Sociology of Education http://soe.sagepub.

com/

Leveling the Home Advantage: Assessing the Effectiveness of Parental Involvement in Elementary
School
Thurston Domina
Sociology of Education 2005 78: 233
DOI: 10.1177/003804070507800303

The online version of this article can be found at:

http://soe.sagepub.com/content/78/3/233

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:

American Sociological Association

Additional services and information for Sociology of Education can be found at:

Email Alerts: http://soe.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

Subscriptions: http://soe.sagepub.com/subscriptions

Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

Citations: http://soe.sagepub.com/content/78/3/233.refs.html

>> Version of Record - Jul 1, 2005

What is This?

Downloaded from soe.sagepub.com at CARLETON UNIV on November 28, 2014

 Leveling the Home Advantage:
Assessing the Effectiveness of
Parental Involvement in Elementary
School
Thurston Domina
City University of New York

In the past two decades, a great deal of energy has been dedicated to improving children’s
education by increasing parents’ involvement in school. However, the evidence on the effec-
tiveness of parental involvement is uneven. Whereas policy makers and theorists have assumed
that parental involvement has wide-ranging positive consequences, many studies have shown
that it is negatively associated with some children’s outcomes. This article uses data from the
children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 to estimate time-lagged growth
models of the effect of several types of parental involvement on scores on elementary school
achievement tests and the Behavioral Problems Index. The findings suggest that parental
involvement does not independently improve children’s learning, but some involvement activ-
ities do prevent behavioral problems. Interaction analyses suggest that the involvement of par-
ents with low socioeconomic status may be more effective than that of parents with high
socioeconomic status.

I
n the past two decades, a great deal of
research and policy-making activity has
been dedicated to increasing the involve-
ment of parents in schools. Parental-involve-
ment initiatives have been a mainstay of fed-
eral educational policy since the Reagan
administration’s 1986 Goals 2000: Educate
America Act. In 1996, the Clinton administra-
tion reauthorized the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act, adding a new pro-
vision that required the nation’s poorest
schools to spend at least 1 percent of their
Title I supplementary federal funds to develop
educational “compacts” between families
and schools. Likewise, increasing parental
involvement in schools is one of the six cen-
tral goals of the Bush administration’s 2002
No Child Left Behind Act.
At the state and local levels, interest and
activity surrounding parental involvement has
been even more pronounced. A 1995–96 sur-
vey by the National Center for Education
Statistics showed that nearly all public ele-
mentary and middle schools in the United
States sponsored activities that were
designed to foster parental involvement.
According to the survey, 97 percent of
schools invited parents to attend an open
house or back-to-school night, 92 percent
scheduled parent-teacher conferences, 96
percent hosted arts events, 85 percent spon-
sored athletic events, and 84 percent had sci-
ence fairs (Carey et al. 1998). Throughout the
United States, parental-involvement initia-
tives have been central to state- and dis-
trictwide school reform efforts, most notably
in Baltimore, Chicago, and Philadelphia
(Epstein 2001; Fine 1993; Wallace and
Walberg 1991). In 2003–04, New York City
schools chancellor Joel Klein appropriated

Sociology of Education 2005, Vol. 78 (July): 233–249 233

Downloaded from soe.sagepub.com at CARLETON UNIV on November 28, 2014

234
$43 million to hire parent coordinators to
arrange school events and contact parents in
each of the system’s 1,200 schools (Gootman
2003).
The spread of parental-involvement poli-
cies reflects the application of key insights
from the sociology of education to the day-
to-day operation of American schools. As
Epstein (1986, 1987a, 1987b) argued,
parental-involvement efforts acknowledge
the crucial role that families and communities
play in children’s education. They attempt to
moderate upper- and middle-class students’
home advantage by bringing all families,
regardless of social class or race, into the daily
life of the school. Parental-involvement poli-
cies seek to redistribute cultural and social
capital, boosting the resources that are avail-
able to disadvantaged children. They are
thought to foster social closure by creating
opportunities for parents, teachers, and
administrators to network and share informa-
tion with one another.
But does parental involvement deserve the
faith that the public has invested in it?
Researchers have generally agreed that
parental-involvement activities are associated
with stronger educational outcomes, but it is
not clear that these activities cause educa-
tional success (A. Baker and Soden 1998;
Downey 2002). Indeed, evidence regarding
the effectiveness of parental involvement has
been mixed and largely discouraging. Many
studies have suggested that the parental-
involvement activities that are most frequent-
ly targeted by schools have little or no direct
influence on children’s educational outcomes;
others have indicated that the effectiveness of
parental involvement may be conditional on
parents’ race and class. However, these find-
ings may be misleading. Past researchers on
parental involvement have focused on cogni-
tive and academic outcomes, neglecting the
effect of involvement on children’s behavior.
Furthermore, most have studied middle
school and high school students, rather than
elementary school students.
I used data on the elementary school-aged
children of the National Longitudinal Survey
of Youth 1979 cohort (NLSY79) to investigate
the relationship between six forms of parental
involvement and two distinct outcomes—
Downloaded from soe.sagepub.com at CARLETON UNIV on November 28, 2014
Domina
children’s cognitive achievement and their
behavioral problems. The NLSY79’s longitudi-
nal design makes it possible to place parental
activities in the context of children’s earlier
achievement and behavior. Using a repeated-
measures approach, I estimated the effects of
parental involvement on achievement and
behavior, net of earlier achievement and
behavior. Finally, I used interaction terms to
determine whether the effects of parental-
involvement activities vary by parents’ socioe-
conomic status (SES).
PREVIOUS RESEARCH
Given the popularity of parental-involvement
initiatives as a tool for school reform, it is sur-
prising to note that research on the link
between involvement and school success has
been inconclusive. A few national studies
have associated high levels of parental
involvement with improved educational out-
comes for children (Fehrmann, Keith, and
Reimers 1987; Stevenson and Baker 1987;
Useem 1992), but others have reported that
parental involvement in education is nega-
tively related to children’s educational out-
comes (Fan 2001; Milne et al. 1986). Even
within studies, the results have often been
mixed, with the observed effects of parental
involvement depending on which aspects of
involvement and which educational out-
comes have been considered (Crosnoe
2001b; Ho and Willms 1996; Keith 1991;
Miedel and Reynolds 1999; Muller 1993;
Singh et al. 1995).
Indeed, a review of multivariate studies of
the effectiveness of parental involvement yield-
ed no single parental-involvement activity that
was consistently linked to favorable children’s
outcomes. For example, whereas Catsambis
(1998), Muller (1993) and Ho and Willms
(1996) reported positive effects of parents’ at-
home educational supervision, Desimone
(2001) reported negative effects, and Fan
(2001) and McNeal (1999) reported nonsignif-
icant findings. Even within studies, the estimat-
ed effects of particular parental-involvement
activities have varied according to the outcome
measured. For example, Desimone (2001) and
McNeal (1999) found that attendance at
Leveling the Home Advantage
Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) meetings is
associated with positive values on some chil-
dren’s outcomes and negative values on others.
The one area in which recent studies have
seemed to agree is one in which involvement
has a counterintuitive negative effect on chil-
dren’s educational outcomes; Catsambis
(1998), Desimone (2001), Fan (2001), Muller
(1993), and Ho and Willms (1996) all reported
a significant, negative association between par-
ents’ educational contacts with schools and
children’s educational outcomes.
Studies that have used other methodolo-
gies have yielded similarly ambiguous find-
ings. Among qualitative studies, Comer
(1980), Comer and Haynes (1991), Epstein
(2001), and Lareau (1989) reported positive
effects of parental involvement. Fine (1993)
and Reay (1998), however, argued that
observed associations between parental par-
ticipation and children’s educational perfor-
mance are really artifacts of the class and
racial advantages that involved parents bring
to the table. The evidence from evaluations of
parental-involvement programs has been no
more encouraging. Mattingly et al. (2002)
reviewed the evaluations of 41 school- and
district-level parental-involvement programs
and concluded that there is little empirical
evidence to support the claim that schools’
efforts to improve parental involvement ulti-
mately improve students’ outcomes. Only
half the parental-involvement studies that
Mattingly et al. considered to be adequately
designed found positive effects of parental-
involvement programs.
EXPLANATIONS FOR THE
UNEVEN EFFECTS
Given the resources that have been dedicated
to parental involvement, these findings are dis-
couraging. However, previous research on
parental involvement may have underestimat-
ed its effect by neglecting the following four
considerations.
Differential Effects by Students’ Ages
Nearly all past research on the effectiveness of
parental involvement has been conducted on
Downloaded from soe.sagepub.com at CARLETON UNIV on November 28, 2014
235
middle- and high school students. This focus
may have caused researchers to underesti-
mate the effects of parental involvement.
Parents’ involvement in school tends to
decline as children age (Catsambis and
Garland 1997; Crosnoe 2001a), as does its
effectiveness (Catsambis and Suazo-Garcia
2000; Muller 1998; Singh et al. 1995). The
only relatively recent study that analyzed the
involvement of parents of elementary school
students using quantitative methods (Miedel
and Reynolds 1999) found that parental
involvement improves the reading scores of
kindergarteners but has no effect on the read-
ing scores of high school students.
Furthermore, most parental-involvement pol-
icy-making activity has focused on increasing
the involvement of children in elementary
school (Chen and Chandler 2001). It is possi-
ble that these initiatives could be effective,
even if the effects of parental involvement on
high school-aged children are negligible. This
article addresses this oversight in the litera-
ture by estimating the implications of
parental-involvement activities for a sample of
elementary school students.
Conceptualizing Parental
Involvement and Its Effects
Influenced by Epstein’s (1992) typology of
parental involvement—a typology that
includes basic parental roles like keeping chil-
dren safe, as well as higher-level involvement
activities, such as collaborating with commu-
nity organizations—researchers on parental
involvement have considered a variety of
activities as examples of parental involve-
ment. By contrast, analyses of the implica-
tions of involvement have been narrowly
focused on children’s cognitive and academic
achievement. As McNeal (1999) pointed out,
this tight analytic focus may come at a cost.
McNeal argued that the conceptual ties
between most forms of parental involvement
and children’s learning are weak compared to
the ties between parental involvement and
children’s behavior.
Involvement may be expected to influence
children’s outcomes via three mechanisms:
• Parental involvement socializes. When, for exam-
236
ple, parents supervise their children’s home-
work, they convey the importance of school-
ing.
• Second, parental involvement generates social
control. Parents who attend PTA meetings and
volunteer in school develop relationships with
their children’s teachers and the parents of
their children’s classmates. These relationships
make it easier for parents to monitor children’s
behavior and teachers’ practices.
• Parental involvement gives parents access to
insider information. When children have prob-
lems at school, involved parents learn about
these problems earlier and know more about
available solutions.
McNeal argued that since the mechanisms
vary, different types of parental involvement
will have different effects on children’s cogni-
tive and behavioral outcomes. Socialization
primarily affects children’s behavior and
engagement. Similarly, the social-control
aspects of parental involvement tend to curb
children’s problem behaviors, but do relative-
ly little to influence children’s learning. Only
the insider-information element of parental
involvement, McNeal contended, directly
influences both children’s cognitive and
behavioral outcomes.
Researchers who have focused on the cog-
nitive effects of parental involvement may
have overlooked more dramatic implications
of involvement for children’s behavior. This
article models the effect of six parental-
involvement activities on children’s behav-
ioral and cognitive development. Following
McNeal (1999), I argue that the six parental-
involvement activities influence children’s
outcomes in different ways: Two of the
parental-involvement variables that are
included in my analyses measure the extent
to which parents are engaged in students’
homework, an activity that primarily affects
students’ outcomes via socialization. Three of
the involvement measures—attending PTA
meetings and volunteering inside and outside
the classroom—tap involvement in activities
that allow parents to exercise social control
over their children. In addition, my analysis
includes a measure of attendance at parent-
teacher conferences, an activity that exposes
parents to insider information.
Downloaded from soe.sagepub.com at CARLETON UNIV on November 28, 2014
Domina
Separating the Causes and Effects
of Involvement
Researchers have often explained negative
and nonsignificant associations between par-
ents’ involvement in school and children’s
outcomes by arguing that the direction of
causal effects between involvement and edu-
cational outcomes is ambiguous. According
to this argument, when children are experi-
encing difficulties in school, their parents are
more likely to schedule meetings with teach-
ers and to become involved, but when chil-
dren are succeeding in school, their parents
tend to relax their involvement in school
(Crosnoe 2001a; McNeal 1999; Muller 1998;
Sanders 1998).This explanation suggests that
cross-sectional estimates of the effect of
involvement are biased, since they neglect
the cross-cutting influence of prior perfor-
mance.1
A handful of studies have adopted a longi-
tudinal survey design to address causal direc-
tion. Singh et al.’s (1995) study tested the
effect of parental involvement on students’
eighth-grade academic achievement with a
control for prior grades. Muller (1998) and
Fan (2001) used a more-rigorous, repeated-
measures approach. Their analyses took
advantage of the repeated measures available
in the National Education Longitudinal Study
(NELS) of 1988 to model the effect of
parental involvement on high school stu-
dents’ achievement, net of prior achievement
scores. These studies controlled for potential
reverse-causality bias, but their estimates of
the effect of parental involvement were no
less ambiguous than were those of earlier
studies. Muller found that children who dis-
cuss school with their parents experience rel-
atively rapid growth in math achievement,
but otherwise, both Muller and Fan found
that most parental-involvement activities
have, at best, no effect on the cognitive
development of high school students.
This article also adopts a repeated-mea-
sures approach, using NLSY data for elemen-
tary school students. The approach tests the
hypothesis that parental involvement is both
the cause and the effect of children’s elemen-
tary school performance by examining the
effects of parental involvement net of chil-
Leveling the Home Advantage
dren’s prior cognitive achievement and
behavior.
Heterogeneity of Causal Effects
Recent theoretical and empirical work has
pointed to the possibility that the efficacy of
particular parental-involvement activities
varies according to parents’ race, ethnicity,
and class background (Desimone 2001;
Lareau and Horvat 1999; McNeal 1999).
Taken as a whole, this line of inquiry suggests
that the involvement efforts of middle-class
and white parents may meet with greater
educational rewards than may the involve-
ment efforts of poor and minority parents.
Potential heterogeneity in the causal
effects of parental involvement has profound
implications for the effectiveness of parental
involvement as a school reform strategy. If
Desimone (2001), Lareau and Horvat (1999),
and McNeal (1999) were correct that the
positive effects of parental involvement are
the strongest for the most-advantaged fami-
lies, a general increase in parental-involve-
ment activities may actually widen gaps in
educational achievement, rather than amelio-
rate them.
To address these issues, I used time-lagged
models to investigate the possibility that the
effects of parental involvement vary by par-
ents’ socioeconomic background by testing
for interactions between the effects of
involvement activities and parents’ SES.2 If
these analyses show greater returns to the
involvement of high-SES parents, the progno-
sis for parental-involvement programs as a
tool for generating educational equity is grim.
If, on the other hand, they show that the
involvement of disadvantaged parents has a
stronger effect than the involvement of rela-
tively affluent parents, even modest effects of
parental involvement could have major con-
sequences for improving educational equity.
DATA AND METHODS
I used longitudinal data from the mother-
child sample of the NLSY793 to sort out the
relationship between several parental school-
involvement activities and elementary school
Downloaded from soe.sagepub.com at CARLETON UNIV on November 28, 2014
237
children’s cognitive and behavioral develop-
ment. The NLSY79 began in 1979, collecting
data on the family background, labor market
experience, and educational history of a sam-
ple of 12,686 American children and young
adults aged 14–22. Annual follow-up surveys
tracked the school-to-work transition of this
original cohort, and in 1986, the NLSY79 ini-
tiated a mother-child sample, focusing on the
children of the NSLY79 respondents. In addi-
tion to surveying mothers and children about
their families, friends, and schooling, the
NLSY79 has administered a battery of cogni-
tive and socioemotional assessments to the
children biannually (Baker et al. 1993; U.S.
Department of Labor 2001).
Researchers have relied heavily on NLSY79
data to analyze the influence of parents’
socioeconomic characteristics on children’s
educational development (see, e.g., Duncan
and Brooks-Gunn 1997; Mayer 1997; Parcel
and Menaghan 1994). However, I know of
only one study that used NLSY79 mother-
child data to assess the influence of parental
involvement, and that study was limited to a
small subsample of respondent children who
were enrolled in the Head Start program
(Cohen 2002). The NLSY79 is uniquely suited
to research on parental involvement, since it
provides rich data on parental involvement
and multiple children’s educational and
behavioral outcome measures. In addition, it
provides repeated observations of children
while they are still in elementary school,
which distinguishes it from the NELS, the
data set that has most often been used in
recent research on parental involvement.
I studied 1,445 children of NLSY79 respon-
dents. These children were enrolled in ele-
mentary school in 1996 and completed the
NLSY79’s Peabody Individual Achievement
Test (PIAT) and the Behavior Problems Index
(BPI) in 1996 and 2000.4 All the children in
this sample were in the fourth or lower grades
in 1996, and the median student was
enrolled in the second grade. I followed these
children through three survey rounds, look-
ing at the effect of parents’ school-involve-
ment activities in 1996 on the children’s 2000
PIAT and BPI scores. Since the NLSY purpose-
ly oversampled the economically disadvan-
taged, African Americans, and Hispanics in
238 Domina

the construction of the initial 1979 cohort
and since response rates in the screening
process and in subsequent interviews varied
by race and other characteristics, I used the
NLSY’s 2000 child weights to correct for
potential biases.5 Although rates of nonre-
sponse were low, listwise deletion would dis-
card nearly one third of the cases in my sam-
ple. As King et al. (2001) demonstrated, the
result would be the loss of valuable informa-
tion and could cause severe selection bias. To
avoid these problems, I filled missing data
using Amelia multiple imputation, a tech-
nique that has been demonstrated to pro-
duce more reliable data than other tech-
niques for dealing with missing data (Honaker
et al. 2001; King et al. 2001).6 Table 1 pre-
sents weighted descriptive statistics for each
variable that was used in the analyses.
Dependent Variables
Using ordinary least-squares (OLS) regression
models, I assessed the effect of the six
parental school-involvement activities on two
outcomes: the PIAT and the BPI. The PIAT
measures children’s academic achievement
(Dunn and Markwardt 1970). This composite
score is the mean of the child’s age-standard-
ized percentile scores on subtests in mathe-
matics, reading recognition, and reading
comprehension, each of which consists of 84

Table 1. Variables Used in the Analyses: Descriptive Statistics of NLSY79 Elementary School
Children

Variables Range Mean SD

Dependent Variables
2000 Composite PIAT percentile score 0–100 57.88 24.84
2000 BPI percentile score 0–100 56.83 28.03

Parental Involvement Variables

Parents attended PTA meeting, 1996 0–1 .550 .498
Parents attended one-on-one meeting with
teacher or school official, 1996 0–1 .937 .242
Parents volunteered in classroom, 1996 0–1 .608 .488
Parents volunteered outside the classroom, 1996 0–1 .641 .480
How often parents helped with homework, 1996 0–5 3.11 1.72
How often parents checked homework, 1996 0–5 3.88 1.65

Background Control Variables

Black 0–1 .140 .347
Hispanic 0–1 .071 .258
Other 0–1 .073 .260
Male 0–1 .518 .500
Dummy, child attended public school, 1996 0–1 .855 .353
Dummy, child lived with mother and her
spouse/partner, 1996 0–1 .791 .407
Child’s grade in 1996 0–4 1.82 1.38
Family SES, 1996 -2.26–2.46 0 .69

Prior Performance Control Variables

1996 Composite PIAT percentile score 0–100 51.66 18.11
1996 BPI percentile score 0–100 57.79 27.43
Child repeated a grade before 1996 0–1 .052 .222

Downloaded from soe.sagepub.com at CARLETON UNIV on November 28, 2014

Leveling the Home Advantage
multiple-choice items.7 These three subtests
have high reliability and correlate closely with
a variety of other cognitive measures.8
The BPI measures the frequency, range,
and type of childhood behavioral problems.
This measure is derived from mothers’
responses to 28 questions about their chil-
dren’s behavior in the three months before
they were surveyed. Among the behaviors
included in the BPI are cheating and lying,
argumentativeness, difficulty concentrating,
bullying, disobedience at home and at
school, trouble getting along with other chil-
dren, trouble getting along with teachers,
and impulsiveness.9 The BPI is a negative
measure; a high score on the BPI indicates
many behavioral problems.
Measures of Parental Involvement
I used six NLSY variables to measure aspects
of parental involvement. Four of these vari-
ables measure parental participation in
school-based parental-involvement activities,
and two measure at-home parental involve-
ment in the educational process. The NLSY
includes several more-general questions
about parent-child relations, but these six
questions most directly tap the involvement
of parents in children’s education.
The four school-involvement measures are
attendance at parent-teacher conferences,
participation in the PTA, volunteering in the
classroom, and volunteering outside the
classroom (such as supervising lunch and
chaperoning field trips). These items are all
dichotomous, and each is based on inter-
views with the mothers. Mothers who said
that they or their husbands or partners par-
ticipated in the school activity in question
were coded 1, and those who said that they
did not were coded 0. To eliminate simul-
taneity and time-order issues, I used data on
parents’ school involvement from 1996 to
predict children’s outcomes in 2000. While
the four items are correlated,10 multicollinear-
ity diagnostics on the OLS regression models
suggested that including all four types of
involvement in one regression model does
not introduce collinearity problems.
In addition, I used two child-reported vari-
ables to measure the effect of at-home
Downloaded from soe.sagepub.com at CARLETON UNIV on November 28, 2014
239
parental-involvement activities on children’s
outcomes: how often the parents helped the
children with homework and how often the
parents checked the children’s homework.
These measures of home involvement are
scale variables, ranging from 0 (for children
whose parents never checked or helped with
homework) to 5 (for children whose parents
checked or helped with homework every
day). Although these two variables correlate
with one another at .52, they do not correlate
closely with the school-involvement variables,
and post-hoc multicollinearity tests suggested
that they do not create multicollinearity issues
in the regression models.11
It should be noted that these measures of
parental involvement are less precise than
one may like.12 The four measures of parental
participation in school activities are blunt; as
dichotomous measures, they blur the distinc-
tion between parents who regularly partici-
pate in school activities and those who do so
infrequently. Likewise, by focusing exclusively
on help with homework, the measures of at-
home parental involvement miss more-
nuanced forms of parental involvement, such
as discussing school lessons and engaging in
informal academic coaching. These data limi-
tations likely have a conservative effect on the
reported findings; since the data imperfectly
capture parental involvement, estimates of
the effectiveness of involvement could be
understated.
Control Variables
Socioeconomic Background I took several
characteristics of children’s social, economic,
and family backgrounds into account to con-
trol for possible spurious correlations between
parental school-involvement activities and
children’s outcomes. Each of these character-
istics has been shown elsewhere to be related
to both parents’ school involvement and chil-
dren’s educational and behavioral outcomes.
The control variables are child’s race and gen-
der (measured in a series of dummy vari-
ables), child’s grade, type of child’s school,
two-parent family, and family SES (created by
taking the mean of the standardized logged
family income-to-needs ratio, mother’s and
father’s highest grade completed, and moth-
240
er’s and father’s occupational prestige level).
Each of these controls was measured in 1996,
when the parental-involvement measures
were taken.
Prior Performance To assess the possible
reciprocal causal relationship between
parental involvement and children’s out-
comes, I added measures to control for chil-
dren’s prior performance on relevant assess-
ments. With the addition of these prior per-
formance variables, the PIAT and BPI analyses
became time-lagged growth analyses. While
the earlier models predict the effect of
parental involvement on children’s 2000 PIAT
and BPI assessment values, these time-lagged
models predict the change in assessment val-
ues over these four years. Controlling for prior
values in the PIAT and BPI models reduces the
model’s variability considerably; the students’
1996 PIAT scores correlate with their 2000
scores at .72, and the 1996 BPI scores corre-
late with the 2000 BPI scores at .65.
Interaction Effects
The final step of the analysis was to investi-
gate heterogeneity in the effects of parental
involvement by parent’s SES, using interac-
tion terms created by multiplying the SES
scale by each of the parental-involvement
activities. The two outcome variables were
then regressed on each of these interaction
terms, along with controls for SES and the
other background and prior performance
controls. For clarity’s sake, each of these inter-
action analyses was run separately.
FINDINGS
Table 2 presents the effects of parental-
involvement activities in 1996 on children’s
academic achievement and behavioral prob-
lems in 2000. Three models are reported for
each dependent variable: The base model
looks at the effects of parental involvement
without any controls, the second addresses
the issue of spurious causality by controlling
for the child’s socioeconomic background,
and the third addresses the issue of time
order and causal direction by controlling for
Downloaded from soe.sagepub.com at CARLETON UNIV on November 28, 2014
Domina
the child’s prior score on the dependent vari-
able.
The base PIAT model indicates that several
parental-involvement activities are significant-
ly related to high academic achievement.
Attending parent-teacher conferences and
PTA meetings, volunteering both in and out
of the classroom, and checking homework
are all positively associated with subsequent
scores on academic achievement tests.
Furthermore, these effects are not insubstan-
tial: Children whose parents participated in
each of these five involvement activities
scored an average of 15.35 percentage points
higher on the 2000 standardized composite
PIAT examination. Homework help is nega-
tively associated with academic achievement
in this model. The six parental involvement
variables explain less than 5 percent of the
variance in PIAT scores. Nonetheless, this
model clearly shows that children with
involved parents tend to have higher acade-
mic achievement.
The second PIAT model suggests that
some of this positive association between
parental involvement and academic achieve-
ment is spurious. Attending PTA meetings,
volunteering outside the classroom, and
checking on homework are all significantly
and positively associated with academic
achievement, even after race, family back-
ground, and school sector are controlled.
However, the coefficient for attendance at
parent-teacher conferences becomes nega-
tive in this model, the coefficient for class-
room volunteering becomes statistically
insignificant, and the positive and statistically
significant coefficients for attending PTA
meetings and volunteering outside the class-
room shrink considerably. Controlling for a
child’s background characteristics reveals that
at least some of the positive association
between each parental-involvement measure
and academic achievement that was
observed in the base model is an artifact of
the mutual dependence of parental involve-
ment and academic achievement on back-
ground characteristics. Like much of the
research on the link between parental
involvement and academic achievement, the
overall picture that emerges from the second
PIAT model is ambiguous. Net of race and
 Table 2. Unstandardized OLS Coefficients: Effect of 1996 Parental Involvement on 2000 PIAT and BPI Scores

2000 PIAT 2000 BPI

Variables 1 2 3 1 2 3

Parents attended one-on-one meeting with teacher, 1996 2.94* -3.99*** -1.21 1.81 2.78* 1.61
Parents attended PTA meeting, 1996 3.32*** 1.92*** .47 -2.38** -.56 .36
Parents volunteered in classroom, 1996 1.71* -.48 .37 -2.76*** -2.08** -.14
Parents volunteered outside the classroom, 1996 6.56*** 2.67*** .27 -5.34*** -3.58*** -1.82**
How often parents checked homework, 1996 .82*** 1.02*** -.34* -6.51** -.93*** -.39*
Leveling the Home Advantage

How often parents helped with homework, 1996 -2.16*** -1.61*** -.33* 2.79 .22 -.43*
Black 11.80*** -5.81*** -5.67*** -3.08***
Hispanic -5.02*** -1.00 -3.19* .57
Other -3.61*** -2.05** 1.36 2.17*
Male .59 .71 4.05*** .58
Dummy, child attended public school, 1996 -3.26*** -1.14* 6.57*** 4.91***
Dummy, child lived with mother and her spouse/partner, 1996 .80 .85 -5.29*** -2.69***
Child’s grade in 1996 -.15 -2.78*** .41 -.44*
Family SES, 1996 15.76*** 6.91*** -7.75*** -2.86***
PIAT, 1996 .90*** —
BPI, 1996 — .63***
Constant 51.38*** 62.78*** 19.61*** 63.17*** 58.42 21.86

Downloaded from soe.sagepub.com at CARLETON UNIV on November 28, 2014

Adjusted R2 .049 .294 .601 .019 .083 .435

*p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001.

241
242
family background, some parental-involve-
ment activities are positively related to acade-
mic achievement; others are negatively or
nonsignificantly related.
But like most research on parental involve-
ment, this second PIAT model fails to account
for reciprocal causality between parental
involvement and achievement. In the third
and final model, I allowed for the possibility
that parents will adjust their involvement
according to their children’s needs by adding
a control for a child’s 1996 PIAT score. The
coefficients reported in this model can be
understood as the effect of parental involve-
ment on the rate of children’s improvement
in academic achievement between 1996 and
2000. In this model, the only parental-
involvement practices that are significantly
associated with academic achievement—
attending parent-teacher conferences, check-
ing homework, and helping with home-
work—are negatively associated. This finding
suggests that once the effect of prior acade-
mic achievement on parents’ educational-
involvement activities is accounted for, the
positive association between involvement
and achievement melts away. It lends sup-
ports to McNeal’s (1999) contention that the
link between parental involvement and chil-
dren’s cognitive outcomes is tenuous.
Furthermore, it substantially challenges the
notion that parental involvement boosts chil-
dren’s academic achievement. Unless
parental-involvement programs improve the
effectiveness of parental involvement, this
finding should raise serious questions about
these initiatives’ efficacy as a strategy to
improve students’ learning.
The analysis of the effect of parental
involvement on children’s behavioral prob-
lems yields more encouraging results. In the
base model, four of the six parental-involve-
ment activities are associated with fewer
behavioral problems. This model demon-
strates that children whose parents attend
PTA meetings, volunteer inside and outside
the classroom, and check their homework
score 17 percentage points lower on the stan-
dardized BPI distribution.
Three of the four desirable parental-
involvement effects remain significant after
child’s school, family, and socioeconomic
Downloaded from soe.sagepub.com at CARLETON UNIV on November 28, 2014
Domina
background are controlled in the second
model. Net of controls, parents’ volunteering
in school (both inside and outside the class-
room) and homework checking are strongly
associated with lower levels of childhood
behavioral problems. As was the case in the
PIAT models, some of the association
between involvement and BPI that was
observed in the base model is spurious; net of
background characteristics, the three signifi-
cant parental-involvement variables are asso-
ciated with a decline in BPI of just 6.6 per-
centage points. Nonetheless, the second BPI
model suggests that the independent influ-
ence of parental-involvement activities on
children’s behavior is much clearer and
stronger than is the influence of parental
involvement on academic achievement.
The third model confirms this point, show-
ing that parents’ volunteering outside school,
homework checking, and homework help all
reduced children’s 2000 behavioral problems,
even after background variables and 1996 BPI
scores were controlled. It is worth noting that
the effect of homework help on BPI has
reversed to become statistically significant
and negative in this third model. In other
words, although the first two models showed
no relationship between homework help and
BPI, the third model shows that homework
help prevents children’s behavioral problems.
In sum, the observed effect of parental
involvement on children’s behavioral prob-
lems is relatively modest; together, the three
significant parental-involvement variables
account for a change of 2.6 percentage
points in the standardized BPI scale. Despite
the weak causal link between parental
involvement and children’s cognitive devel-
opment, these analyses show that parental-
involvement activities can be effective in pre-
venting children’s problem behaviors. The
effect of parental involvement on children’s
behavior seems to come primarily through
socialization and the exercise of social con-
trol.
The last question to be answered is
whether the effects of parental involvement
vary on the basis of the parents’ socioeco-
nomic background. Table 3 uses multiplica-
tive interaction terms to address this ques-
tion. It reports a series of two-step regressions
Leveling the Home Advantage 243

Table 3. OLS and Logistic Regression Coefficients: Heterogeneity in the Causal Effects of Parental
Involvement, by Parental SES (standard errors in parentheses)

2000 PIAT 2000 BPI

1 2 1 2

Parents Attended One-on-One Meeting, 1996 -1.19 -1.64 .53 1.29

(.77) (.84) (1.03) (1.12)
SES 7.00*** 8.70*** -2.91*** -5.84**
(.33) (1.29) (.42) (1.72)
Interaction — -1.78 — 3.06
(1.30) (1.74)
R-square .604 .604 .432 .432

Parents Attended PTA Meeting, 1996 .35 0.37 -.18 -.25

(.38) (.38) (.50) (.51)
SES 6.90*** 7.02*** -2.87*** -3.43***
(.33) (.47) (.42) (.62)
Interaction — -0.20 — .94
(.56) (.75)
R-square .604 .604 .432 .432

Parents Volunteered in the Classroom, 1996 .42 0.38 -.71 -.70

(.39) (.39) (.52) (.52)
SES 6.90*** 6.38*** -2.83*** -2.75***
(.33) (.50) (.42) (.64)
Interaction — 0.80 — -1.30
(.57) (.77)
R-square .604 .604 .432 .432

Parents Volunteered Outside the Classroom, 1996 .40 0.44 -1.66** -1.77**
(.40) (.40) (.53) (.53)
SES 6.91*** 7.70*** -2.77*** -5.00***
(.33) (.49) (.42) (.63)
Interaction — -1.25* — 3.59***
(.57) (.76)
R-square .604 .604 .433 .435

How Often Parents Checked Homework, 1996 -.52*** -0.48*** -.59*** -.56***
(.12) (.12) (.15) (.16)
SES 6.89*** 7.92*** -2.90*** -1.96*
(.33) (.72) (.42) (.95)
Interaction — -0.27 — -.24
(.17) (.22)
R-square .605 .605 .433 .433

How Often Parents Helped with Homework, 1996 -.50*** -0.52*** -.61*** -.57***
(.11) (.11) (.15) (.15)
SES 6.98*** 6.49*** -2.87*** -1.59*
(.33) (.57) (.42) (.75)
Interaction — .16 — -.42*
(.15) (.20)
R-square .605 .605 .434 .434

*p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001.

Downloaded from soe.sagepub.com at CARLETON UNIV on November 28, 2014

244 Domina

predicting students’ 2000 PIAT and BPI
scores. In the first set of each of these models,
the dependent variable is regressed on a
parental-involvement activity, SES, student’s
race and gender, school sector, family status,
grade, and score on the 1996 administration
of the outcome. In the second set of these
models, an interaction term, created by mul-
tiplying the parental-involvement variable
times family SES, is added. (For ease of inter-
pretation, only the involvement, SES, and
interaction coefficients are reported here.)
This table provides limited evidence that
the effectiveness of parental involvement is
conditional on parental SES. Three of the 12
models reported here show statistically signif-
icant interactions between parental-involve-
ment activities and SES. Two of these signifi-
cant interactions point in a surprising direc-
tion, in light of the evidence presented in
Desimone (2001), Lareau and Horvat (1999),
and McNeal (1999). With one exception—
the significant negative interaction between
homework help and SES on children’s BPI
scores—the statistically significant interaction
terms suggest that the involvement activities
of low-SES parents have a more favorable
influence on their children’s outcomes than
do the activities of high-SES parents.
Table 4 illustrates this finding by calculating
the predicted outcome scores for each of the
regressions in Table 3 that indicated significant
interaction effects. This table compares the pre-
dicted effects of parental-involvement activities
for a hypothetical student whose parents’ SES is
one standard deviation above the mean value
with the predicted parental-involvement effects
for another hypothetical student whose par-
ents’ SES is one standard deviation below the
mean. It shows that the PIAT return to parental
volunteering is nearly twice as high for low-SES
children as it is for high-SES children. Even
more striking is the effect of parental volunteer-
ing on students’ BPI; while volunteering at
school is associated with a small increase in
behavioral problems among affluent children; it
substantially reduces behavioral problems
among poor children.

Table 4. Predicted Values on Children’s Outcomes for Parental Involvementa

Parent Parent Did Not

Parental Involvement Participated Participate Difference

Outcome: 2000 PIAT

Volunteer outside the classroom
High SES 58.17 57.58 0.58
Low SES 49.66 48.50 1.16

Outcome: 2000 BPI

Volunteer outside of classroom
High SES 55.14 54.52 .62
Low SES 56.98 60.94 -3.96
Homework help
High SES 57.18 58.18 -1.00
Low SES 60.56 61.33 -.77

a These values were calculated by substituting values into the regression equations summarized
in Table 4. Predicted values were calculated for four hypothetical students: two students whose
values on the SES scale were one standard deviation above the mean, one whose parent partici-
pated in the parental-involvement activity and one whose parent did not, and two students whose
values on the SES scale were one standard deviation below the mean, one whose parent partici-
pated in the parental-involvement activity and one whose parent did not. For each of the remain-
ing predictors, sample means were substituted in the regression equation.

Downloaded from soe.sagepub.com at CARLETON UNIV on November 28, 2014

Leveling the Home Advantage
These findings are directly contrary to
Lareau and Horvat’s (1999) qualitative analy-
ses and McNeal’s (1999) quantitative analy-
ses, both of which suggested that the involve-
ment efforts of high-SES parents were more
effective than those of low-SES parents. In
light of earlier research, the interactions
reported here, which suggest that the
involvement of low-SES parents may pay
greater cognitive and behavioral dividends
than the involvement of high-SES parents,
should be regarded with caution. One impor-
tant difference between my analyses and the
previous analyses may explain this difference:
My analyses were time lagged to control for
students’ prior achievement and therefore
separate the effect of socioeconomic back-
ground on the effectiveness of parental inter-
ventions from the confounding effect of its
academic and behavioral context. Thus, it is
possible that earlier findings that showed
greater parental-involvement returns for afflu-
ent students may have been biased by the
correlation between students’ skills and
behavior and their families’ SES and that
these interactions show the true relationship
between family SES and the effectiveness of
parental-involvement activities. On the other
hand, it is also possible that the interactions
reported in Tables 3 and 4 simple reflect a
ceiling effect. If the children of highly
involved high-SES parents began the study
with optimal PIAT and BPI scores, they may
have experienced little change over the
course of the study, regardless of their par-
ents’ school-involvement activities.
DISCUSSION
The idea that parents can change their chil-
dren’s educational trajectories by engaging
with their children’s schooling has inspired a
generation of school reform policies. In the
two decades since the Reagan administra-
tion’s Goals 2000, parental involvement has
become a catchphrase in educational policy
making, and school outreach efforts, such as
open houses, PTAs, and parent coordinators,
have become increasingly common in U.S.
elementary schools. In the public discourse,
parental involvement has come to be regard-
Downloaded from soe.sagepub.com at CARLETON UNIV on November 28, 2014
245
ed as a panacea—policy makers bill parental-
involvement initiatives as a tool to reform fail-
ing schools, improve students’ learning, and
reduce class- and race-based gaps in skills.
This study has suggested that some—but
not all—of this faith may have been mis-
placed. Attendance at parent-teacher confer-
ences, PTA membership, volunteering at
school, homework checking, and homework
help are, indeed, associated with high scores
on achievement tests and a low incidence of
behavioral problems for elementary school
children. However, after school and family
background and child’s prior academic
achievement are controlled, the effect of each
of these involvement activities on children’s aca-
demic achievement is negative or nonsignifi-
cant. Rather than advance children’s cogni-
tive development, some forms of parental
involvement may actually hurt. Although this
finding is discouraging and difficult to recon-
cile with the theoretical work that associated
involvement with academic advantages, it is
consistent with much of the previous research
on the link between parental involvement
and children’s cognitive outcomes.
By contrast, this study found a clear causal
link between parental involvement and chil-
dren’s behavioral problems. Even after I
applied stringent controls for children’s fami-
ly and school backgrounds and scores on an
earlier measure of behavioral problems, the
analyses demonstrated that parents prevent
children’s behavioral problems when they vol-
unteer at school, help their children with their
homework, and check their children’s home-
work.
McNeal’s (1999) treatment of parental
involvement as a form of social capital helps
to make sense of the contrast between the
demonstrated effectiveness of parental
involvement in the domain of children’s
behavior and its relative ineffectiveness in the
area of cognition. McNeal argued that
involved parents influence their children in
three ways: First, they socialize their children
by demonstrating their interest in their chil-
dren’s education (as they do when they pay
close attention to their children’s homework).
Second, they exercise social control by spend-
ing time at school, getting to know teachers
and other parents, and using these ties to
246
monitor their children’s schooling. Finally,
they gain access to insider information by
meeting and sharing information with teach-
ers, administrators, and other parents. For the
first and second of these mechanisms, in par-
ticular, the link between involvement and
children’s behavior is more direct than the
link between involvement and children’s cog-
nition. My findings are consistent with this
analysis, showing that socializing activities
like homework help and checking and social
control activities like school volunteering pre-
vent children’s behavioral problems, even
though they have little direct influence on
academic achievement.
The findings in this article undermine the
traditional case for increasing parental involve-
ment in schools, suggesting that involvement
is ultimately unrelated to students’ academic
performance. It should be noted, however,
that the article did not directly assess the
effectiveness of parental-involvement policies.
Although many of the parental-involvement
activities that I studied likely took place in the
context of schools’ parental-involvement ini-
tiatives, many others took place in the
absence of programmatic intervention. This
distinction could have important implications
for the effectiveness of parental-involvement
activities and should be examined more care-
fully in future research. On the one hand,
parental-involvement initiatives may improve
the effectiveness of involvement by teaching
parents how to intervene successfully in their
children’s schooling and by sensitizing school
personnel to parents’ needs. On the other
hand, if school-involvement programs flood
schools with eager parents, they could dilute
the effectiveness of individual involvement
activities. Unless school policies make
parental-involvement activities more effective,
the findings of this study suggest that they will
do little to improve elementary school chil-
dren’s learning.
However, the findings suggest a new,
more circumscribed, rationale for supporting
parental-involvement programs: Involvement
may do little to encourage students’ learning
in the short run, but it effectively prevents
students’ misbehavior. This is no small
achievement. The behavioral improvements
that are associated with parental involvement
Downloaded from soe.sagepub.com at CARLETON UNIV on November 28, 2014
Domina
may translate into cognitive advantages in
the long run. As students progress through
school, their attitudes and behavior can have
important implications for their academic
engagement and success. For example,
McLeod and Kaiser (2004) demonstrated that
young children’s behavior (as measured by
the BPI) influences their odds of later com-
pleting high school and enrolling in college.
Further research is needed to understand how
parental-involvement activities that occur
when students are in elementary school pay
off as students move into middle school, high
school, and beyond.
NOTES
1. However, this is not the only way in
which reciprocal causality can bias estima-
tions of the effect of parental involvement on
children’s outcomes. Crosnoe’s (2001b) study
of California high school students showed
that classroom success tends to stimulate the
late high school involvement of parents
whose children are enrolled in the noncollege
preparatory tracks.
2. Because of the small sample size, I was
unable to replicate Desimone’s (2001) analy-
sis by race using the NLSY elementary school
children.
3. The NLSY79 is sponsored by the U.S.
Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor
Statistics and administered in collaboration
with the Center for Human Resource
Research, Ohio State University, and the
National Opinion Research Center, University
of Chicago.
4. I used NLSY data only from 1996 to
2000 because these are the only years for
which data on parents’ school involvement
are available.
5. It should be noted, however, that even
when weighted, this NLSY subsample should
not be considered representative of all
American elementary school students.
Instead, the children I analyzed are represen-
tative of the elementary school-aged children
of all American women aged 35–42 in 2000.
However, there is no evidence of any system-
atic difference between these children and all
elementary school children.
Leveling the Home Advantage
6. For each case that is missing, Amelia
generates five estimated values using data
from values on nonmissing variables and the
EMis expectation maximization algorithm.
The result is five separate data sets, in which
nonmissing values remain unchanged (and
are identical across data sets) and previously
missing variables are filled.
7. In models that I do not report here, I
analyzed the three PIAT subtests separately;
the findings are substantively similar to the
summary findings reported here.
8. One-month test-retest reliabilities vary
between the three PIAT subtests, ranging from
.64 for the reading comprehension subtest to
.74 for the mathematics subtest and .89 for
the reading recognition subtest (Baker et al.
1993; Dunn and Markwardt 1970). The three
subtests scale well with one another—for the
2000 subtests, Cronbach’s alpha = .83.
9. Although individual BPI items have low
test-retest reliability, scaled values have
proved to be more stable, with a one-month
test-retest reliability of .63 (Baker et al. 1993).
The Cronbach’s alpha for the 28 2000 BPI
items is .88.
10. Volunteering in the classroom and vol-
unteering outside the classroom are correlat-
ed at .46. This is the highest correlation
between the four school-involvement vari-
ables and the only correlation above the con-
ventional .4 threshold.
11. Variance inflation factors (VIF) were run
on all the reported regression models and are
available on request. According to the rules of
thumb presented by Chatterjee, Hadi, and
Price (2000), collinearity is an issue if any VIF
is greater than 10 and if the mean of all VIFs
is considerably larger than 1. No VIF in the
models reported here was greater than 2, and
the mean VIFs for these models ranged from
1.28 to 1.30.
12. Adequately measuring parental
involvement is a problem that is repeatedly
encountered in the quantitative literature on
the consequences of parental involvement.
An ideal data set may provide measures of
parental involvement from parents, students,
and teachers, as well as measures of the
intensity of involvement and information
about the context of and motivations for
parental-involvement activities.
Downloaded from soe.sagepub.com at CARLETON UNIV on November 28, 2014
247
REFERENCES
Baker, Amy J. L., and Laura M. Soden. 1998. “The
Challenges of Parent Involvement Research”
(ERIC/CUE Digest No.134). Available on-line
at http://www.ericdigests.org/1998-3/par-
ent.html
Baker, Paula C., Canada K. Keck, Frank L. Mott, and
Stephen V. Quinlan. 1993. NLSY Child
Handbook: A Guide to the 1986–1990 National
Longitudinal Survey of Youth Child Data.
Columbus: Center for Human Resource
Research, Ohio State University.
Carey, Nancy, Laurie Lewis, Elizabeth Farris, and
Shelley K. Burns. 1998. Parent Involvement in
Children’s Education: Efforts by Public
Elementary Schools (NCES 98-032).
Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing
Office.
Catsambis, Sophia. 1998. “Expanding Knowledge
of Parental Involvement in Secondary
Education: Effects on High School Academic
Success” (Report 27). Baltimore, MD: Center
for Research on the Education of Students
Placed at Risk, Johns Hopkins University.
Catsambis, Sophia, and Janet E. Garland. 1997.
“Parental Involvement in Students’ Education
During Middle and High School” (Report 18).
Baltimore, MD: Center for Research on the
Education of Students Placed at Risk, Johns
Hopkins University.
Catsambis, Sophia, and Belkis Suazo-Garcia. 2000.
“Parents Still Matter: Parental Influence on
High School Seniors’ School-Related
Motivation, Future Plans, and Expectations.”
Unpublished manuscript, Queens College,
City University of New York.
Chatterjee, Samprit, Ali S, Hadi, and Bertran Price.
2000. Regression Analysis by Example. New
York: John Wiley & Sons.
Chen, Xianglei, and Kathryn A. Chandler. 2001.
Efforts by Public K–8 Schools to Involve Parents
in Children’s Education: Do School and Parent
Reports Agree? (NCES 2001-076). Washington:
DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Cohen, Jennifer Lynn. 2002. “The Effect of Parental
Involvement on Academic Achievement in
Children Who Attended Head Start.”
Unpublished MSW thesis, California State
University, Long Beach.
Comer, James P. 1980. School Power: Implications of
an Intervention Project. New York: Free Press.
Comer, James P., and Norris M. Haynes. 1991.
“Parent Involvement in Schools: An Ecological
Approach.” Elementary School Journal
91:271–77.
Crosnoe, Robert. 2001a. “Academic Orientation
248
and Parental Involvement in Education During
High School.” Sociology of Education
74:210–30.
—-. 2001b. “Parental Involvement in Adolescent
Education: The Interplay of the School,
Community, and Ethnicity.” Sociological Focus
34:417–34.
Desimone, Laura. 2001. “Linking Parent
Involvement with Student Achievement: Do
Race and Income Matter?” Journal of
Educational Research 93:11–30.
Downey, Douglas B. 2002. “Parental and Family
Involvement in Education.” Pp. 6.1–6.27 in
School Reform Proposals: The Research Evidence,
edited by Alex Molnar. Tempe: Education
Policy Studies Laboratory, Arizona State
University.
Duncan, Greg J., and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn. 1997.
Consequences of Growing Up Poor. New York:
Russell Sage Foundation.
Dunn, Lloyd M., and Frederick C. Markwardt, Jr.
1970. Peabody Individual Achievement Test
Manual. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance
Service.
Epstein, Joyce L. 1986. “Parents’ Reactions to
Teacher Practices of Parental Involvement.”
Elementary School Journal 56:277–94.
—-. 1987a. “Effects on Student Achievement of
Teachers’ Practices of Parental Involvement.”
Pp. 261-276 in Literacy Through Family,
Community, and School Interaction, edited by
Steven Silvern. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
—-. 1987b. “Parent Involvement: What Research
Says to Administrators.” Education and Urban
Society 19:119–36.
—-. 1992. “School and Family Partnerships.” Pp.
1139–51 in Encyclopedia of Educational
Research, edited by Marvin C. Alkin. New York:
Macmillan.
—-. 2001. School, Family, and Community
Partnerships: Preparing Educators and
Improving Schools. Boulder, CO: Westview
Press.
Fan, Xitao. 2001. “Parental Involvement and
Students’ Academic Achievement: A Growth
Modeling Analysis.” Journal of Experimental
Education 70:27–61.
Fehrmann, Paul G., Timothy Z. Keith, and Thomas
Reimers. 1987. “Home Influence on School
Learning: Direct and Indirect Effects of
Parental Involvement on High School
Grades.” Journal of Educational Research
80:330–37.
Fine, Michelle. 1993. “[Ap]parent Involvement:
Reflections on Parents, Power, and Urban
Public Schools.” Teachers College Record
94:682–710.
Downloaded from soe.sagepub.com at CARLETON UNIV on November 28, 2014
Domina
Gootman, Elissa, 2003, August 30. “In Gamble,
New York Schools Pay to Get Parents
Involved.” New York Times, p. A1.
Ho, Esther Sui-Chu and J. Douglas Willms. 1996.
“Effects of Parental Involvement on Eighth-
Grade Achievement.” Sociology of Education
69:126–41.
Honaker, James, Anne Joseph, Gary King, Kenneth
Scheve, and Naunihal Singh. 2001. Amelia: A
Program for Missing Data (Windows Version).
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Available
on-line at http://Gking.Harvard.edu
Keith, Timothy Z. 1991. “Parent Involvement and
Achievement in High School.” Advances in
Reading/Language Research 5:125–41.
King, Gary, James Honaker, Anne Joseph, and
Kenneth Scheve. 2001. “Analyzing
Incomplete Political Science Data: An
Alternative Algorithm for Multiple
Imputation.” American Political Science Review
95:49–69.
Lareau, Annette. 1989. Home Advantage: Social
Class and Parental Intervention in Elementary
Education. London: Falmer.
Lareau, Annette, and Erin McNamara Horvat.
1999. “Moments of Social Inclusion and
Exclusion: Race, Class, and Cultural Capital in
Family-School Relationships.” Sociology of
Education 72:37–53.
Mattingly, Doreen J., Radmila Prislin, Thomas L.
McKenzie, James L. Rodriguez, and Brenda
Kayzar. 2002. “Evaluating Evaluations: The
Case of Parent Involvement Programs.” Review
of Educational Research 72:549–76.
Mayer, Susan E. 1997. What Money Can’t Buy:
Family Income and Children’s Life Chances.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
McLeod, Jane D., and Karen Kaiser. 2004.
“Childhood Emotional and Behavioral
Problems and Educational Attainment.”
American Sociological Review 69:636–58.
McNeal, Ralph B., Jr. 1999. “Parental Involvement
as Social Capital: Differential Effectiveness on
Science Achievement, Truancy, and Dropping
Out.” Social Forces 78:117–44.
Miedel, Wendy T., and Arthur J. Reynolds. 1999.
“Parent Involvement in Early Intervention for
Disadvantaged Children: Does It Matter?”
Journal of School Psychology 37:379–402.
Milne, Ann M., David E. Myers, Alvin S. Rosenthal,
and Alan Ginsburg. 1986. “Single Parents,
Working Mothers, and the Educational
Achievement of School Children.” Sociology of
Education 59:125–39.
Muller, Chandra. 1993. “Parent Involvement and
Academic Achievement: An Analysis of Family
Resources Available to the Child.” Pp. 77–114
Leveling the Home Advantage 249

in Parents, Their Children, and Schools, edited Components of Parental Involvement on

by Barbara Schneider and James S. Coleman.
Boulder: Westview Press.
—-. 1998. “Gender Differences in Parental
Involvement and Adolescents’ Mathematics
Achievement.” Sociology of Education
71:336–56.
Parcel, Toby, and Elizabeth G. Menaghan. 1994.
Parents’ Jobs and Children’s Lives. New York:
Walter de Gruyter.
Reay, Diane. 1998. Class Work: Mothers’
Involvement in their Children’s Primary
Schooling. London: UCL Press.
Sanders, Mavis. 1998. “The Effects of School,
Family, and Community Support on the
Academic Achievement of African American
Adolescents.” Urban Education 33:384–409.
Singh, Kusum, Patricia G. Bickley, Paul Trivette,
Timothy Z. Keith, Patricia B. Keith, and Eileen
Anderson. 1995. “The Effects of Four
Eight-Grade Student Achievement: Structural
Analysis of NELS-88 Data.” School Psychology
Review 24:299–317.
Stevenson, David L., and David P. Baker. 1987.
“The Family-School Relation and the Child’s
School Performance.” Child Development
58:1348–57.
U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor
Statistics. 2001. The National Longitudinal
Surveys Handbook 2001. Washington, DC:
Author.
Useem, Elizabeth. 1992. “Middle Schools and
Math Groups: Parents’ Involvement in
Children’s Placement.” Sociology of Education
65:263–79.
Wallace, Trudy, and Herbert J. Walberg. 1991.
“Parental Partnerships for Learning.”
International Journal of Educational Research
15:131–45.

Thurston Domina is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the Graduate School and University Center,
City University of New York. His dissertation investigates the causes and consequences of recent
increases in residential segregation between college graduates and people with lower levels of edu-
cation.

The author is grateful to Paul Attewell, David Lavin, and Julia Wrigley for their helpful comments on
earlier versions of this article. This research was supported by a Social Justice and Social Development
in Educational Studies training grant, codirected by Colette Daiute and Michelle Fine and funded by
the Spencer Foundation. Address correspondence to Thurston Domina, Ph.D. Program in Sociology,
CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, 6109, New York, NY 10016; e-mail: tdomina@gc.cuny.edu.

Downloaded from soe.sagepub.com at CARLETON UNIV on November 28, 2014