Commentary Harvard professor Robert Putman, author of the groundbreaking sociological book “Bowling Alone,” said, if given a choice between a 10 percent increase in school budgets or a 10 percent increase in parental involvement, he would take the parental involvement. Why? Because when parents are involved in a child’s education, the child succeeds. That’s not just a statement of opinion, it’s a statement backed up with hard facts. In 1997, Karen Bogenschneider of the University of Wisconsin-Madison studied 8,000 high school students in nine high schools in Wisconsin and California. She found that, with only a couple of exceptions, children whose parents were involved in their education achieved higher grades (pdf). The National Home Education Research Institute has found that home-schooled students score, on a typical basis, over 15 to 30 percentile points higher than public schooled students on standardized achievement tests. They also score above average on achievement tests …