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Article Excerpt
Educational attainment is strongly related to positive adult outcomes, and it is thus surprising that we find so few investigations, such as the ones in this issue, that focus on examining the longitudinal relation between parents' education and the academic attainment of their children. Ever since Bradley and Caldwell's (1976, 1984) landmark work on delineating aspects of the home environment that relate to child cognitive gains, researchers have been attempting to move from analyses of child outcomes based primarily on distinctions of social address (e.g., income, parental education, occupational status) to ones that examine the processes behind these distinctions. From a social justice perspective, the purpose of such endeavors is to delineate malleable processes that might benefit children who are likely to perform poorly in school. The findings from the studies presented in this issue provide insight into those processes while simultaneously suggesting that the fundamental purpose may be hard to achieve.
Much research has been conducted on the direct positive relations between parents' education and children's academic attainment. Indeed, those relations are so extensively assumed by researchers that parent education is often considered a control variable. Such statistical control of parents' education serves as a mathematical attempt to remove its effect from other relations being modeled, not to explain or understand the way in which it produces an effect. In sharp contrast, the investigators of the studies in this issue delve into the parent education variable rather than control for it. The authors of three of these articles test conceptual models of the processes by which parents' level of education relates to subsequent child educational achievement (Davis-Kean & Sexton; Dubow, Boxer, & Huesmann; Pettit, Yu, Dodge, & Bates), whereas the authors of the fourth (Magnuson, Sexton, Davis-Kean, & Huston) provide a much-needed examination of child benefits associated with increases in maternal education. Collectively, these articles produce valuable findings and raise provocative questions.
A Reliable Relation
It is hard to find a study on children's educational achievement that does not build parents' education or some other proxy for socioeconomic status (SES) into the analytic frame. More than twenty-five years ago, White (1982) conducted a meta-analysis in which he examined the relation between SES and academic achievement and concluded that the relation was moderately strong. A more recent meta-analysis of studies published between 1990 and 2000 conducted by Sirin (2005) arrived at a similar conclusion, with a correlation of r = .30 between parents' education and children's academic achievement. Sirin also found that the correlation between SES and achievement was lower for families who were minorities in comparison to families of European American background, although a mix of many ethnic groups were included in the general category of "minority."
The authors of three articles in this issue (Davis-Kean & Sexton; Dubow, Boxer, & Huesmann; Pettit, Yu, Dodge, & Bates) found the basic bivariate correlation between parental and children's educational attainment to be in a similar, though slightly higher, range (from r = .38 to r = .49) to those reported in the meta-analyses. Although two of the studies had a large proportion of European American families (Dubow, Boxer, & Huesmann; Pettit, Yu, Dodge, & Bates), the study by Davis-Kean and Sexton indicates that the relation between parents' education and children's achievement in third grade varies by ethnic group, ranging from r = .38 for African American families to r = .49 for Asian American families (H. Sexton, personal communication, December 17,...
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