Gain or Vain: The Heterogenous Relationships between Parent-Teacher Contact and Students’ Educational Achievement

Parent-teacher contact, understood as either social capital, cultural capital, or parental involvement, has been widely documented to positively influence students’ educational achievement. Yet, the current sociological literature on parent-teacher contact often neglects the agency of students and the equalizing effects of schools.

To address these limitations, I propose a two-dimensional framework to illuminate the heterogeneous relationships between parent-teacher contact and students’ educational achievement. This novel framework contains an objective dimension – students’ existing academic achievement – and a subjective dimension – students’ attachment to school.

I use China, the largest education system in the world, as a case study to test this framework. The analysis of two waves of data from the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS), based on school fixed-effects models, demonstrates the validity and applicability of this framework.

First, parent-teacher contact is irrespective of students’ past academic achievement, which refutes the reactive involvement hypothesis and supports the proactive involvement hypothesis.

Second, in general, parent-teacher contact has a positive relationship with students’ subsequent educational achievement.

Third, however, this positive general relationship has certain heterogeneities. It is statistically significant only among low-achieving students and students with high attachment to school, supporting the “gain” hypothesis of parent-teacher contact, but not significant among high-achieving students and students with low attachment to school, supporting the “vain” hypothesis of parent-teacher contact.

By delineating the conditions under which parent-teacher contact may be a gain or vain, this framework not only reveals the complex, heterogeneous relationships between parent-teacher contact and students’ educational achievement but also provides practical guidelines for school-based parental involvement.