Now that's going to be a smart kid...

A huge new study just out — “Family scholarly culture and educational success: Books and schooling in 27 nations” — published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, says just having books in the home is as important in determining a child’s educational success as the parents’ education level, according to this report in the Nevada News by Claudene Wharton.

Reports Wharton:

Whether rich or poor, residents of the United States or China, illiterate or college graduates, parents who have books in the home increase the level of education their children will attain, according to a 20-year study led by Mariah Evans, University of Nevada, Reno associate professor of sociology and resource economics.

For years, educators have thought the strongest predictor of attaining high levels of education was having parents who were highly educated. But, strikingly, this massive study showed that the difference between being raised in a bookless home compared to being raised in a home with a 500-book library has as great an effect on the level of education a child will attain as having parents who are barely literate (3 years of education) compared to having parents who have a university education (15 or 16 years of education). Both factors, having a 500-book library or having university-educated parents, propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average.

Evans is particularly interested in the benefit for children of lesser-educated parents. “The results of this study indicate that getting some books into their homes is an inexpensive way that we can help these children succeed,” she says. “Even a little bit goes a long way.”

The study found that, “Having as few as 20 books in the home still has a significant impact on propelling a child to a higher level of education, and the more books you add, the greater the benefit.”

Evans tells the News, “You get a lot of ‘bang for your book’. It’s quite a good return-on-investment in a time of scarce resources.”

According to the News report:

The study by Evans and her colleagues at Nevada, UCLA and Australian National University is one of the largest and most comprehensive studies ever conducted on what influences the level of education a child will attain.

The researchers were struck by the strong effect having books in the home had on children’s educational attainment even above and beyond such factors as education level of the parents, the country’s GDP, the father’s occupation or the political system of the country.

Having books in the home is twice as important as the father’s education level, and more important than whether a child was reared in China or the United States. Surprisingly, the difference in educational attainment for children born in the United States and children born in China was just 2 years, less than two-thirds the effect that having 500 or more books in the home had on children (3.2 years).

In this post at The Daily Beast, education expert Diane Ravitch reports on the victory of Texas conservatives in the battle over textbooks in the public school: “The conservative majority of the Texas State Board of Education adopted new guidelines for social-studies textbooks that reflect their conservative political views. The new guidelines will emphasize the Christian beliefs of the Founding Fathers. Students in Texas will be expected to learn about the emergence of the conservative movement in the 1980s and 1990s. The new textbooks are supposed to promote patriotism and respect for the ‘free-enterprise system.’”

Ravitch goes on to explain how this happened:

For many years, the Texas state board has been telling textbook publishers what should appear in the books that the state will buy for its students. Nineteen other states decide which textbooks will qualify for “adoption” in their public schools. Books that are not approved by the state board cannot be purchased with state funds. This is a very powerful lever to bring about revisions in the textbooks. The two most consequential of the so-called adoption states are Texas and California, because they have the largest number of students and therefore the most clout with publishers. When Texas or California speak, publishers listen and change their textbooks to comply.

The elected school board in Texas pressures publishers toward a conservative agenda, while California, “insists that the textbooks it buys for grades K-8 comply with its ’social content’ guidelines, which require positive representations of all groups in society.”

It’s enough to give publishers whiplash, but the big ones keep up with the demands. These are huge markets. In Texas, according to Ravitch, the board, “buys textbooks en masse for all grades, so it has a lot of influence on high-school textbooks.”

Ravitch shows the absurdities of this politicized textbook adoption process and advocates a cure. States should de-couple politics from scholarship by changing the ambit of the state school board, and abolish the adoption system altogether. She writes, “The job of the state board should be to evaluate which classroom materials seem to be most effective in helping students learn the subject and to make that information public.” And she goes on to suggest that, “teachers and districts should be free to choose whatever books or textbooks or other learning materials they thought best to reach the state’s academic standards.”

Seems like a good start toward educating young people instead of young ideologues.