Govt and teachers are to blame for poor academic performance but some parents are the reason students fail

Standardized tests are used as determinants of academic excellence and to prove that one has completed a specified period of study and thus ready to progress to the next level on the academic ladder. This has made performance in standardized tests (BECE and WASSCE) a hot issue with immense interest from all and sundry.

This is heightened by our political terrain where the government, as well as the opposition party, uses education and examination results to play politics; to show how well the government has performed or failed in education. It has created a situation where the media as well as CSO’s use examination results as a measure of the effectiveness of the government’s education policies and to judge teachers’ effectiveness on their job.

Most often, the attention is directed towards teachers and fingers are pointed at the sitting government when learners in the basic and pre-tertiary schools perform abysmally in their final exams (BECE and WASSCE).

One critical factor in the academic performance of students which is usually less talked-about is parental involvement.

It is globally known that parental involvement contributes significantly in achieving higher student success and sustained school performance. Hence if parents don’t affect their critical role in the education of their children, it doesn’t matter how ably teachers teach or government support education, learners will still fail to excel in their academics as expected.

Accordingly, parents' role in the academic performance of learners needs to be highlighted so that society would appreciate the essentiality of parental support in the performance of learners. This article looks at that.

Parental involvement in children's academics takes many forms and this include;

Good parenting in the home i.e. maintaining a warm and supportive home for learning;

This involves the provision of a secure and serene environment at home, helping children with homework, setting good examples of constructive social and educational values and high aspirations relating to personal fulfilment. Education is not limited to the four walls of a compound called school. Parents have to create an environment that stimulates and sustains children’s interest in learning right from home before they get to school. The home should be challenging for students to aspire to excel in their exams and aim at greater heights in life. A child’s readiness to learn is greatly affected by how education is presented to him/her in the home.

Students who are from homes where there is not much emphasis on the importance of education and hence are not motivated or challenged to take their education seriously come to school unready for academic work. There are parents who can sit together with their children behind a TV set to watch telenovelas late into the night, doing nothing to stimulate children’s interest in learning. There are others also who overburden their children with household chores to the extent that children come to school the next day exhausted.

However, students’ performance is greatly improved when parents take steps like; providing a timetable and a quiet place for children to study and assigning times for doing other responsibility like household chores. Also parents who monitor out-of-school activities, for example; setting limits on television watching, reducing time of playing, monitoring the kind of friends learners walk with encourage children’s development and progress in school.

Keeping contact with teachers/schools to share information

Teacher-parent relationship is critical to students’ success and school development in general. Parents must understand that success of children requires collaboration between themselves and the teachers who teach these children.

Parents must therefore participate in school meetings like PTA and also make it a priority to visit or contact teachers who teach their children to discuss the challenges these children are facing in their academic work and how best they can be helped. Teachers know best the academic strength of learners and can suggest the appropriate remedial actions needed to help them cope with their academic work.

It is however unfortunate that some parents never visit their children’s school to find out who teaches them, how they are performing, the challenges they are facing and how best to help them. In the SHS, there are parents who never step foot in the school their children attend for the entire 3-year period that their children stay in the boarding house. Some even don’t monitor their children's terminal report and progress.

A good relationship between teachers and parents goes a long way to enforce student performance. Thus, there is a need for parents to support and also motivate teachers and be convinced of the value of mutual cooperation in the success of students. Parents can provide teachers with information which might be essential in how teachers deal with students and vice versa.

Providing books and other necessary materials to support learning

There are parents who just send their children to school without providing books, writing materials and even food for children. They think it is the government and teachers' responsibility to do all these while all they do is to present their child in school without any support whatsoever.

When it comes to the SHS, some parents think free SHS means the government has also taken the responsibility of parenthood needed for their own children to succeed. There are parents who don’t want to invest a penny in their children's education with the excuse that education is free. They just put their children into a vehicle and send them to the boarding house and they feel that is all they are supposed to do as parents.

The government is also to blame for this negative perception some parents have. The impression has been created that the government has absorbed every fee and hence every responsibility. This has created the wrong mind-set that parents are not to do anything towards their children's success in school.

Such parents expect teachers to do magic for their children to pass without them buying textbooks and other learning materials for learners. The free SHS should rather reduce the financial burden and afford parents the flexibility to be able to provide textbooks and learning materials not covered by the free SHS.

Conclusion

Experiential evidence shows that parental involvement is one of the fundamental factors in attaining higher student achievement and sustained school performance. Therefore if parents don’t grasp and play their critical role in the academic success of their children, teachers can teach as well as possible and the government can support as much as it could, but there would still be a limitation in students achieving excellence in their academics.

The writer, Solomon Nana Kwame Ansong is an educationist with a biochemistry background who has an interest in educational and social issues.