Sociology of Education 2005, Vol. 78 (July): 233–249 233 Leveling the Home Advantage: Assessing the Effectiveness of Parental Involvement in Elementary School Thurston Domina City University of New York In the past two decades, a great deal of energy has been dedicated to improving children’s education by increasing parents’ involvement in school. However, the evidence on the effec- tiveness of parental involvement is uneven. Whereas policy makers and theorists have assumed that parental involvement has wide-ranging positive consequences, many studies have shown that it is negatively associated with some children’s outcomes. This article uses data from the children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 to estimate time-lagged growth models of the effect of several types of parental involvement on scores on elementary school achievement tests and the Behavioral Problems Index. The findings suggest that parental involvement does not independently improve children’s learning, but some involvement activ- ities do prevent behavioral problems. Interaction analyses suggest that the involvement of par- ents with low socioeconomic status may be more effective than that of parents with high socioeconomic status. I n the past two decades, a great deal of research and policy-making activity has been dedicated to increasing the involve- ment of parents in schools. Parental-involve- ment initiatives have been a mainstay of fed- eral educational policy since the Reagan administration’s 1986 Goals 2000: Educate America Act. In 1996, the Clinton administra- tion reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, adding a new pro- vision that required the nation’s poorest schools to spend at least 1 percent of their Title I supplementary federal funds to develop educational “compacts” between families and schools. Likewise, increasing parental involvement in schools is one of the six cen- tral goals of the Bush administration’s 2002 No Child Left Behind Act. At the state and local levels, interest and activity surrounding parental involvement has been even more pronounced. A 1995–96 sur- vey by the National Center for Education Statistics showed that nearly all public ele- mentary and middle schools in the United States sponsored activities that were designed to foster parental involvement. According to the survey, 97 percent of schools invited parents to attend an open house or back-to-school night, 92 percent scheduled parent-teacher conferences, 96 percent hosted arts events, 85 percent spon- sored athletic events, and 84 percent had sci- ence fairs (Carey et al. 1998). Throughout the United States, parental-involvement initia- tives have been central to state- and dis- trictwide school reform efforts, most notably in Baltimore, Chicago, and Philadelphia (Epstein 2001; Fine 1993; Wallace and Walberg 1991). In 2003–04, New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein appropriated Delivered by Ingenta to CUNY Graduate Center (cid 85110067), City Univ. of New York Graduate Center (cid 9793), Dr Adams (cid 52021545) IP : 127.0.0.1 Wed, 27 Jul 2005 15:10:00