The purpose of this doctoral dissertation was to determine whether a teacher involved parent education program which stressed parent child interaction, would significantly improve the verbal achievement of rural, disadvantaged, low income, black first grade students. A total of 43 pupils were selected from two predominantly black schools in Macon County, Alabama. Both schools represented the most disadvantaged rural area of Macon County. Twenty three pupils and their parents participated in the experimental group. The treatment for the experimental group was the Parent Education Program which consisted of a series of ten weekly meetings from September through December of 1974. The control group consisted of 20 students and their parents. The program sessions were held once a week for one and one-half hours. The main intent of the sessions was to improve achievement in general concepts. The sessions included readiness concepts, number concepts, letter and word recognition, vocabulary, arts, science, and social studies. The parents were encouraged to talk to their children constantly. It was believed that if communication were increased between parent and child, verbal achievement results would improve significantly. Comparisons were made between experimental and control groups on the basis of achievement and intelligence scores. Other factors considered were educational status, family income, ages and occupations of parents, and the sex of the pupils. Results indicate that there was a significant mean differences in the verbal achievement of the experimental and the control group. All findings supported the notion that the program caused the significant achievement gains for the experimental group. Parental income, education of parents, age of parents, occupation, and sex of pupil did not cause these mean differences to disappear when tested using analysis of covariance. (Author/AM)