Comments about ‘Parents more important to test scores than teachers, study says’

Geez, I've been saying this for 10 years! Maybe now people will sit up and listen. It doesn't matter how much the teacher is making, what the class size is, if the books are new, if the classroom is modern, etc. It matters even less if the school has a new auditorium, a big gym, or new football uniforms paid for by boosters (here's looking at you, Timpview). What matters is the parents. If the parents create high expectations for the kid's education, that kid will get educated. A kid who wants to learn will learn no matter what.

Want to know where to throw your educational dollars? Throw them at teaching parents how to parent.

Makes you wonder about the increasing number of homes where parent-child interaction is decreasing due to over-scheduling of extra-curricular activities, double-income situations, and free-time overrun by media devices.

I am sure this will come as shocking information to many, especially politicians on the right who choose to blame teachers for every problem in society today. Brave Sir Robin you have it right, if a teacher wins the parent lottery you can put 50 kids in each class and it will not matter kids will learn and the scores will be high. But in the same light, if a teacher loses the parent lottery 12 kids in a class will be a much greater challenge than the class of 50.

I heard long ago, SAT scores were most closely correlated with parent's educational and income levels. My now deceased education professor father-in-law told us the easiest way to find good schools was to simply live in the most affluent area we could afford.

Ok, so if parents are more influential in the education of a child than a teacher is, why do we want educators teaching our kids morals? If they are to learn morals, this study would indicate that what is taught in the home is what will stick, and not what is taught at school.

Interesting that we have an article that talks about parents influence on a child's education and there are hardly any comments, but put an article out there about teachers and we would have at least 50 comments. Until parents pull their share of the weight in educating children we will continue to have problems, but that is the big pink elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about.

Yet we put all the blame and all the accountability on the 10% (teachers) to make up for the other 90%!