Samantha Durrance PMAP 8121 Spring 2015

The Effect of Parent Expectations for Their Child’s Education on the Child’s Grades in School

Introduction

A great amount of time and energy seems to be spent discussing the problems with American

education and how to fix them. Reformers push school choice, more assessment and accountability, and

changes in school management as solutions that have merit. Many others, myself included, believe that

the one biggest problem with American education is our failure to address the underlying issues that

lead to lower student achievement and worse life outcomes, especially for the nation’s disadvantaged

students. The one biggest issue that is generally acknowledged to have significant effects is poverty,

though the mechanisms by which poverty is detrimental to the success of our students are many.

Poverty is cyclical in nature, and it takes a great deal of effort for anyone to overcome the particular

challenges it imposes. Belief in one’s capabilities and high expectations for oneself, as well as a strong

support system of family and friends, may be integral to producing this effort. For a child, these beliefs

and aspirations begin in the home.

While teaching 8th grade mathematics, I facilitated many a parent conference during which it

came out that the student’s highest educational goal was to graduate high school and that the student’s

parents shared that expectation (as opposed to expecting more). In some cases, the student was not

even sure that graduating from high school was in the cards for him. These low expectations stem from

a variety of sources and are common in households with low socioeconomic status, particularly when

the parents themselves may not have earned a high school diploma. To anyone who has been a teacher

(and perhaps even some who have not), it seems like common sense to think that the expectations of a

child’s parents will affect the educational attainment of the child. In fact, it is more than just common

sense—research has shown that there is a significant association between parent expectations and their

children’s scores on ITBS math and reading tests (Reynolds, Mavrogenes, Hagemann, & Bezruczko,

1993), and that parents’ high aspirations for their children’s education raise the children’s own

Samantha Durrance PMAP 8121 Spring 2015

expectations and directly contribute to their academic achievement (Bandura, Caprara, Barbaranelli, &

Pastorelli, 1996).

Academic achievement is often measured using standardized test scores, but tests do not tell

the full story. It takes passing grades to graduate from high school, and better than passing grades to get

into most four-year universities. It follows that, if there is a connection between parent expectations

and student achievement, students’ grades might reflect this: students whose parents only expect them

to graduate from high school (if that) may generally have lower grades, while students whose parents

expect them to go to college and beyond may have higher grades. In this research paper, I will seek to

explore this connection and answer the question, “Do the educational expectations of a child’s parents

affect the child’s grades in school?”

This is an important question to answer because education is one of the ways that a child raised

in poverty can obtain the means to escape it. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that workers with

less education both earn less and face a higher unemployment rate than workers with more education

(2015). If parents do not expect their child to continue his education beyond high school, or if there is a

history of low educational attainment in the family, and if these expectations and precedents affect the

child’s actual educational attainment in terms of grades, then the educational opportunities available to

the child and his chance to sustain a comfortable lifestyle are reduced. It is within the power of public

policy to influence parents’ views on education help them encourage their children to pursue education

beyond high school.

Hypothesis

My hypothesis is that parents with higher expectations for their child’s educational achievement

are less likely to have a child who earns low grades in school. Common sense says that high parental

expectations for a child’s academic success may lead them to push the child to work harder

academically in order to fulfill those expectations, leading to higher grades. However, it is entirely

Samantha Durrance PMAP 8121 Spring 2015

possible that parents’ own educational attainment affects their expectations for their child’s education,

as well as the child’s grades due to the history of education in the family. In this case, parents’

educational attainment would be an antecedent variable. From my own experience, I also think that low

parental expectations for a child’s education can cause a child to be less academically focused and

motivated, resulting in more behavior problems at school and in lower grades because the child is not

paying as much attention in class and is out of class more frequently due to disciplinary consequences.

Bandura, Barbaranelli, Caprara, and Pastorelli assert that “[c]hildren whose parents have [high]

academic aspirations for them are disinclined to become involved in troublesome activities” (1996). In

this case, it is the child’s behavior problems that are directly causing the detrimental effect on his

grades, not his parents’ expectations. The incidence of behavior problems would then be an intervening

variable.

My hypotheses can be diagramed as follows, where X = expectations for child’s education (1 = to

not graduate from high school, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 = graduate or professional degree), Y = child’s grades across

all subjects (1 = mostly A’s, 2, 3, 4 = mostly D’s or lower), Z1 = highest level of parental educational

attainment (1 = less than high school, 2, 3, 4, 5 = graduate or professional school), and Z2 = teachers

have contacted parents about a behavior problem (0, 1):

Data and Methods

The dataset I use for this project is the 2003 Parent and Family Involvement in Education dataset

as collected by the National Household Education Survey (National Center for Education Statistics,

2015). The survey was conducted by the social science research firm Westat and designed to randomly

Z1 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

X (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) Y (1, 2, 3, 4)

+

--

--

X (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) Y (1, 2, 3, 4)

X (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) Z2 (0, 1) Y (1, 2, 3, 4)

--

+

--

Expectations Grades

Expectations Behavior Problems Grades

Parent Education Expectations Grades

Parent Education Grades

Samantha Durrance PMAP 8121 Spring 2015

select screening participants using phone numbers, conduct a screening to determine eligibility, and

then collect the survey data via interviews. For this survey, the target population was people with

children in grades K-12. One of the goals of the survey was to provide reliable national estimates; thus,

researchers utilized national census data and weighted responses to create as close to a nationally

representative sample as possible, as well as employing random sampling within households.

Of the 12,426 cases in my study data, 247 were considered inapplicable by the researchers, and

an additional 2,403 are children whose school doesn’t give grades on the traditional A to F scale used to

record their grades as an ordinal variable. For the purposes of this paper, I did not include these

responses, nor those cases with one or more parent whose highest level of education was recorded as

“inapplicable”, leaving 7,096 cases for analysis. The exact wording of the questions used in the survey

for the variables this paper is concerned with can be found in the Appendix. The statistical tools used in

my analysis are frequency table, two- and three-way contingency tables, measures of central tendency

(mean, median, mode, and standard deviation), zero- and first-order gamma coefficients, and the chi

square statistic.

Analysis and Interpretation

Of the 7,096 valid cases used for analysis, 48.4 percent of respondents reported that their child

earned mostly A’s in school, 35.8 percent reported mostly B’s, 13.0 percent mostly C’s, and 2.7 percent

mostly D’s or lower. Parents’ expectations for their child’s education ranged from a low of 1 (to not

graduate from high school) to 6 (to earn a graduate or professional degree). The mean expectation of

4.87 and median of 5 indicate that the average parent in the sample expects their child to attend at least

two years of college and/or graduate from a four- or five-year school, while the mode of 5 indicates that

more parents expected their child to earn a four- or five-year college degree than to stop education at

any other level. Only 5.1 percent of parents in the sample indicated that they did not expect their child

Samantha Durrance PMAP 8121 Spring 2015

to at least graduate from high school or earn a GED. A full 44.3 percent of parents expect their children

to achieve at least a four-year college degree.

The variable for the highest level of parent/guardian education considers both

parents/guardians and has a range of 1 to 5, less than high school to graduate or professional school.

The mean and mode attainment in the sample is 3.34, or just above the level of a vocational/technical

degree or some college. Parent educational attainment can also be divided into the father’s and the

mother’s. While both have the same mean and mode (2.97 and 3.00, respectively), a sample child’s

mother was slightly more likely than his father to be a college graduate or have achieved a

vocational/technical degree or some college. While 49.4 percent of mothers in the sample were in these

two categories, only 44.4 percent of fathers were. Only 9.3 percent of mothers lacked a high school

diploma, compared to 10.4 percent of fathers. However, fathers in the sample were more likely to have

achieved a graduate or professional school degree, at 14.5 percent to only 12.4 percent of mothers.

As seen in Table 3, a crosstabulation analysis of the relationship between higher parent

expectations for their child’s education and the child earning lower grades in this sample demonstrates

a strong negative relationship between these two variables, with a gamma value of -.505. As the level of

parents’ expectations increases, the likelihood of the child earning lower grades in school decreases. Of

parents in the sample who expected their child to achieve a graduate or professional degree, 94.2

percent reported that their child earned mostly A’s or B’s in school, with 67.9 percent reporting mostly

A’s. Of respondents who expected their child to earn a four-year college degree, 88.9 percent reported

that their child earned mostly A’s or B’s, but this percentage drops to 75.2 percent of respondents who

expected their child to attend two or more years of college, but not finish a degree. In contrast, only

27.5 percent of respondents who did not expect their child to receive a high school diploma or

equivalent reported that their child received mostly A’s or B’s. For those respondents who expected

their child only to graduate from high school or to graduate and attend a vocational or technical school,

Samantha Durrance PMAP 8121 Spring 2015

the percentages of respondents whose child earned mostly A’s or B’s are 52.3 and 56.3, respectively.

Interestingly, more of these respondents reported that their child earns mostly C’s than in any other

expectation category, which could be attributed to the fact that a grade of C is generally considered to

be at least a 70: the minimum passing grade in most schools, a necessary benchmark for earning high

school credits and therefore graduating. In contrast, 72.4 percent of respondents who did not expect

their child to graduate from high school reported that their child earns mostly C’s or mostly D’s, and

most of these children (44.8 percent) earned mostly D’s or lower.

In general, the data show that parents who expect their child to earn at least a four-year college

degree are more likely to have children who earn mostly A’s in school. Parents who expect their child to

attend two or more years of college are more likely to have children who earn mostly B’s, while parents

who expect their child to only graduate from high school or to graduate and also attend a vocational or

technical school are more likely to have children who earn mostly B’s or mostly C’s. Finally, parents who

do not expect their child to graduate from high school are more likely to see their child earn mostly D’s

or lower. This relationship almost certainly holds true among not just the respondents in this sample,

but also in the population as a whole. The chi-square value of this analysis is 1566.002, which is far

above the critical value for the data even at a significance of .0005.

Does a higher level of education attained by a child’s parents color the parents’ expectations for

their child and encourage the child to aim for a higher level of achievement? The data say: sort of. When

controlling for the parents’/guardians’ highest level of education, there is still a statistically significant

relationship between higher parent expectations and lower student grades, and this relationship can still

be generalized to the population. In fact, controlling for parent education accounts for 50.0 percent of

the relationship for parents who did not graduate from high school, about 8 to 10 percent of the

relationship for parents who graduated from high school but attained any level of education less than

graduate or professional school, and actually strengthens the relationship by about 4.5 percent for

Samantha Durrance PMAP 8121 Spring 2015

parents who have graduate or professional school degrees. This indicates that parents who do not

expect their children to graduate from high school are more likely to have children who earn low grades,

but that this low academic achievement stems partially from the parents’ expectations, partially from

the child’s family history of educational achievement, and partially from other factors. This fits well with

what I observed as a teacher: it can be more difficult for a child to envision herself pursuing a level of

academic achievement beyond that which her parents have achieved, especially if her parents are not

pushing her toward that goal. In contrast, the fact that the relationship between parent expectations

and the child’s grades was actually strengthened for respondents who hold graduate or professional

degrees indicates that not only are these parents’ expectations influential on their children, but that the

children may also be seeking to match the academic achievement of their parents and therefore are

more likely to earn higher grades.

Do children whose parents have lower academic expectations for them demonstrate more

behavior problems, and therefore earn lower grades in school? This variable, too, accounted for only a

small part of the relationship between parent expectations and child grades. Among respondents who

reported that teachers contacted the family about behavior problems with their children, 13.7 percent

expected their children to receive a high school diploma or lower, and 23.2 percent of these

respondents reported that their children earned mostly D’s or lower. Of respondents who reported

teacher contact about behavior problems, 57.3 percent expected their children to at least graduate from

a four-year college, and only 2.9 percent of these respondents reported that their children earned

mostly D’s or lower. Among respondents who reported that teachers had not contacted them about

behavior problems, only 4.8 percent expected their children to receive a high school diploma or lower

and 11.6% of these respondents reported that their children earn mostly D’s or lower; 76.5 percent of

respondents not reporting behavior problems expected their children to at least graduate from a four-

year college, and only 0.6 percent of their children earned mostly D’s or lower. While the incidence of

Samantha Durrance PMAP 8121 Spring 2015

teacher-reported behavior problems is higher among respondents with lower academic expectations for

their children, then, it is far from a full interpretation for their low grades. The partial-order gamma

values show that behavior problems account for 8.3 percent of the association between parent

expectations and child grades for children whose teachers contacted home about behavior problems,

and only 3.6 percent of this association for children whose parents were not contacted.

Conclusion

Thus, neither proposed third variable accounts for very much of the relationship between

parent expectations and grades for all respondents, though it appears that parent education accounts

for more of the relationship than the child’s behavior. While my causal model is partially correct, more

research is needed to determine what other antecedent or intervening variables might further explain

this relationship. It is likely that there are a number of variables of both types that all explain small parts

of a child’s academic achievement as measured by grades. One observation that is supported by the

data, however, is that there is a clear and strong relationship between parents’ expectations for their

child’s education and how well the child performs in school as measured by grades. The trend in the

data, with children whose parents expect much of them earning the highest grades, children whose

parents expect very little of them earning the lowest, and children who lie in the middle earning low but

passing grades, shows that, in general, children tend to earn roughly the grades their parents expect of

them. Children whose parents expect them to continue their education into college or beyond tend to

earn grades that will give them the opportunity to do so; children whose parents do not expect that they

will even graduate from high school tend to earn low grades that prevent it or make it more difficult.

The takeaway, then, is that parents should analyze the expectations (explicit and otherwise) they have

for their children’s educational attainment and be cognizant that these expectations may very well help

determine their child’s educational future—and thereby their lifetime job potential and earnings.

Samantha Durrance PMAP 8121 Spring 2015

APPENDIX

VARIABLE KEY

VARIABLE SURVEY QUESTION

SEGRADES Now I would like to ask you about (his/her) grades (during this school year/at the school (he/she) attends this year). Overall, across all subjects ((he/she) takes at school), does (he/she) get...

SEFUTURE Now I have some questions about (CHILD)’s future education. How far do you expect (him/her) to go in (his/her) education? Would you say you expect (him/her)…

PARGRADE Indicates the highest level of education for the subject child’s parents or nonparent guardians who reside in the household. This measure is derived from MOMGRADE (PU7), MOMDIPL (PU8), DADGRADE (PV7), and DADDIPL (PV8)

SEBEHAVR Have any of (CHILD)’s teachers or (his/her) school contacted you (or (CHILD)’s guardian) (or (the) other adult(s) in your household)) about any behavior problems (he/she) is having in school this year?

TABLE 1:

TABLE 2:

CHART 2: Parent expectations for child’s education

Samantha Durrance PMAP 8121 Spring 2015

TABLE 3

Samantha Durrance PMAP 8121 Spring 2015 T

AB

LE

4A

Samantha Durrance PMAP 8121 Spring 2015

Samantha Durrance PMAP 8121 Spring 2015

TABLE 4B

Samantha Durrance PMAP 8121 Spring 2015

Samantha Durrance PMAP 8121 Spring 2015

REFERENCES

Bandura, A., Caprara, G. V., Barbaranelli, C., & Pastorelli, C. (1996). Multifaceted Impact of Self-Efficacy Beliefs on

Academic Functioning. Child Development, 67, 1206-1222.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2015, April 2). Earnings and unemployment rates by educational attainment. Retrieved from

Employment Projections: http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm

National Center for Education Statistics. (2015, February 26). National Household Education Surveys Program: Data

Products. Retrieved from National Center for Education Statistics:

https://nces.ed.gov/nhes/dataproducts.asp#2003dp

Reynolds, A. J., Mavrogenes, N. A., Hagemann, M., & Bezruczko, N. (1993). Schools, families, and children: Sixth year

results from the longitudinal study of children at risk. Chicago: Chicago Public Schools, Department of Research,

Evaluation, and Planning.