On Wednesday, results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, rattled the education world. Despite $191B invested in learning recovery, the achievement gap is wider than it has been in 30+ years.
Cue head scratching, navel gazing, and finger-pointing. After historic investments in curriculum, professional development, and tutoring, how could we possibly be worse off? And what hope do we have now that ESSER funds are a fading memory?
The NAEP results are alarming, but they’re not puzzling. They make perfect sense through the lens of my experience as a student and teacher.
When my family immigrated to the US, we quickly discovered that schools serving poor families like ours don’t often live up to America’s promise. So, my parents tried a new strategy: renting the cheapest house in an affluent neighborhood with a high-performing public school.
Years later, I became a teacher and taught first grade in one of Philadelphia’s most impoverished neighborhoods. It didn’t take long to pinpoint why these two schools in my life had such dramatically different outcomes for kids.
Could it be the students? Of course not. Kids in suburban New Jersey aren’t inherently smarter than kids in North Philly.
Could it be the teachers? Definitely not. My colleagues in Philadelphia were some of the smartest, most capable, and hardest working teachers I’ve ever met.
Could it be the curriculum? How? Houghton Mifflin doesn’t have some magic curriculum they refuse to sell Title I districts.
Could it be technology? Certainly not. In fact, it should raise concerns that wealthy parents are keeping their kids off screens while low-income students are encouraged to spend an ever-greater percentage of their school day behind a screen with headphones on.
Could it be school funding? If only! ESSER funds were disproportionately aimed at Title I districts, and we’re worse off, not better.
So where are we going wrong? We’re not supporting parents! Parents are the primary determinants of children’s life and learning outcomes. Of course, they are! Any of us who are parents can attest. And the research is unambiguous.
Research finds parental involvement in their children’s learning is a more powerful predictor of academic success than any other variable, including race and class. One study concluded that 80% of the variation in public school performance results from parents’ influence, not teachers’.
Despite this decades-old body of research, the education sector fixates on the 13% of waking hours students spend in classrooms. We have historically sidestepped families while investing trillions in classroom intervention. What do we have to show for it? An ever-widening achievement gap.
Our society has enabled privileged parents to put their kids on the path to academic and economic success. At the same time, we’ve made it painfully difficult for marginalized parents to do the same. Unless and until we help marginalized families support learning at home, inequities will persist. Parents are their children’s first and best teachers, yet we fail to provide them the basic resources we’d give any teacher: curriculum and coaching.
But with all the pressures of poverty, can marginalized parents really participate in their children’s education? Unequivocally, yes. Parents with scant money and minutes can still help their children learn to read. A meta-analysis of nearly 10 million students found that 15 daily minutes of at-home learning seems to be the “magic number” for substantial positive gains in reading achievement. As we saw in this study of the Oakland Reach, parents can be as effective as teachers in tutoring students. Unlike traditional tutors, caregivers are in abundant supply, and they tutor their kids out of love—not for payment.
Springboard Collaborative finds that for every hour a teacher leads a workshop upskilling families to support learning, parents deliver 25 hours of tutoring at home. And they do so eagerly! Springboard’s weekly parent workshops average 91% attendance. Multiple studies demonstrate that these programs can close the gap to grade-level reading by nearly half in 5-10 weeks—not to mention a measurable impact on student attendance. When parents and teachers work as a team, students win.
Paloma Learning uses AI to help K-2 parents provide curriculum-aligned instruction daily at home. The tool is a mobile app that helps marginalized families build the habit of tutoring their kids for 15 minutes a day. Over the course of a school year, this adds up to 1,000 extra hours of one-on-one instruction for every classroom, without burdening teachers or budgets. One study from a large Title I district found students whose families used Paloma were 122% more likely to move from below to on-or-above benchmark in word reading and 48% more likely in decoding.
When it comes to wealthy parents, we seem to have no trouble seeing their potential to drive learning outcomes for their children. Why don’t we see in a low-income single mom the very same love, commitment, and potential? It’s time for the education system to finally begin treating families as assets, not liabilities.
Winston Churchill famously said, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing… after they have tried everything else.” The moment has come for districts to try something else: helping families participate in their children’s learning.