A two-parent household does not combat illiteracy

By Stabroek News On In Letters to the Editor |

Dear Editor,

I wish to respond to a letter in your newspaper dated September 16 entitled ‘A two-parent home is the single most important ingredient in eradicating illiteracy.’ I understand that the pronouncement by the Minster of Education that 68 per cent of your children are not reading at grade level is causing some amount of alarm. However there is no need for us to resort to the absurd.

In their book Freakonomics authors Dubner and Levitt after analyzing a massive governmental education database, interviewing 20,000 families and collecting other data on other aspects of students’ lives, identified the following as positively correlated with high test scores in the United States:

  1. The child has highly educated parents.
  2. The child’s parents have high socioeconomic status.
  3. The child’s mother was thirty or older at the time of her first child’s birth.
  4. The child had low birth weight (an indication of a lack of health issues including learning disabilities).
  5. The child’s parents speak English in the home. (Consider the implications for Guyanese children for many of whom English is not spoken in the home and who really should be taught English as a second language.)
  6. The child is adopted. (Adoption corresponds with higher economic status.)
  7. The child’s parents are involved in the PTA.
  8. The child has many books in his home (note, many books in the home and not the child’s parents reading to him or her every day).

The eight factors that are not related to high test scores are:

  1. The child’s family is intact (meaning a two-parent household).
  2. The child’s parents recently moved into a better neighbourhood.
  3. The child’s mother didn’t work between birth and kindergarten.
  4. The child attended Head Start. (Head Start is a US pre-school programme.)
  5. The child’s parents regularly take him/her to museums.
  6. The child is regularly spanked.
  7. The child frequently watches television.
  8. The child’s parents read to him nearly every day.

As seen from the above, two-family households did not correspond with higher test scores. As a matter of fact, many other studies have pointed to single female-headed households as having children who excel in school because the heads of the households are highly educated and possess high incomes. Two uneducated parents with low incomes do not positively impact a child learning or high test scores. In our own region, Barbados with 42.9 per cent single parent households ranks high regionally and internationally in education. Again Barbados also ranks high in personal income and GDP.

There are many positives to a two-parent household (married or not). Whilst it does not hinder literacy it does not combat illiteracy.

Yours faithfully,

Candice Ramessar

Home-schooling parent