A Parent's Guide for Helping Your Child Excel

What can I do?

Being involved with your child’s education is no longer just about attending PTA meetings, chili suppers, or even parent-teacher conferences. It does not mean being connected once or twice during the school year. Being involved means being connected on a daily basis with your child’s education. Show your child that school is so important that even you feel the need to be there. It means being a mentor as well as a parent. Teachers and school administrators want parents to be involved at home and at school with their children.

Activities for parents should include:

• Engaging in learning activities at home, such as helping with reading skills and checking homework.
• Knowing and monitoring what your child is and should be learning.
• Supervising children and monitoring how they spend their time out of school.
• Talking about school and what children are learning.
• Attending school events, going to parent-teacher conferences, meeting with teachers, and volunteering in the classroom or school.

Parents can definitely be a part of the solution for higher achievement. Ask yourself:

• Do I understand my child’s required state testing?
• How can I help improve my child’s test scores?
• Does my child’s teacher see me as an educational partner?
• When was the last time I gave time to my child’s school?

By forming a partnership with teachers, parents can make a huge difference in their student’s performance from kindergarten through 12th grade. Parents should know the expectations of the school and insist that they be high.

Benefits of Parental Involvement in the classroom include:
First-hand understanding of  expectations in the classroom.

• Knowledge of curriculum policies, programs, and opportunities.
• Increased sense of comfort and ownership at school.
• Observation of your child to better understand her strengths/weaknesses.
• Chance to know your child’s friends.
• Opportunity for input into the program.

When Students are Challenged, They Do More, Achieve More

However, it takes more than engaged parents to produce high student achievement. There has to be high expectations of students by both parents and teachers. When students are challenged to do more, they achieve more. Studies that compared levels of involvement found that achievement increased directly with the extent to which parents were engaged with the learning process. And in schools where teachers reported high levels of outreach to parents, test scores grew at a rate of 40 percent higher than in schools where teachers reported low levels of outreach.