Peers and Priorities

Peers-Surround your child with other achievers. Peers have a profound influence on student achievement, sometimes outweighing even parental influence. This explains why selecting the right program for your child is so important. Here is where it gets especially interesting. The research tells us that peer groups determine what values a child will have toward education. So parents who make sure their child’s social peer group values education direct their child toward academic success. When parents knowingly or unknowingly abdicate the decision about whom their child hangs out with, they find themselves almost powerless to help their child succeed in school.

So where you live is important, but not for the reason you might think. It may not be simply the quality of the teachers in a certain school that makes it a desirable place to send your child. It’s more about the quality of the students — where the students value academic success.

Priorities-Establish the proper priorities. It is very common for African American families to place a very high value on skills that have to do with entertainment. We praise our children when they excel at sports, comedy, music and theater and the results have been good. Black athletes, comedians, musicians and actors have been very successful. The problem is that only a very small fraction of any racial group can achieve success in those areas. To have a higher assurance that our children will be able to earn a living wage we must give a higher priority to education and job skills development. If we send our kids to basketball camp we should also send them to science camp. If we come to the school for the special programs in which our children are performing we must also come to the school for parent-teacher conferences.