Once their kids are old enough to go to school, many parents depend on classroom teachers to help them learn crucial acadmeic and life skills. And the media hype around the hiring of better and more qualified teachers in public schools continually broadcasts the idea that a great teacher can make—or break—a student’s achievement.

But great classroom teacher or not, parents continue to play an important role in thier child's education. 

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which conducts exams for the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), tested 15-year-olds' reading comprehension and ability to extend math and science course learning to solving real problems. The findings? Fifteen-year-old Americans did not score as well as students in countries like Singapore, Finland and Shanghai.

The PISA team also interviewed 5,000 parents to explore why some students do better than others on the PISA tests. Here are three main findings:

1. Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all.
2. The performance advantage among students whose parents read to them in their early school years is evident regardless of the family’s socioeconomic background. 
3. Parents’ engagement with their 15-year-olds is strongly associated with better performance in PISA.

The takeaway: It doesn’t take a Herculean effort to assist with your children’s academic achievement at school. Keep reading with your kids at every age (you can even read side-by-side with your teen). In addition, simply asking how your child's school day was and showing genuine interest in what he's learning at school can have a tremendous impact—even more so than attending PTA meetings, volunteering in classrooms or participating in fund-raising—which should be a big sigh of relief to working moms.