Ed Brayton is a freelance writer and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) has put out the first major study on gay parents and school involvement and it finds that LGBT parents are more involved in their childrens' education than the average straight parents, often by a significant margin. The study involved the LGBT parents of nearly 750 children, whose involvement they compared to results of previous studies of involvement by the general parental population. Among its findings:
LGBT parents are more likely to be involved in their children's education than the general parent population. Compared to data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), LGBT parents are more likely to attend a parent-teacher conference in the past year (94% to 77%) and more likely to volunteer (67% to 42%).
Those are very significant differences. This isn't a percent or two, it's a full 25% more volunteering and 17% more attending conferences. Unfortunately, it also found significant discrimination and harassment of the children of those parents:
# More than half (53%) of parents described various forms of exclusion from their school communities: being excluded or prevented from fully participating in school activities and events, being excluded by school policies and procedures, and being ignored and feeling invisible.# LGBT parents reported mistreatment from other parents in the school community and even from their children's peers at school - 26% of LGBT parents in the survey reported mistreatment from other parents and 21% reported hearing negative comments about being LGBT from students.
This is not at all a surprise, of course. My only question about the methodology is that this study appears to have relied on self-reporting by the parents themselves. If the studies they used for comparison on rates of parental involvement did not similarly involve self-reporting, they're comparing apples to oranges.
We would, after all, expect a higher result on self-reported surveys than on actual counts reported by the school because some portion of parents on a self-report survey are going to claim more involvement than they actually engage in. If they are comparing two different types of methodologies, it points the way to a better study that can be done and should be done on the subject.
Comments
Gay parnts are more involved because they are trying to push the gay agenda!!one!1! [/funditard]
Seriously, the atheist parents I know (most of my circle of friends) also seem to way more involved than the average 'murikan. I think it may have something to do with the necessity of needing to be more vigilant about one's child's education knowing that they are reasonably likely to get at least a couple classes with a proseltyzing teacher.
Cheers.
Posted by: FastLane | April 15, 2008 9:40 AM
My wife and I are very involed in our children's education. Can't understand why any parent (straight, gay, atheist, Christian, etc) wouldn't be.
Posted by: Rev. AJB | April 15, 2008 10:22 AM
Hey, my mother was very involved in my education. Are you trying to tell me she was a lesbian? Bah this is a bunch of gay agenda, atheist cabal, hogwash. My mother weren't no lesbian monkey!
Pardon me while I remove my tongue from my cheek.
This is an interesting report. All the data was survey driven. But notification for the survey was through the GLSEN web site and LGBT family organizations. So selection bias could be a significant factor. I'm with Ed, it's provocative but inconclusive. I hope it inspires more studies with broader sample groups.
Posted by: Abby Normal | April 15, 2008 10:26 AM
I would hypothesize that this is related to the differential investment costs of becoming parents.
Straight people can become parents wholly inadvertantly, even somewhat resentfully, simply by being a bit careless. Having invested less in their decision to become parents, they are likely to value it less, and invest less in child-rearing, including being involved in education.
Other straight people become parents purposely, but almost by rote--now we date, now we get engaged, now we get married, now we get kids. Their investment is somewhat higher, and so they are probably more likely to be involved, but not necessarily greatly so.
Gay parents must make a conscious choice and go to considerable efforts to have children. That high investment probably makes them value their children more highly, on average, than straight parents, and so they are likely to get more heavily involved in their children's upbringing--including in their education--to protect that investment.
The same logic would probably hold true for parents who had their children at a later age, versus those who had children early. Of course there will be variance in all these categories--it wouldn't be hard to find a woman who accidentally got pregnant as a teenager, but who has been a deeply involved parent, reading to kids at night, going to parent-teacher conferences, working on math problems with the kid, etc. But as statistical averages, I'd predict this is what we'd find.
Posted by: James Hanley | April 15, 2008 10:29 AM
I am wary of the fact that a gay-rights group released a study that is so overwhelmingly favorable to gay parents. While I am not accusing GLSEN of lying, I would like to see this study repeated by another organization.
That being said, James Hanley's argument makes sense. I would also like to see the statistics broken down by demographics other than sexual orientation. For example, are gay parents more or less involved than straight parents who adopted? etc. etc.
Posted by: Brandon | April 15, 2008 10:56 AM
James Hanley, you can add to your list folks who become parents via adoption. As a group, they are very 'invested' in their children, having become parents intentionally and at great 'cost', both literally and metaphorically.
Posted by: Elf Eye | April 15, 2008 11:38 AM
I agree with James' analysis, and with Elf Eye that the same thing likely applies to adoptive parents. I would add that it likely applies to parents who have to overcome serious infertility problems (I saw the years of pain and difficulty my best friend and his wife went through and it's undoubtedly an immense investment up front that certainly does make them value those children more). There's a significant number of straight parents, as James says, who got that way by accident; they really don't want to be a parent and they view it as a pain in the ass. Then there's another significant number, in my experience, who have children only because it's expected - that's what the "normal" blueprint for a life says, so that's what you do. They've given no thought as to why they want children or what to do with them once they've got them, they just know they're supposed to have them. If it was more difficult to have children, if they had to sacrifice something to get them and overcome roadblocks to get them, that would make it less likely that someone becomes a parent by accident or with ambivalence.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | April 15, 2008 12:03 PM
I'm going to preface this comment by saying that:
1) I'm a big supporter of gay rights
2) Gays should be allowed to adopt children (or have them in vitro if they are lesbians). They have every right to a family.
3) Gays should be allowed to marry.
But, I'm skeptical. A gay-rights advocacy group publishes a study. Am I surprised that is shows that gays are "better" parents? Nope. It's like Greenpeace publishing a study about deforestation. I can pretty much already guarantee what the conclusions will be.
Most importantly: why wasn't it peer reviewed and published in a science journal? Then I'd give it more weight. Until then, it reeks of advocacy rather than science.
Posted by: Miguelito | April 15, 2008 1:09 PM
I don't think the fact that the study was done by a group that advocates gay rights is a good reason to doubt the study. That comes dangerously close to making an argumentum ad labelum argument. As usual, accusations of bias don't really tell us anything because everyone is biased. If that bias has affected the validity of the research then it shouldn't be hard to point out substantive reasons why. So rather than just saying they're biased, one should look at substantive flaws in the methodology. Two have been pointed out, one by me (that it's based solely on self-reporting, which may be exaggerated) and one by Abby Normal (that the test group was identified by their political activism, which may skew results away from the average person). Such criticisms are always a good thing, whether one agrees with the conclusions of a study or not, because they help future researchers to fix those flaws and make their studies better.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | April 15, 2008 2:42 PM
No doubt there's some advocacy here. But there's prima facie validity here, as alluded to by others (and, in fact, when there are active roadblocks put into the way of gay parents, I think a natural reaction is to get even more invested in the children).
Posted by: gwangung | April 15, 2008 2:45 PM
Another factor I can see: the members of gay couples raising children are probably, on average, better educated and wealthier than parents in general, if only because the less educated and those with lower incomes would have a harder time doing it. And of course higher education and higher income generally correlate positively with parental involvement in kids' education.
If this was at least in part a self-selected sample, then all bets are off because of social desirability bias: if given the choice of whether or not to report their involvement, parents with little involvement (something generally frowned upon) are going to be much less likely to respond than those who are doing what's considered the Right Thing.
Posted by: ebohlman | April 15, 2008 2:55 PM
Thank you. As I was reading, I was thinking the same thing. You have to control for socioeconomic status, educational level, number of children, even geographic location which often relates to culture, and scads of other factors. C'mon, guys, this research is crap. I am very sympathetic to gay parents, but don't try to use garbage like this to prove anything. I suspect that Dick Cheney's grandchild will be just fine, but compared to what, and then maybe not.
Posted by: Elizabeth | April 15, 2008 4:26 PM
Here you are assuming that both "gay" parents are men. Lesbians get a rough deal financially most of the time - at least, from what I can see in the city where I live.
Moreover, we all know that women on average earn less than men. Now consider a man-man couple, and a woman-woman couple. On average, the lesbians should have a lower income than a heterosexual couple, and way lower than a "gay" male couple. At least, that's what one would expect from current data on gender bias in the workplace...
Posted by: steppen wolf | April 16, 2008 2:21 PM
Ed, the fact that it was done by an advocacy group is reason to doubt it due to publication bias alone. An advocacy group isn't going to publish a study that goes against what it advocates. Even if each group independently does not play the repeat the study till we like the results game, when all groups are taken together, that is the result.
Plus, I believe I've seen research fairly recently showing that who sponsors a study affects the outcome; though I'd have to go dig it up.
Posted by: Anthony | April 18, 2008 12:13 AM