Parent-Pupil Ratio Affects Learning

Minority students were less likely to live with two parents. The decline in two parent households has recently stopped, but the gaps are unchanged.

www.ets.org/research/pic

I can relate to this from personal experience.  During the five years between my mother’s death (I was 12) and my dad remarried (I was 17), I posted a couple of the worst years of my public school career.  My father was as kind, considerate, hard working a soul as you might ever meet.  But getting out of a huge debt hole after my mother’s death and taking care of a household pretty much used up all his energy.  And, he hated confrontations.  So, for the first couple of years, during 8th & 9th grade, my school performance suffered, severely.  Mea Culpa!

“A recent synthesis of decades of research concludes that father absence is correlated with:

• less academic success;

• behavior and psychological problems;

• substance abuse and contact with the police;

• sexual relationships at earlier ages;

• less economic well-being in adulthood; and

• less physical and psychological well-being as adults.”

 Wendy Sigle-Rushton and Sara McLanahan, “Father Absence and Child Well-Being,” in Daniel P. Moynihan, Timothy M. Smeeding, and Lee Rainwater (Eds.), The Future of the Family, Russell Sage Foundation, 2004.

According to Child Trends DataBase, “some groups of children are much less likely to have access to two parents in the home — just 35 percent of Black children and 66 percent of Hispanic children, compared with 74 per- cent of White children. These family structures have important effects — the poverty rate for female-headed households is 28 percent, more than five times the rate for married couples.”

Schools have no control over the number of parents at home, but it’s clear that the two parent households have an educational advantage over single parent households.