Raising Student Achievement in a High Need School To me, the major issue that people consistently fail to adequately address when discussing raising achievement in a high need school is the generational impact of educational disparity. For many people, providing equal educational facilities and equal quality of education is the only remedy to solving educational disparity. However, that ignores the critical role that parents play in a child's education. This role goes far beyond parents and the PTA; in fact, while those parents may help to contribute to the overall quality of a school, they do not necessarily impact individual student education in the necessary manner. Instead, I am talking about the critical role that parents play in education and learning-readiness, if only in an ancillary manner in their children's lives.

For example, I grew up with a father who had a graduate-school level professional education and a mother who lacked any education beyond the first year of college, but who had attended a highly-recognized private school during...

When I had questions about homework, it was no problem for either of them to assist me with my homework, and when I encountered math issues that they were unable to address when I was in high school, they had the financial resources to hire a tutor and enough working knowledge of math to be able to assess whether that tutor was an expert. This is not a situation one generally sees in the homes of students in high needs schools; instead those parents frequently lack the educational background to provide learning assistance to their children and the financial wherewithal to pay for that assistance when something is beyond their skill set.
It is critical to realize that it is not a lack of parental involvement or desire to help their children that may prevent these parents from doing so, which has been the assumption of many people who want to dismiss lower-socio-economic class members as somehow less deserving than people in higher socioeconomic groups. It is not a question of will they help, but a question of can they…