Encourage children, economist says
Economist James McIntosh has good news. The key to academic success may be as simple as getting the appropriate encouragement.
“Children from disadvantaged families are not condemned to be at the bottom of the grade distribution,” McIntosh says in a recent paper. “In fact, children with poorly educated fathers can actually do better than average if their parents have positive education attitudes and praise their children when they do well.”
Many grown children of humble parents can attest to this, but it’s nice to have it confirmed by econometrics.
McIntosh’s recent study, “Family Background, Parental Involvement, and Academic Achievement in Canadian Schools,” caught the approving attention of Peggy Curran, The Gazette’s university columnist, on Feb. 14.
The reason it’s good news is that attitudes, unlike genetics and being born into wealth, can be changed. Single parents are given reason for hope as well.
“The effects of having parents who have separated or divorced, or coming from a household which is on welfare are relatively small,” the paper says. “The impact of household income is also quite small but significant. Thus it would appear that children from disrupted or low-income households will not automatically do poorly in school because of that.”
Current dropout rates for boys in Quebec are scandalously high. Somewhere between one-third and one-half do not finish high school. McIntosh’s findings suggest that a campaign directed at their parents might be more effective than putting more money into the schools themselves.
“Educating parents about the benefits of getting good grades or going further in the educational system could lead to significant improvements in average grade performance,” McIntosh writes.
He adds a caveat: “There are limits, since between 65 and 70 per cent of Canadian parents already believe that these objectives are very important.”
Like many researchers in the field, McIntosh was stumped by the difference in academic performance between boys and girls. He concluded that girls are simply better at school.
“Children from immigrant families, that is with fathers or mothers not born in Canada, do slightly better than average, so the integration problems that many European countries have experienced are not present in Canada, at least as far as their participation in the educational system is concerned.”
McIntosh is associated with the Danish National Institute of Social Research, and sent an explanatory email from Copenhagen.
“This part of a fairly broad research initiative that deals with various aspects of education, including the determinants of attainment and performance. In other papers I examine test score results as well as what determines how well individuals do in the educational system. Some of the results are based on Danish data and some on Canadian data.
“I am also interested in how important family background variables are and whether this has changed over the last 50 years. There are some economists who do this but there is not much Canadian research on how well students do in school.”