Any teacher down in the trenches, as opposed to up in the ivory tower, will tell you that a supportive home environment is key to a good education.
It's good that you know "any" teacher but, given that statement is an unsupported generalization, I suspect it's far more true than not. I, for instance, don't know any teacher who would disagree with it.
But it's the wrong question to ask. The right one is what can good schools do to overcome the wide variety of the effects of poverty and of dysfunctional families (at all income levels) on children. I don't think, however, there is any question that kids from difficult backgrounds who are able to attend good schools do much better than kids from the same backgrounds who do not.
The real question then is what sorts of policies would enable more kids to overcome difficult backgrounds.
Incidentally, single parent homes would, by themselves, definitely not qualify as a difficult background. I know from my participation in local public schools that, at least on an anecdotal level, it really doesn't matter. The town is small enough to know, roughly, which families don't work well for the kids and which do. There are more than a few that are dysfunctional on this score that are surprising--two parent families with all the advantages, etc. We all, of course, know those families in our own lives.
But, back to your charges. Does poverty make it more difficult for kids to do well at school? In my mind, the answer is a definite yes. Do the children from single parent families do worse, on average, than those from two parent families, controlling for the obvious variables? I don't know in any serious sense but the answer is not a no-brainer. My guess is that it's a very mixed outcome, depending heavily on the income and education of the parent(s).
But that then means we are back to my basic point--it's not the number of parents but their income and education level. |
