SPECIAL REPORT * With parental involvement increasingly seen as key to children’s success in learning, schools and agencies are offering programs to encourage the role of . . .

In the public discussion over school reform, educators and policymakers often focus on what happens in classrooms. A growing body of evidence, however, is casting new attention on what occurs at home.

Leading experts agree that mothers and fathers who read to their children, keep close tabs on schoolwork and confer with teachers can make the difference between success and failure, confirming what teachers have long observed.

Yet parents struggle daily to involve themselves in their children’s education. The predicament cuts across class and race, affecting rich and poor alike for reasons of time and work, apathy and ignorance.

It weighs most heavily on disadvantaged families for the added reasons of language and poverty, prompting efforts by schools and government agencies to reach into those households and offer the urgent help they need.

The bridges are meant to reach people like Paula Diaz, an immigrant in Pacoima who can’t read with her third-grader because the books are written in English.

“I feel embarrassed and sad because I can’t help,” said Diaz, 39, who finished only sixth grade in Mexico.

Diaz’s daughter attends Montague Charter Academy, a low-income, predominantly Latino school that earned one of the lowest marks in the state’s new Academic Performance Index. The index ranked schools according to their scores on the Stanford 9 standardized test and dramatized the enormous gap between schools in affluent and impoverished neighborhoods.

As educators, governors and presidential candidates search for ways to close the gap, they are trying to address the corrosive effects of poverty on learning.

One strategy draws on research that shows parents can significantly influence attendance, homework, grades, graduation rates and other measures of academic achievement--regardless of family income and education levels.

A study by the U.S. Department of Education found that students who have two involved parents earned A’s nearly twice as often as students whose parents have little involvement.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that low-performing sixth- and eighth-graders in Baltimore saw their writing skills improve and their language arts grades rise slightly after they began discussing homework with family members on a regular basis.

“Parents really want to help their children,” said Joyce L. Epstein, director of the Center on School, Family and Community Partnerships at Johns Hopkins. “They are just not sure how, given their family constraints.”

Most Parents Wish They Could Do More

By their own admission, mothers and fathers say they are falling short when it comes to helping their children.

Nearly three-quarters of the parents in a recent national survey said they are not doing enough to help their children with school. Fewer than a quarter said they know how to motivate their kids and that schoolwork gets done at the same time every day.

“Parents are feeling quite pressured and concerned about how they raise their kids and certainly about how their children do in school,” said Jean Johnson, vice president of Public Agenda, a research group that prepared the survey. “But you sense that parents are [saying], ‘I don’t have enough time.’ ”

Cathi Carlton and Juan Vizcarra live in dramatically different worlds but share a common plight: juggling work and children.

Carlton, a divorced mother, faces an endurance test as she balances two young sons with the casting agency she heads in Santa Monica.

She wakes at 6:30 a.m., gets breakfast on the table, whisks Kai, 5, and Ben, 7, to school and zooms to work. About 1:15, she sprints back to school to pick up her kindergartner, waits for her first-grader, packs the boys into her Land Cruiser, drops them at home, checks their homework, then flies back to work.

Inevitably, the frenetic routine breaks down.

When work gets overwhelming, Carlton reluctantly has the nanny pick the boys up at school and oversee their homework. Or Carlton has to skip the hour she volunteers in Kai’s classroom.

“It’s always, always, always a juggle,” said Carlton, 39. “I still feel guilty when I can’t pick them up from school or do homework with them.”

Vizcarra runs his own version of the parent marathon--working 12-hour shifts as a cook for a taco stand in East Los Angeles.

Vizcarra is away from home 60 hours a week, working until 2 a.m. many nights. He is gone when his four children arrive home from school most days and sleeping when they eat breakfast.

Vizcarra’s wife, Maria Chavarria, used to work as a window cashier at the restaurant. She quit several months ago at her husband’s request to focus on the children’s education as well as her own.

She takes English and parenting classes three afternoons a week at their neighborhood elementary school in Cudahy. She is enrolled in a special family literacy program at the school that also provides after-school classes and child care for her kids.

“I was too tired to help them when I was at work,” Chavarria said. “I would come home with a lot of stress and a headache and tell them to go do their homework. Now I sit down and really focus with them.”

The Cudahy neighborhood where the family lives is in many ways a microcosm of Los Angeles: home to scores of low-income families, many from other countries, who present schools with extraordinary challenges.

Families from Mexico and elsewhere struggle not only with the hurdles of poverty and language but with issues of trust and confidence.

“Parents come with a whole other understanding that education is left to the school and the teacher is the professional,” said Katherine Del Monte, director of the Latino Family Literacy Project, a South Pasadena organization that trains parents to read with their children. “To question their authority is considered offensive.”

In some cases, parents simply don’t care enough to get involved, teachers say.

“Getting 100% parent involvement--I would have to be a little skeptical. I don’t think it’s going to happen,” said Katherine Neilson, vice president of parenting education for the California State PTA.

Antonia Guzman, a teacher at Gage Middle School in Huntington Park, told her students at the beginning of the school year that their education depended on a partnership with her and their parents.

But only half of the parents of her 90 students showed up at a recent parent-teacher conference. Guzman believes that most of the no-shows were working.

Guzman, a UCLA graduate, attended Gage. Her own parents, immigrants from Mexico, made her education their top priority, although they struggled to make ends meet.

“If the parents don’t value education, the students will say, ‘Why should I?’ ” said Guzman, 22.

Parents are being drawn into the system through campus parent centers that are cropping up at schools statewide. One of the most comprehensive in the region, Elizabeth Learning Center in Cudahy, offers a wide menu of services throughout the day and night, including mental health counseling, English and computer classes, parenting and citizenship courses, and dollar-a-day child care. An accompanying clinic provides free health care to students at the attached school and low-cost services to others in the community.

The goal is to clear away the myriad problems that impede families from focusing on education.

In Pacoima, parent centers are being supplemented by a privately funded outreach effort.

The Los Angeles Educational Partnership, a nonprofit organization that promotes school reforms, trains parents in the community to visit the homes of families with children under age 3. The visitors bring bags of books and read to the youngsters--modeling the techniques the parents can use to prepare their children for school.

State Funds Teacher Visits, Parent Training

Sacramento is encouraging similar reforms.

A law enacted in October will provide $15 million so that teachers can visit the homes of their students, with the majority of funds going to the poorest schools in the state. Another $5 million will pay for schools and districts to expand existing parent outreach programs and to train parents on ways to get involved in education.

State and national leaders say those efforts are crucial because parent involvement can be as strong a predictor of academic achievement as a family’s income and education levels.

Evidence can be found in parents such as Claudia Soto, a high school dropout from Compton who is possessed by the power of education.

Every day, Soto picks up 9-year-old Christina from school and then collects 5-year-old Hector at a nearby day-care center. The three head home and grab a quick snack. Then it’s time to hit the books--mother and children alike.

Christina dives into her grammar, spelling and vocabulary exercises at the kitchen table. Soto erases Christina’s misspelled words and makes the girl look up her mistakes in a dictionary.

In between the children’s homework, Soto cooks dinner, does the dishes and cracks her own textbooks for the English class she is taking at Compton College. She earned her high school diploma at adult school and hopes one day to become a school counselor.

The routine is exhausting, but Soto is determined.

“I want to make sure my children graduate from a university,” said Soto, the daughter of an immigrant mother. “You have to be educated to succeed in life.”