Most educational literature about raising student achievement zooms right in on the schools. How can we make them better so that students will learn more? But improving schools is not the only way of improving educational outcomes.
In other industrialized countries, students who do not learn very well in school can combine schoolwork with an apprenticeship. Apprenticeships give kids practical experience, but they do a lot more. Many young people find school learning too abstract; they are not good at manipulating symbols, which is what most traditional school learning requires. They think and learn better when faced with a specific problem -- like how to repair a car or arrange a two-week tour in India. Apprenticeships increase these kids' achievement by giving them a chance to work in a real-life setting.
Apprenticeships like these are a 20th-century version of a traditional way of training young workers. A recent study suggests that there is another time-honored way of educating the young that we should take a new look at: the transfer of knowledge from parents to children.
Parents are kids' first teachers, but what children learn from them is not necessarily good. Children whose parents have done poorly in school are likely to do poorly too. If there are no books around and if they never see their parents read, children are unlikely to become readers. If parents don't talk to them about the importance of education, youngsters probably won't care about doing well in school. Their school achievement -- and their prospects for employment when they leave school -- will probably repeat their parents' pattern.
Is there any way of breaking this pattern or must it be passed on from generation to generation? "Teach the Mother and Reach the Child," a recent study by Sandra Van Fossen and Thomas G. Sticht, suggests that we can. The study of 463 unemployed mothers in nine centers all over the country shows that, when these women took courses to improve their employability and literacy, their children's achievement in school was also likely to improve. Forty-six percent of children whose mothers took part in literacy training got better grades; 45 percent did better on standardized tests; 46 percent read more; 39 percent had better school attendance; 52 percent reported that they liked school more. Altogether, "65 percent of children benefitted from their mother's participation in an education program."
Interviews with parents and children quoted in the study suggest how important the experience was to them. One child said he was glad his mother was going to school because "she read me and my sisters stories and showed us words in books." A mother said that she had learned a lot about teaching her own child from watching her teachers: "Patience is something I am learning and I am using it with my son." All the mothers in one program indicated that they now regularly talked about the importance of education with their children.
The experience of the paraprofessionals in New York City schools bears out the study's findings. The paras were originally mostly high school dropouts who got jobs as classroom assistants and a chance to continue their education. Many did so and became teachers themselves. But at the same time, they found that "going back to school" affected radically the way they worked with their own children.
"Teach the Mother and Reach the Child" suggests several things about improving the achievement of poor youngsters. We tend to think primarily in terms of giving extra help to young children from disadvantaged backgrounds before they enter first grade. Head Start, for example, is designed to give them a boost so they can start school on a level with other children, and it has worked very well. The approach suggested in this study is also very promising. If giving mothers some extra schooling means that their attitude towards their children's schooling becomes more positive and the child is more likely to learn, we are helping two for the price of one. This is a good use of money in hard times. ( And if the extra schooling helps the mother get a job, it's triply good.)
Intervening in this way also increases the likelihood that the mother will reinforce what goes on in school. A teacher can make progress working a couple of hours a day with children. But what happens when kids go home to places where no one urges them to do their homework or reads them stories or admires the pictures they drew that day? Gains in school that are not cultivated at home are likely to be lost. But if a parent is able to make school learning a part of a child's life at home, it's more likely to stick and give the child something to build on.
We often seem to assume that schools are the only places where students learn, so we put full reliance -- and full responsibility -- on schools for raising student achievement. We need to find ways of making schools better. But we should not neglect the other settings where learning can take place - and where students can get a kind of help that schools aren't designed to provide. We need to explore some of them and take advantage of what they have to offer.