The San Francisco Chronicle (3/28, Graff) reports that researchers studying NCES data have found that “parent help is mostly inconsequential, and sometimes can even hurt.” Researchers “looked at 63 measures of parental involvement in children’s lives, including helping with homework, volunteering at school, punishing kids with bad grades” and other factors, and found that “most had little affect on a child’s academic success.” Moreover, in middle school, “parental homework help had a negative effect, bringing down test scores.” The study found that “reading out loud to young kids and talking with teenagers about college” were the only factors that seemed to help academic achievement.