No ordinary man could be such a fool

From Don't Help Your Kids With Their Homework by Dana Goldstein. To be fair to the researchers, it is possible that the reporter is misrepresenting their findings. There is no link to a study to test that hypothesis. Accepting that she has correctly reflected the researcher's findings and interpretation, it calls to mind George Orwell's so frequently useful observation that

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

Goldstein's summary of the findings.

One of the central tenets of raising kids in America is that parents should be actively involved in their children’s education: meeting with teachers, volunteering at school, helping with homework, and doing a hundred other things that few working parents have time for. These obligations are so baked into American values that few parents stop to ask whether they’re worth the effort.

Until this January, few researchers did, either. In the largest-ever study of how parental involvement affects academic achievement, Keith Robinson, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and Angel L. Harris, a sociology professor at Duke, mostly found that it doesn’t. The researchers combed through nearly three decades’ worth of longitudinal surveys of American parents and tracked 63 different measures of parental participation in kids’ academic lives, from helping them with homework, to talking with them about college plans, to volunteering at their schools. In an attempt to show whether the kids of more-involved parents improved over time, the researchers indexed these measures to children’s academic performance, including test scores in reading and math.

What they found surprised them. Most measurable forms of parental involvement seem to yield few academic dividends for kids, or even to backfire—regardless of a parent’s race, class, or level of education.

The first question that comes to mind regards averaging. Any individual activity, say meeting with teachers, is going to have a distribution curve among practitioners. In other words, there are parents who meet with teachers and who are well prepared, constructive and derive benefit from such a meeting. There are others who are combative, ill-prepared, antagonistic and who generate negative outcomes from the meeting. So if you have half the population who don't meet with teachers, a quarter who meet and generate positive outcomes and a quarter who meet and generate negative outcomes, then, if you simply average those who meet (positive and negative), then there will be no difference between the meeters and the non-meeters.

What you really want to know is the prevalence of a practice (such as meeting), effectiveness of the practice and the comparison of results between the good practitioners, the bad practitioners and the non-practitioners. From the article it appears that they are simply comparing meeters and non-meeters regardless of effectiveness.

It is as if you compare how people deal with a leaking faucet. You can fix it yourself or you can call a plumber. For those that choose the DIY route, there are those that have some experience in plumbing and those that have no experience. So which approach is the cheapest and most time-effective. Roughly, experienced amateur(cheap and fast), then plumber (expensive and fast), inexperienced amateur (expensive and slow). If you simply compare DIY with plumber (averaging the experienced and inexperienced DIY), then, just as with this study on parental involvement, you will find that there is no AVERAGE benefit to the DIY route because you have included the poorly performing inexperienced DIYers.

That is such an elemental mistake that it is hard to credit that that is what has happened. On the other hand, the article gives no indication otherwise. Given the fact that there is in fact a lot of evidence indicating that effective parental involvement is on balance beneficial for both children and schools, it almost seems as if the researchers had a preconceived outcome they wished to arrive at.

And that isn't uncommon in sociology studies. There is a very common theme to sociology research to the effect that individuals lack agency, that they are entirely subject to historical circumstance and exogenous shocks and that there has to be a policy response that shields people from the consequences of their own actions and of context and shocks. And what do sociological policy interventions require? Sociologists. Perhaps that is the sequence that we are seeing when we look at research results such as this. They find what is in their own interests to find.

And it is too bad. These are interesting questions which deserve disinterested, empirical, objective answers. Along the continuum of Tiger Mom - Helicopter Parent - Laissez Faire Parent - Uninvolved Parent - Uninterested Parent, which yields the best results under what circumstances? There are successes that can be cited for each approach as well as failures. Which approach works best for what type of child under what circumstances? Claiming that no approach works at all is, how do I put this, less than credible.