Peers, Parents and Schools: How They Affect Student Achievement

June 1999
California parents, educators, and business leaders alike have been concerned about the lagging achievement of the state’s students — high school students in particular. This concern has led, most notably, to the passage of a new state law requiring that, beginning in the year 2004, all California students pass a high school exit exam before receiving a diploma.

At a recent EdSource conference, notable scholars and researchers Laurence Steinberg and Pedro Noguera shared their different and yet often complementary perspectives on the cultural, familial, and institutional factors that have the most potent influence on student learning and academic performance.

Laurence Steinberg, Professor of
Psychology at Temple University

Steinberg focused primarily on those influences acting on students from outside of the classroom. In particular, he discussed how the interacting forces of peers, parents, and ethnicity, all working in tandem, shape the attitudes students have toward school and their academic achievement. Steinberg argued that educational measures such as the implementation of academic standards, while valuable, cannot by themselves fully compensate for certain less than healthy cultural and social attitudes toward school.
Steinberg’s insights on adolescents and schooling, detailed in his 1996 book Beyond the Classroom, have garnered him national attention. Beyond the Classroom is based on over five years of research conducted in over nine different rural, urban, and suburban communities, six in California. Altogether, more than 20,000 American teenagers and their families — from an ethnically and economically diverse sample — were surveyed.

Steinberg on peers, parents, and their effect on student achievement
Steinberg portrayed low academic motivation as near epidemic among American teenagers — especially among Latino and African-American students. Summarizing from his research, he highlighted some of the reasons for their lack of motivation.

Why are so many American students uninterested in school?
“Our surveys suggest that students believe in the benefits associated with getting a diploma, but that they’re skeptical about the benefits associated with either learning or doing well in class. In other words, they believe that their success in the labor force will depend mainly on the number of years of schooling they complete, not with learning what schools have to teach. If students believe that the academic side of school is merely an unpleasant obligation, and that whether they succeed or fail in school is largely irrelevant to their future, they will not remain engaged in school. This is reinforced by the fact that employers don’t ask to see high school transcripts.”

Ethnic differences in attitudes toward school
“Social scientists have long observed that Asian-American students perform on average better than white peers, who in turn out-perform blacks and Latinos. Ethnic differences are particularly apparent in terms of student beliefs about the consequences of failing in school. Asian students are much more likely than others to believe that not doing well in school will have negative consequences. In contrast, non-Asian students are much more cavalier about the negative effects of doing poorly in school. In essence, it seems to be undue optimism about the lack of consequences, and not pessimism about future prospects, that is holding back many black and Latino students in school. They don’t really believe that doing poorly in school will hurt them.”

The influence of peers and American student culture
“Contemporary American society pulls teenagers away from school toward social and recreational pursuits. There is widespread peer pressure not to succeed academically. One of five students say that their friends make fun of people who try to do well in school. More than one-half of all students say they never discuss their schoolwork with friends.
“So why do Asian students buck this trend? Well, they are far more likely to have friends who believe that it’s important to do well in school, and who place less of a premium on having an active social life. The opposite is true for black and Latino students. In the schools we studied — even those in middle-class communities — there was a near complete absence of identifiable peer groups that respect and encourage academic success among black and Latino youngsters. And without this kind of support, excellence in school is unlikely.”

Too many parents have “checked out”
“The parental involvement that makes the biggest difference in student performance at the high school level is the type that actually draws parents into the schools physically: attending school programs, watching their kids in extracurricular activities, showing up for teacher conferences. Yet our study found that only about one-fifth of high school parents in this country consistently attend school programs, and more than 40% never do. Low expectations are a problem, too. Nearly one-sixth of all students believe that their parents don’t even care if they earn good grades. More than half of all students say they could bring home grades of C or worse without their parents getting upset.
“Why are so many parents uninvolved in their adolescents’ lives? American parents seem to believe that they don’t really matter once a child is of a certain age; consequently, there is a steep drop-off in school participation as children enter adolescence. As well, high school faculty contribute by inadvertently pushing parents away as they encourage student independence and responsibility. And this decline in parental school involvement could not happen at a worse time, because it is just at this point that other forces in youngsters’ lives are beginning to compete with school for their time and energy.”

The dangerous lure of after-school employment
“One of the worst offenders distracting youngsters from academics is after-school employment. In our study we found that students who were working more than 20 hours a week were earning lower grades, spending less time on homework, cutting class more often, and cheating more frequently. The United States is the only country in the world in which this level of working during school is commonplace, especially among students who have their sights set on continuing their education beyond high school.”

Pedro Noguera, Associate Professor
of Education at the University of California, Berkeley

Noguera emphasized the role the school can play in raising student achievement — especially the achievement of African-American and Latino students. While Noguera readily acknowledged the powerful influence of peers and parents, he insisted that the school can do much more than it currently does to address issues of intra-school segregation, academic tracking, and the underachievement of minority students.
Noguera has published and lectured widely on topics such as youth violence, race relations within schools, and secondary issues resulting from desegregation in public schools. Recently, he completed the Diversity Project at Berkeley High School, a school reform collaboration effort between faculty, parents, and students at Berkeley High School and the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley. The Project aimed to discover the factors contributing to resegregation within the high school and ethnic disparities in student achievement. Noguera, the father of four children who attend Berkeley public schools, has also previously served on the Berkeley Unified School District Governing Board.

Noguera on how schools can make a difference for minority students
In addressing the issues of equity and diversity as they relate to school reform, Noguera described what researchers and educators in the Diversity Project learned about gaps in student achievement and some of the ways schools inadvertently perpetuate them.

On disparities in student achievement at Berkeley High School
“Berkeley High, like many schools, has in the past judged its success based on the accomplishments of its best students. It graduated large numbers of kids who were National Merit Scholar winners and went on to the best colleges in the country. But if you looked at what was happening to the bottom two-thirds of the kids, you got a different picture. The attrition rates, the suspension rates, the test scores, and the D and F rates were as bad as any other urban high school.
“The Diversity Project was created in 1996 to address two questions related to this. The first was how to reduce disparities in academic achievement that occur along racial and socio-economic lines. We believed that Berkeley High had the resources to reduce the achievement gap, but had been unable to do so for a number of historical reasons. The second question was how to address patterns of racial separation among students within the school. These patterns appeared to reinforce the perception that racial identity and student performance were linked. They sent students the message that because of their race, they could or could not do certain things within the school (i.e., play a sport, take an AP class, participate in extra-curricular activities, etc.).
“We conducted research we could use to guide the school reform process. We felt that before we could propose specific changes within the organization of the school we needed to understand what was happening there.”

The need to “problematize” failure
“In order to make a case for change at the school, we needed to use our school data regarding low minority achievement to ‘problematize’ assumptions about failure. We believed that when groups of students fail for long periods of time, teachers and others start to see failure as normal. When this happens, the failure tends not to be seen as the school’s problem anymore — it’s the problem of the kids, parents, and society. This must change for educators to take responsibility over student outcomes, and to believe that what they do can have an impact on achievement.
“After months of research, we presented our findings at a staff development meeting. On a map of the city of Berkeley, we showed the faculty how the city’s census tracks correlated with student grades. As might have been expected, the map showed that students who live in the hills [mostly white students] had very high GPAs, while those who live in the flat lands [mostly minority students] had much lower GPAs. What was most interesting was that, instead of blaming the kids or their families as typically happened in the past, teachers said things like, ‘We’re troubled by this pattern. You know, it’s kind of what I expected, but I’m troubled that there’s such a high association between where kids live and how they’re doing in school.’
“By starting with the data, we were then able to work together to identify both the causes of these patterns and some strategies for addressing them.”

Recognizing the differences in family background is critical
“Until recently, Berkeley High allowed students to choose their own classes. That system works well if you know who the good teachers are and the college-prep courses you need. Students from affluent, well-educated families did know, or their parents knew and got involved. But many of the black and Latino kids would not even make a choice. They would end up with courses that were not making them UC or CSU eligible.
“Our conversations with minority parents helped us recognize that we needed to do a better job of bridging the gap between these parents and the school. Many parents said they couldn’t figure out who to talk to when they had a problem or needed information. They also said that when they did finally speak to someone they were not treated well, which made them angry and distrustful. So we’re now looking at ways of bridging that gap by organizing and empowering the parents of kids who are doing least well.”

Peers, Parents, and Schools Working Together to Improve Student Achievement
After diagnosing the problems associated with low student achievement, Steinberg and Noguera offered several recommendations as to how Californians should address them: