The Mirror Between Us

How Schools Reflect—or Fail to Reflect—the Lives of the Students They Serve

A Research Brief on the Link Between Parenting and Teaching Style from forwardED

Mirroring Development. © 2025 forwardED

A child does not walk into a classroom empty. They carry with them the echoes of the night before—how they were seen, spoken to, disciplined or loved, heard or dismissed. These echoes shape expectations, and expectations shape experience.

In a 12-month study, conducted in inner-city, economically less advantaged school districts across four states, researchers at forwardED aimed to test a fundamental idea: that alignment between parenting and teaching styles matters and may be far more predictive of student performance than we previously imagined.

In education, performance is often seen as solitary, an individual trait to be cultivated or corrected within the child. But we are learning that performance is shaped and mediated through relationships—between students and their families, students and their teachers, and between the culture of home and the culture of school. So, we at forwardED asked, how does the alignment between parenting style and teaching style affect student outcomes?

What we found was not only revealing but also philosophically illuminating. Children are deeply social beings who enter classrooms with formed expectations about authority, care, discipline, and responsiveness through their experiences at home. These expectations become mental and emotional templates—ways of anticipating how adults will treat them, how they should respond, and how safe or unsafe they are in learning environments. We have come to name this phenomenon through two theoretical concepts: continuance and disruption.

Continuance occurs when the patterns of care and discipline a child receives at home are reflected and affirmed in the classroom. This continuity affirms the child’s sense of order and safety, allowing them to extend themselves in learning. Disruption, by contrast, emerges when the child’s expectations are contradicted. This break in relational logic often results in emotional confusion, behavioral resistance, and detachment from the learning environment.

This theoretical framing guided our methodological approach. The study, part of a much larger longitudinal study, was conducted in eight schools across four states, primarily serving Black, Latinx, and multilingual students. We engaged 360 students in grades four through ten, along with their parents or guardians and 120 teachers.

Our mixed-methods design included quantitative and qualitative components, enabling us to triangulate findings and uncover patterns and meanings. Quantitatively, students completed perception surveys measuring classroom climate, school belonging, and well-being. Academic performance was assessed using both GPA data and standardized assessments provided by the districts. Qualitatively, we conducted in-depth interviews with students, caregivers, and educators. Using Baumrind’s parenting style typology—authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and uninvolved—we categorized and analyzed both parenting and teaching approaches. Our analysis used hierarchical linear modeling to explore correlations between alignment and outcomes, while thematic coding helped us interpret the interview data with depth and nuance.

Our findings were striking. Across the board, students whose home parenting styles aligned with their teachers’ instructional and disciplinary approaches outperformed their peers in both academic and emotional domains. For instance, students raised in authoritative households—marked by high expectations and high responsiveness—thrived most in classrooms led by teachers who similarly combined structure with warmth. These students saw an average increase in GPA of 12.7 percent over the school year, and their self-reported feelings of school belonging rose by 18 percent.

By contrast, students raised in authoritarian households—those characterized by rigid rules and emotional distance—performed best with teachers who maintained clear expectations and consistent discipline, even if they were less emotionally expressive. These students responded positively to predictability and firm guidance, particularly when it mirrored their home experience.

When parenting and teaching styles clashed, the results were troubling. Students raised in structured homes who encountered permissive classrooms, or those raised in emotionally open homes who entered rigid school environments, often struggled. Disruption in relational expectations led to elevated reports of anxiety, increased behavioral incidents, and in some cases, academic declines of up to 14 percent. Students frequently described feeling “out of place,” “confused,” or “like the teacher didn’t understand them.” This phenomenon of misalignment proved especially pronounced in vulnerable communities, where schools and families often operate from vastly different cultural logics and emotional frameworks.

These findings align closely with the foundational work of Shirley Brice Heath, who in her landmark study Ways with Words (1983) illustrated how home language and interaction patterns—what she called “language socialization”—prepare children differently for the demands of school. In her study, students from communities whose communicative styles mirrored school expectations succeeded, while those whose styles diverged struggled to adapt, often being misread as defiant or disengaged.

Our findings suggest that this phenomenon extends beyond language into broader relational patterns: how children are held accountable, the tone of adult authority, and the emotional scaffolding of instruction. In other words, success in school is not just about cognitive readiness, but about relational readiness—about whether a child’s emotional and disciplinary expectations are met or disrupted in the classroom.

This insight also deepens our understanding of the “race match” literature. Scholars such as Thomas Dee (2004) and later Gershenson et al. (2018) have found that Black students perform better, experience fewer suspensions, and report greater belonging when taught by same-race teachers. But the surface explanation—race—may mask a deeper logic: alignment. It is not merely racial sameness, but the shared cultural and relational fluency that often comes with race match that enables deeper alignment between students and teachers. Same-race teachers are more likely to share parenting logics, communication styles, and disciplinary philosophies with their students, leading to greater mutual understanding. Thus, the alignment we observe is not just about color but about care. It is about whether the teacher, implicitly or explicitly, validates the child’s world.

The importance of alignment invites us into a deeper, more politically textured conversation. Alignment is not neutral. It begs the question: who gets to be aligned?

As Lisa Delpit (1995) and Gloria Ladson-Billings (2009) have pointed out, schools are cultural institutions. They reflect and reward certain parenting logics—typically white, middle-class, authoritative ones—while penalizing others. In other words, the students most likely to thrive are those whose home styles are already institutionally validated.

This helps us reframe the persistent racial disparities in school outcomes. It’s not merely that white students perform better on average, but that their home cultures are more likely to be mirrored in classroom norms and teaching styles.

Isn’t good teaching good for everyone, regardless of parenting?

Yes—and no. While high-quality instruction benefits all students, our findings suggest that relational compatibility modulates access to that quality. In other words, students who feel safe and seen in a classroom are more likely to take academic risks, ask questions, and engage deeply. Good teaching doesn’t land equally. Alignment influences how and whether it is received.

Critics might argue that if alignment matters so much, how do we explain the difference in performance between siblings raised in the same household? Our data challenges the premise of identical parenting. We found significant variation in parenting style within households, often influenced by factors such as birth order, gender, temperament, parental age, and economic stress. A firstborn daughter may experience authoritative parenting, while her younger brother receives a more permissive or authoritarian approach due to changing family dynamics. In this sense, no two children are raised identically, even under the same roof. As such, their alignment with different teachers—and consequent performance—can vary considerably. These internal variations within families help to clarify what might otherwise appear as anomalies in our theory.

Others might suggest that good teaching is universally effective, regardless of alignment. While there is truth in the power of strong pedagogy, our findings suggest that pedagogical excellence is not enough if it is not received. A student who feels unsafe or misunderstood in a classroom is less likely to engage deeply, take intellectual risks, or form positive relationships with learning. In this way, relational alignment is the precondition for access to the benefits of good teaching. It is the doorway through which learning must pass.

This research contributes to a growing body of scholarship that argues for a more holistic view of student performance—one that attends not only to curriculum and cognition but to context and care. The ecological systems theory of Urie Bronfenbrenner reminds us that children develop within nested systems, and the more consistent and affirming those systems are, the more robust the development. Our work also extends the insights of Darling and Steinberg (1993), who showed that parenting style shapes adolescent adjustment, by demonstrating how these effects reverberate into the classroom and interact with teaching style.

Perhaps more importantly, our study shows that the home-school divide is not just geographic or bureaucratic—it is emotional and epistemological. Schools that assume a one-size-fits-all approach to discipline, care, and instruction ignore the relational frameworks students bring with them.

By understanding alignment as a mechanism of performance, we unlock more precise levers of intervention.

What we now know with greater confidence is that alignment matters. And alignment is not innocent. Schools have long privileged a narrow set of relational norms—those most closely aligned with white, middle-class parenting styles. These norms have become the hidden curriculum of education, rewarding those who reflect them and penalizing those who do not. Thus, alignment is not just a pedagogical concern—it is a justice concern. Our findings provide one more mirror for schools to examine themselves: who is reflected in your expectations? Whose children thrive under your care? And who is forced to adapt, to translate, to shrink?

The implications of this work are far-reaching. Teacher education must prioritize relational flexibility—the capacity to adapt disciplinary and instructional approaches to meet students where they are, not where we wish they were. The question isn’t “are they ready for us,” but “are we ready for them?”

If we want to close performance gaps, we must first close the relational gap. Schools must treat families not as problems to be managed, but as sources of wisdom about how students learn, love, and live. Policymakers must shift from accountability models focusing solely on outcomes to those examining the relational inputs that shape them. And researchers must deepen our exploration of how emotional, cultural, and disciplinary congruence between home and school shapes learning trajectories over time.

The way forward is not uniformity but resonance because at the heart of our study is a simple yet profound truth: schools work best for those they reflect. If we want all children to succeed, we must build schools that reflect them all. That reflection begins with understanding who our students are—not just what they know, but how they were raised, how they expect to be treated, and what they need to feel safe and seen. Because when the home meets the classroom in harmony, students not only learn more—they become more. And that, perhaps, is the most important lesson of all.

References

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard University Press.

Darling, N., & Steinberg, L. (1993). Parenting style as context: An integrative model. Psychological Bulletin, 113(3), 487–496. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.113.3.487

Delpit, L. (1995). Other people's children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. The New Press.

Dee, T. S. (2004). Teachers, race, and student achievement in a randomized experiment. Review of Economics and Statistics, 86(1), 195–210. https://doi.org/10.1162/003465304323023750

Gershenson, S., Hart, C. M. D., Lindsay, C. A., & Papageorge, N. W. (2018). The long-run impacts of same-race teachers. National Bureau of Economic Research (Working Paper No. 25254). https://doi.org/10.3386/w25254

Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge University Press.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2009). The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African American children (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.

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Suggested citation: Kirkland, D.E. (2025). The Mirror Between Us: How Schools Reflect—or Fail to Reflect—the Lives of the Students They Serve. In forwardED Perspectives, https://www.forward-ed.com/post/the-mirror-between-us.

David E. Kirkland, PhD, is the founder and CEO of forwardED. He is a nationally renowned scholar and leading expert on education equity. He can be reached at david@forward-ed.com.