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Hm, I'm sure there are good proxies, like the number/length of parent-initiated phone calls/emails to the school/teachers.


These are good proxies for parental involvement with school, but as Mark Twain famously suggested, school != education.


Which is clever, but all that matters for validity of the metric here, is whether a parent with a child in school, would be willing to make all these calls to the school, but otherwise be an uninvolved parent. It doesn't seem likely IMHO.


Helicopter parents can be highly involved with school but not effective in supporting their child's education. I know far too many parents who do their children's homework for them, as an example.

There are also many parents actively engaged in their child's education who don't feel the need to be in constant contact with a teacher.


The issue is whether "being involved with the child's education" has predictive power over long-term outcomes that explains away the influence of the school itself. While it may weaken the correlation for the different involvement types to be more vs less helpful, I was only speaking to the issue of whether your could measure involvement at all.


And my statement was that involvement with school ignores other types of involvement in education.




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