Previous literature has indicated that parent-child communication, e.g. parents’ communication ability, and the quality or style of the communication, potentially brought children different statuses in academic achievement. However, there was not a clear distinction among these different levels or aspects of the communication in the existing research, which might lead to confusions of findings. Therefore, in the present study, we adopted a comprehensive Three-Level Model of Parent-Child Communication as a framework to measure and compare the parent-child communication of high, middle and low achieving students. In the model, the family is regarded as a system consisting of all family members, their relations and the interaction of the relations. Concretely the model describes the parent-child communication on the following three levels: (1) component-level, measuring the communication ability of each family member, such as father, mother, and child; (2) relationship-level, examining the quality of dyadic communication occurred between father and child or mother and child; (3) system-level, emphasizing the relationship of mother-child and father-child communications. A “parent-child communication scale” designed to measure the above three levels was applied in the present study to examine the parent-child communication of students with high, middle and low achievements. The result showed that: (1) high-achieving students’ communication abilities in terms of initiative, clarity and sensitivity were better than those of low-achieving students; high-achieving students’ fathers were also excel low-achieving students’ fathers in the clarity and openness of communication; (2) high-achieving students owned a higher level than low-achieving students in the quality of both relationship-oriented and problem-solving-oriented communication with their parents; (3) for high-achieving students, their mothers’ and fathers’ statuses were balanced in communication with children, and the two dyadic communications performed a consistent function to children, while they were neither balanced nor consistent for low-achieving students. In sum, there were significant differences in communication abilities, the quality of parent-child communication, and the relationship (balance and consistency) of the two dyadic communications between the high- and low-achieving students. Lastly, the differences were discussed under the framework of the Three-Level Model of Parent-Child Communication.