Research That Matters (January 17 - 20, 2008)

Latino parents have consistently experienced distrust, discrimination and oppression from the U.S. public education system via school structures. However, despite these structural barriers and the consequent lack of visible Latino parental participation in schools, there is a wealth of literature indicating that Latino parents place great value on their children's education. Likewise, Latino parents in general report providing much academic support for their children. An entrenched racism framework explains this disconnect, proposing that although Latino parents desire to actively participate in their children's schooling, discriminatory barriers interfere, and the 'absence' of Latino parents in the schools demonstrates resistance, rather than a sign of disinterest. The present study quantitatively examined the relationship between parental impressions of school structures and parental academic support for Latino parents. I hypothesized that Latino parents are less likely to volunteer in their child's classroom and attend PTA meetings as the result of negative impressions of school officials and teachers at their child's school, and also that negative impressions of school structures would not effect whether Latino parents helped their children with homework. Specifically, I examined the correlations between parental impressions of experiences with school officials and parental opinions regarding teachers' understanding of their children with whether the parent volunteered in their child's classroom, attended a PTA meeting, or helped their child with homework. Method: I used a secondary data set, the Education Survey 2004, which was collected by the Pew Hispanic Center/Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation by phone between August 7 and October 15, 2003. It is a nationally representative sample of 3,421 adults, 18 years and older, who were selected at random. For this study, only Latino parents were included. [Note: The Pew Hispanic Center and the Kaiser Family Foundation bear no responsibility for the interpretations offered, or conclusions made based on analysis of the Pew Hispanic Center/Kaiser Family Foundation 2004 National Survey of Latinos: Education data.] Results: As hypothesized, logistic regression analyses controlling for gender, origin of birth, income, and age showed that Latino parents who reported negative experiences with school officials were less likely to attend PTA meetings (p=.017, odds=.567), but were not significantly less likely to help their children with homework (p=.763, odds=.931). Experiences with school officials did not significantly effect whether parents volunteered in their children's classrooms (p=.557, odds=.888). Also, the majority of Latino parents reported that their children's teachers understood their children, and teacher's understanding was significantly and positively related to parents helping their children with homework (p=.002, odds=.324). Implications: With the recent and ongoing rise in the U.S. Latino population, there is an urgent need to determine why only about 50% of Latinos graduate from high school. Research has shown that parental academic support is a key factor in student school success. The findings from this study provide additional support for the importance of recognizing and eliminating barriers to Latino parental school involvement. In addition, this study points to the need for future research in this area.