Educators and parents alike often assume that any effort to boost parent involvement in schools is a good thing. But two large randomized controlled trials in Mexico show that more parent engagement doesn’t always produce good results for students. Two different experiments in that country, aimed at low-income indigenous parents, failed to improve the academic achievement of their children.  

The study, “Promoting Parental Involvement in Schools: Evidence From Two Randomized Experiments,” circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research in October 2020, took place in Mexico but it has implications for parent engagement programs here too. It was conducted by four economists at Vanderbilt University, Harvard University, University of California Berkeley and The World Bank.

• Student achievement at 80 schools in low-income areas that provided parents with information on how to support their children’s education was no better than at 100 similar schools that didn’t operate a parent engagement program. 

• For a different group of 125 Mexican schools, parents had been given extra money and some decision-making power, in addition to the information. Students didn’t do better and parents and teachers lost trust in each other. 

• Researcher says that parent involvement programs are still worthwhile but we need to figure out how to design them better.

• In the Mexico experiments, parents were lectured in groups with general information about supporting their children.  

• Felipe Barrera-Osorio, one of the researchers on the Mexico study, says that more specific and targeted information about a parent’s own child is more effective. “Information can be very broad,” he said. “When you say to parents, ‘This is the performance of your kid.’ When you personalize information, parents say, ‘I need to do something.’ That has a very positive effect.”

1. Promoting Parental Involvement in Schools: Evidence From Two Randomized Experiments Felipe Barrera-Osorio, Paul Gertler, Nozomi Nakajima, and Harry Patrinos NBER Working Paper No. 28040 October 2020 
2. Parental Involvement in Middle School: A Meta-Analytic Assessment of the Strategies That Promote Achievement, Nancy E. Hill, Diana F. Tyson, Dev Psychol. 2009 May; 45(3): 740–763. doi: 10.1037/a0015362 
3. Banerjee, A., Banerji, R., Duflo, E., Glennerster, R., & Khemani, S. (2010). Pitfalls of participatory programs: Evidence from a randomized evaluation in education in India. American Economic Journal. Economic Policy, 2 (1), 1.  
4. Barrera-Osorio, F., Gonzalez, K., Lagos, F., & Deming, D. J. (2020). Providing performance information in education: An experimental evaluation in Colombia. Journal of Public Economics, 186 , 104185.