Barriers to Parent-School Involvement for Early Elementary Students

A new study finds that 48 percent of students had parents who reported that one barrier to parent involvement was that family members could not get time off work.

The finding is from “Barriers to Parent-School Involvement for Early Elementary Students,” a new Statistics in Brief released by the National Center for Education Statistics today (January 23). This Brief examines the level of parents’ involvement in activities in their children’s schools, describes the types of barriers to participation that parents face, and shows how the barriers to involvement that parents report differ across child, family, and school characteristics.

Key findings include:

• In the 2012–13 school year, when most of the 2010–11 kindergartners were in second grade, a higher percentage of these students had parents who reported going to a regularly scheduled, parent-teacher conference or meeting (93 percent) than attending an open house or back-to-school night (84 percent); attending a school or class event, such as a play, sports event, or science fair (82 percent); serving as a volunteer in the classroom or elsewhere in the school (52 percent); or attending a meeting of a PTA or  PTO (Parent-Teacher Organization) (43 percent).
• The four most commonly reported barriers were “family members can’t get time off work” (48 percent), “inconvenient meeting times” (33 percent), “no child care” (17 percent), and “[parents] don’t hear about things going on at school that [they] might want to be involved in” (12 percent).
• Among second-graders whose parents reported low involvement in school activities, 59 percent overall had parents who reported an inability to get time off from work as a barrier. Higher percentages of this barrier were reported for students who had two parents employed full time (68 percent) or who had a single parent employed full time (73 percent).
• Among second-graders whose parents reported low involvement, 46 percent overall had parents who reported inconvenient meeting times as a barrier. Compared to the overall average, higher percentages of this barrier were reported for Black students (62 percent), while lower percentages were reported for White students (37 percent).

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