Essay: Teachers Help To Improve Parental Involvement

Teachers Help To Improve Parental Involvement
Coleman and McNeese stated, “A strong, positive relationship between school and home can be a great motivating factor for students…a school-home partnership should address the particular needs of a community and provides the appropriate support that students need to succeed” (Coleman & McNeese, 2009). Motivation is what every child needs from both parents and teachers in order for them to them become achievers. Parental involvement helps with the motivation of every child because they don’t feel less of themselves they feel more empowered to achieve and this may include parent and child having a discussions about what activities they like and their interests.
Educators have a duty to offer students the best educational understanding possible. Parents play a major role in making the educational experience encouraging. An article titled, “Linking Parent and Community Involvement with Student Achievement : Comparing Principal and Teacher Perceptions of Stakeholder Influence” Gordon (2009), highlights that students need the presence of their parents in their schooling especially as they deal with strains of society, while on the other hand in their study on teacher work life, Bauch and Goldring (2000) found that creating a caring atmosphere and requiring parent volunteering seem to have a large effect on promoting parent participation as viewed by teachers. In addition, their research suggests that if the school itself is a supportive environment for teachers to work in, teachers are then more likely to provide parents with information.  In this article, Gordon (2009) talks about the leadership roles in the school system and how this can help to transform the community involvement spent in a student’s education. The writers also looked at the perception that teachers have on parental involvement and how it can affect the child in different ways and also their achievement. Gordon (2009) proposed solution to have principals and teachers to improve and organize their schools to include more parental involvement, which would benefit the students in the end. The notions that were presented in the article supports the theory that schools and parents need to improve a community of learners to increase the success of the students. The authors also encouraged teachers to support parental involvement by having a communication line with the parents and address academic problems that are associated with their child or children immediately.
Consistent communication between the home and the school throughout a child’s education is one of the major factors in student/students achievement in school. In addition the article, “We are the Professionals: A Study of Teachers’ Views on Parental Involvement in School” (Baeck, 2010) delivers a teacher’s perspective on parental involvement. Baeck (2010) examines teachers’ attitudes and experiences towards parental cooperation. This article gives an interesting standpoint to parental involvement and how it may affect the students’ academic achievement. If and when there is a negative thought of parental involvement the students may be the ones that will affected because the teacher will try to close the communications with the parents due to the lack of presence and neglects as it relates to the child.
 
Parents’ characteristics and level of involvement
According to the article Parental Involvement in School In contrast, sociology of education has focused on the process and accurately describes the association between parents’ background and levels of parental involvement (Lareau [1987]; Sui-Chu & Willms [1996]). In addition also Welsch & Zimmer [2008] and Guryan et al. [2008], among others, document that parents with higher education and higher wage allocate more time to direct child care despite their opportunity cost being larger. However, Lareau [1987] resumes the three theories in sociology that explain varying levels of school involvement by socio-economic status. Lareau [1987] states that the “culture of poverty” theory suggests that working-class families do not value education as highly as middle and upper-class families.
According to (Grenfell & James, 1998) they stated that variations in habitus in relation to parent involvement may derive from differences in financial resources, educational knowledge, and experiences with and confidence in the educational system. Parents with low levels of education, for example, may be less involved at school because they feel less confident about communicating with school staff owing to a lack of knowledge of the school system, a lack of familiarity with educational jargon, or their own negative educational experiences. According to Grenfell and James (1998), parents across social classes highly value education. For example, one study showed that working-class mothers valued education for their children in spite of their own negative experiences and misgivings about the educational system (Grenfell & James, 1998).
Similar to Zarate’s (2007) article, “Parental Involvement, Parenting Behaviors, and Children’s Cognitive Development in Low-Income and Minority Families” (Chang et al., 2009) includes the ideas of the multicultural family and the families of different socioeconomic backgrounds and how it affects parental involvement.  As stated by Chen and Gregory, “Student engagement was significantly enhanced by parental encouragement among Hispanic students, whereas parental encouragement had a significant positive impact on school performance among Asian students” (Chen & Gregory, 2009).
In the article, “Predictors of Parent Involvement across contexts in Asian American and European American Families” (Sy et al., 2007) focuses on the parental involvement styles of Asian American and European American families. The article debates the basic changes of the awareness of education from different backgrounds, for the most part focused on Asian American families and European Americans.