By Annie Murphy Paul   

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"Given all the roiling debates about how America's children should be taught, it may come as a surprise to learn that students spend less than 15% of their time in school. While there's no doubt that school is important, a clutch of recent studies reminds us that parents are even more so. A study published earlier this month by researchers at North Carolina State University, Brigham Young University and the University of California-Irvine, for example, finds that parental involvement - checking homework, attending school meetings and events, discussing school activities at home - has a more powerful influence on students' academic performance than anything about the school the students attend. 

 

Another study, published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, reports that the effort put forth by parents (reading stories aloud, meeting with teachers) has a bigger impact on their children's educational achievement than the effort expended by either teachers or the students themselves. And a third study concludes that schools would have to increase their spending by more than $1,000 per pupil in order to achieve the same results that are gained with parental involvement.

 

So parents matter - a point made clear by decades of research showing that a major part of the academic advantage held by children from affluent families comes from the "concerted cultivation of children" as compared to the more laissez-faire style of parenting common in working-class families. But this research also reveals something else: that parents, of all backgrounds, don't need to buy expensive educational toys or digital devices for their kids in order to give them an edge. They don't need to chauffeur their offspring to enrichment classes or test-prep courses. What they need to do with their children is much simpler: talk."

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