Awareness Campaign for Parents of Middle School Students in France
Parental involvement in a child’s education is widely believed to bolster school performance, but many parents face barriers to supporting their children’s education. In particular, parents who have recently immigrated to a new country may not speak the school’s language fluently and may have minimal education, making it difficult to participate in and monitor their child’s schooling. Little is known however, about how parents and students could be affected by programs which provide support and training for parental involvement in education.
The school district of Créteil encompasses all suburbs to the east and north of Paris. It is a densely populated area with high proportions of recent immigrants and second-generation immigrants from mostly Maghreb countries, and has very poor socioeconomic indicators. Barriers to parental involvement in their children’s education are considerable in this context and include: linguistic barriers, logistical constraints (many parents commute long distances to work), and social barriers, as non upper-class parents may feel discouraged by the bureaucratic jargon and hierarchical frame of the French education system. Acknowledging the detrimental power of these barriers, a number of pilot projects were already ongoing at the time of project’s conception which aimed to increase school access in disadvantaged areas of France.
This study evaluates a program designed to foster parental involvement in education, and thereby improve pupil outcomes. Meetings were held at the beginning of the middle school academic year where school officials and teachers encouraged parents to participate in the program. Classes with no parents willing to participate were excluded entirely from the experiment, while researchers randomly assigned classes with participating parents to treatment and comparison groups.
In the treatment group, parents were invited to a series of three group meetings held over two months where education officials spoke on the themes of helping with homework, report cards and schooling in general. Where possible, people who spoke the language spoken by a majority of the parents of the middle school are employed to translate. Parents in treatment groups were then given the option to continue with one of two additional programs, or to abstain from further involvement:
- Program A: An additional series of monthly meetings that complement the three initial meetings. Parents and school are encouraged to invite external experts to these meetings.
- Program B: An additional series of more intense meetings held as often
as twice a week for four or five months. These meetings focus on
providing training for parents needing further support to improve their
literacy or computer skills.
At the end of the school year, data will be collected through questionnaires and administrative sources on individual school performance, sanctions and absenteeism on all students, as well as on parenting practices. Data are collected both on students and parents who volunteered to participate in the program and on their classmates. Researchers will assess the impacts of the program on students’ academic achievement and behavior in school as well as changes in the behavior of the parents themselves, and provide experimental evidence on peer-effects.
Results forthcoming.