Home Environment, Talented Minority Youth, and School Achievement

Abstract

The increasing national interest in the role of minority parents in the education of their children has required an in-depth analysis of the effects of home environmental variables on student academic performance and the implications of findings from such analyses for policy and practice. Results obtained from studies on this topic generally have been inconsistent. 1 This inconsistency is said to have originated from the following: (1) invalid assumptions made about the nature and role of home environmental variables, (2) invalid assumptions about group homogeneity originating from a lack of understanding of the differences that exist among and within minority groups, (3) failure to control for the large number of variablesmost notably, socioeconomic status and race-that interact with environmental variables to affect achievement, and (4) the assumption that environmental variables are static variables that can be isolated for analysis. To the contrary, they operate in an interactive fashion with each other and with other social variables within the larger societal context. The resulting patterns have differential effects on achievement. It is now recognized that for an understanding of the home