how frequently parents read to their children aged eight and under. Almost all the parents said that they do indeed read to their young children, while well over half the parents in all three surveys said they read to their children every day. Studies have shown that as parental education levels rise, the likelihood of reading every day to a young child also rises. While controlling for other influential factors such as gender, race, and income, a Kentucky parent with a bachelor’s degree or higher is 27, 40, and 74 percent more likely to read every day to a young child as a parent with some college experience or a two-year degree, a high school diploma only, and less than a high school diploma or equivalent, respectively.
Figure 4: Percent of Parents Who Read to Their Children Daily, Kentucky, Selected Years
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