The Curriculum Research Says Raises Grades and Attendance — For Every Student

What This Infographic Shows: 5 Reasons, Decoded for Parents

The infographic lays out five documented benefits of ethnic studies curricula, each grounded in what researchers call culturally sustaining pedagogy: teaching that connects students’ lives, histories, and communities to the material they study. Here is what the evidence behind each reason actually looks like.

• Elevated grades and attendance. When students find the curriculum meaningful, they show up more and disengage less. The Dee and Penner study tracked the attendance improvement at 21 percentage points and the GPA gain at 1.4 grade points for students who were already considered at risk of falling behind.
• Confidence and personal agency. Students who see their community’s history treated as worth studying tend to develop what researchers call academic self-efficacy: a sense that school is for them, not happening around them. That belief turns out to be a stronger predictor of persistence than raw ability.
• Benefits for every student. The culturally sustaining model doesn’t divide classrooms by background. By centering diverse histories and perspectives, it builds the capacity for every student to understand a wider world than the one they started in.
• Empathy and cultural competence. Skills that don’t appear on a standardized test but do appear in every workplace, relationship, and civic role your child will ever occupy.
• Leadership and civic engagement. The infographic describes this as the ability to navigate complex social issues, which is another way of saying: preparing students for a real world that is already complex.

The Research Your Child’s School Board Probably Hasn’t Read

Culturally sustaining pedagogy is not a new idea. The framework was formalized by researcher Dr. Django Paris in 2012, drawing on decades of work by educators like Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, who described culturally relevant teaching as instruction that produces students who succeed academically, develop cultural competence, and build a critical understanding of the world they live in. The research base has been building for thirty years.

What makes the Dee and Penner 2017 study significant is that it used a natural experiment design: some at-risk students in San Francisco were offered the course, others were not, and the researchers compared outcomes directly. That kind of control is rare in education research, which is why the results carry more weight than a survey or anecdote. The mechanism is not mysterious. Students who feel the curriculum was built with them in mind attend more. Students who attend more, learn more. The infographic frames this as five separate reasons, but they are all expressions of one underlying finding: when school feels relevant, the whole academic picture changes.

What This Means for Parents Who Want to Advocate

The infographic closes with a call to action: advocate for the implementation of ethnic studies in your child’s school. That is a reasonable ask, and it helps to know what you are advocating for. You are not asking a school to make a political statement. You are asking a school to use a research-backed approach that produces measurable academic gains for the students who need those gains most. That framing matters in a school board meeting. Bring the Dee and Penner study. Name the numbers: 1.4 grade points, 21 percentage points in attendance. Ask which peer-reviewed studies the curriculum committee is using to make decisions about what stays and what goes.

If your child’s school doesn’t offer ethnic studies, there are still things you can do at home. Culturally sustaining approaches work in living rooms as well as classrooms. Reading across cultures, discussing history honestly, and exploring your family’s own story alongside other families’ stories engages the same mechanisms that make the classroom version work.