The figure above (click for larger version) is from an NSF study of K-12 math and science education and shows eighth graders’ math proficiency as a function of their mothers’ education level. I attended a presentation recently where the figure was used to show that schools should not be held responsible for the math ignorance of their graduates because kids with uneducated mothers were inevitably doomed to incompetence. My first thought upon seeing the figure was “Wow, the schools don’t teach any math at all; kids learn all of their math from Mom.”
This really isn’t new. An uneducated parent do not necessarily grasp the value of education and thus use school as a drop-off / pick-up “station” vs. getting involved with their kids education. At a minimum “getting involved” means checking up on homework’s, grades, who you are friends with and everything else.
George: So if we have helicopter students that can’t fly the helicopter after 12 years, 6 hours/day of training with us, we can say “There was nothing we could have done to teach the guy. His parents didn’t know how to fly helicopters so of course the kid was never going to be able to learn.”?
Mine certainly do. I have very tolerance for stupidity. so she does most of it. The school’s idea of solving a system of basic linear equations is guesswork. Literally. One of the questions was what was your first guess; followed by explain how you came up with the next guess.
@Phil, that’s a bad example. What’s the age of your helicopter students? If they start at 6 years old, did they just show up on their own for lessons or was their parents involved to sign them up, and want them to become a pilot? Wouldn’t the parents checkup on their kids progress with you to make sure they are getting their money’s worth? Wouldn’t you call the parents if things aren’t working out (the student is dozing off in class, skipping class, not doing homework’s, etc. etc.)? Wouldn’t you advice the parents to keep an eye and work with the kids at home to improve on weak areas? Etc. etc.
Your helicopter student’s are mostly adults. I can almost guaranty you that they are the kind of parents with good education or with rich parents. They are taking your classes because they understand the value of it and they got that from their parents, not the school. Your graph is the proof; when parents know the matt, so the kids.
I’m a strong believer that for any student to be successful, parents must be involved with their kids education up to high school level. You can’t just hand-off you kids to the school system and expect the best.
George: Helicopter students are most certainly not from rich/highly educated families. Helicopter flying has traditionally been a blue collar job and most of the students don’t have college degrees. Because the students are mostly adults, mostly with jobs, we have far less ability to make them sit down and work than a public school, which has physical custody of students for 6 hours each day.
As far as homework is concerned, I’m not sure why homework is required when there are so many in-school hours. A kid should not come out of 12 years x 6 hours/day being unable to basic stuff. To judge, however, by the emails I get from young people applying to be interns, I would say that English grammar and spelling are not taught effectively.
Sorry the conclusions are ridiculous. Are you sure you got that right?
If yes then I’ve to say I never ever have read such a stupid conclusion in my now around 45 years. And well I can not see a more complete confession of failure for any school system, which comes to such conclusions.
I also just can refuse Gorges conclusions. Yes agreed there are parents who do not care but I doubt that 10% of them fall under that category. So 90% of the parents do care and even if they are less educated, one can often read, that they wish their children a better live. They work hard to get the best education for their children.
However if “mums” can teach their children better than teachers, I propose abolishing every teacher and do home-education. Following your (Phil) idea, better educated parents are better teachers 😉
However I can not even believe this graphic. With calculations of areas just half of the best 8 classers got that? I don’t know when this is taught in the US. Currently my eldest is learning that an he’s in class six. I expect that she got this calculations this year. I’m just puzzling what proficiency may mean.. Any idea?
Is it possible that more highly educated parents (or moms) are more interested/able/better at choosing school districts?
From MSNBC.com “Chinese or Western? Who wins the mommy war?”: http://behindthewall.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/01/10/5805977-chinese-or-western-who-wins-the-mommy-war-
This is certainly consistent with the research showing that college functions more as a high-pass filter than an educator: http://www.princeton.edu/pr/news/00/q1/0126-krueger.htm
And http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2010/0707/Summer-reading-gets-plug-from-US-officials-to-keep-kids-sharp quotes Richard Allington of UTK as finding that $40-50 spent on giving low-income kids free books over the summer was the equivalent of sending them to summer school.
is it possibly IQ related? Maybe part of the explanation is that smart parents produce smart kids who are able to learn effectively?
Is there any information about Fathers? For a while there, SF Unified only tracked the mother’s educational level, so maybe this is the only data available. My guess is that the graph would not change much.
From a highly biased perspective (myself), I tend not to buy the whole parent-child relationship in terms of schooling, except in one basic manner. I remember reading one of your main-website articles and how, in college, students with better study habits is probably a better indicator of how well they do rather than their intelligence. My mom, specifically, would fail a basic algebra quiz if given to her at any age, but both me and my younger brother minored in math to go along with our CS degree. I generally excelled at the classes with the most student interaction, which tended towards the science (and oddly, history) at my school, while overly lecture-oriented, nonsense classes like English, Latin, non-history social science courses I did miserable in (even though I read quite a bit of fiction outside of class and rocked current events games).
I suppose the only real push you can expect from a parent to realize a change in their kid is getting parents to force good study habits on a kid and do so because they recognize the inherit worth of the subject. For instance, I doubt without my own curiosity in the subject, I would never received any push from my mom since she thinks it’s a worthless subject. Smarter moms on the other hand probably learned more advanced math, pushed their child to learn it, since, from the mom’s perspective, math’s usefulness became more apparent than in my own mom’s case. In gross over-generalization, with the mom being there one a child first gets home, this push to learn probably comes from them more often than from a dad; but the actual learning of math still happens at school/in-spare-time for a super nerd, rather than learning it directly from mom.
Some related comments:
A look at the schools attended by kids with parents that haven’t finished high school (or even grade school) and their neighborhoods is illuminating. Jonathan Kozol is a writer and educator that has written about this:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Third_World_US/SI_Kozol_StLouis.html
The writing here is a bit dated (early 90s), but I doubt much has changed since then. Education is only a small facet of a larger social problem.
Also interesting is the history of public education in the US. The growth of public schools came alongside the Industrial Revolution. Many industries in these times needed many factory workers, so they funded public schools and set up a curriculum meant to turn children into efficient factory workers, and nothing else. Today the worst high schools in Chicago do practically the same thing; they offer courses in hairdressing and auto repair instead of AP calculus and AP English.
Interesting to hear anyone making comments on “uneducated” vs. “educated” parents and making a blanket statement about both that and helicopter pilots…so I’ll add my two cents since I have experience in both realms:
Parental Background & Storyline:
Father: My father quit high school at 17 (and never attended college) to support his family after his father died of a heart attack at the very young age of 38. Before he quit school, he had repeated his sophomore year twice as a result of the constant movement of their living quarters and having to work as much as possible to bring income to the family (he had two younger siblings). They were very poor ~ I heard stories of no indoor plumbing at times as well as shirts made out of potato sacks. In his working life, my father was a very successful and popular man in his career and personal life (as well as his community) based on his unique ability to connect and influence people positively (life’s core influence is no different today, is it?). His career found him owning his own restaurants after rising through the ranks of corporate America to be a high level executive.
Mother: My mother, raised by her immigrant Filipino grandmother (with no formal education) while her parents travel the US performing musically. After graduating high school in Hawaii, she moved to California to join her parents band and married my father at the age of 21. Like my father, she also never attended college. She did not enter the (outside the house) workforce until she worked in my father’s first restaurant.
The Kids…
My Brother: High Achiever, Honors Student, Star Athlete, worked for our family restaurant as a teen up until the day he graduated from high school. He entered (and graduated from) University of Southern California as a Navy Officer (via scholarship). He went on to be a lifetime Navy Man (Lieutenant Commander) culminating into tactical trainer and Sea Dragon helicopter pilot. He is currently deployed in IRAQ.
Me: I moved through elementary school in the Gifted Minor Program, being educated in an accelerated fashion, which often had me leaving my classroom in order to study and test with children several grades above me. I graduated Salutatorian from high school and, like my brother also had my choice of college scholarships. The rest of my life is easily Google-able so I won’t bore you with the details…but I would like to own and fly my own helicopter someday…with a disco ball hanging in it somewhere. (Not a joke – you would be able to easily find me quoting that in one of my videos)
Where can all the blanket statements in the comments above place my family and how we approached education/life/people/”success”/MATH… ? I am keenly interested.
xo,
@zaneology