Source Two: Social class and parental intervention in elementary education

Brian Okoye

03/23/13

English 1103

Lareau, A. (2000). Home advantage: Social class and parental intervention in elementary education. Rowman & Littlefield Pub Incorporated.

 

Annette Lareau’s, in her book, mainly argues that “social class affects schooling and challenges the position that social class is of only modest and indirect significance in shaping children’s lives in schools”. Lareau states that “teachers ask for parent involvement” and she believes that social class has a powerful influence on parent involvement patterns.  She also argues that social class differences in family involvement in schooling appear to reflect the amount of separation between work and home in working-class and middle-class families. Moreover, Lareau argues that social class has a powerful influence on life changes because in influences the values that parents hold and pass on to their children. She trusts that social class alters the cultural resources, including language and knowledge of art, music, and other cultural experiences. Most importantly, Annette Lareau pays attention to the devotion of parent involvement in schooling at the elementary level.

Lareau argues that social class plays a relevant role in parent involvement patterns. Though parent’s involvement is tied to school success, it can could also contribute to the lack of school success when parents’ lack involvement. Middle-class parents have a tendency to be more proactive in parent-teacher interactions than lower-class parents. Lareau implies that middle-class parents consistently take more active roles in school than do working-class parents when considering verbal development, attending school events and reading to children. Additionally, she focuses on the joining of researchers and teachers, and their efforts to create strategies that will improve parent involvement. According to Lareau, “the policy implications of parent involvement in schooling have now come to dominate the research agenda.” She argues that overtime valuable evidence that the curriculum, classroom goals and organization and structure of schooling have changed drastically. This implies that Lareau believes that home-school relationships are possible.

            By concluding that the impact of socio-economic status is on the values and educational aspirations which children bring to the educational process, I will argue these values of which children bring to education based on their socio-economic status. My knowledge of social class and how parent’s ownership of resources affects the teachers’ request for assistance, will allow me to discuss how social class affects a child’s request for a teachers’ assistance based on the resources they possess. By seeing consistency in parent influence and involvement, I am interested in arguing how family value can profit social class differently. Furthermore, I will discuss how the curriculum, classroom goals and organization and structure of schooling of different social class have evolved over time. Decisively, I will describe how cultural resources and experiences affect students in the classroom based on their social class.