She grew up during the depression in a small mill town in the southern United States. Her father was a textile worker. Her mother, a homemaker. She not only became the first member of her family to go to college, but she also went on to get a graduate degree, to teach high school chemistry, and to be named Teacher of the Year.

So, when Lydia Lowie was asked several years ago to give a speech describing the most influential teacher in her life, most expected the retired schoolteacher to wax eloquent about an inspiring high school science instructor or a brilliant college chemistry professor.

Instead, Lowie talked about her mother. That’s right, this highly-accomplished schoolteacher who had for years paid dues to a teacher’s union that boasts, “If you can read this, thank a teacher,” identified as her most influential instructor a poor, simple woman with a high school education.

While some might be tempted to dismiss Lowie’s comments as sweetly sentimental, the truth is mothers -- and fathers -- exert far more influence over their children’s intellectual development than is commonly realized. In fact, more than three decades of research shows that families have greater influence over a child’s academic performance than any other factor -- including schools.

Indeed, in the mid-1960s, University of Chicago sociologist James Coleman led a major research study designed to explain why students in certain schools or in certain classes within a school perform better, on average, than students attending other schools or other classes. Coleman’s pioneering research weighed the relative influence on student achievement of different school factors (such as per-pupil spending and school size) as well as the influence of different teacher variables (such as teacher experience and levels of education completed).

While several school factors proved to have a modest effect on student performance, they paled in comparison to the influence of family background. According to Coleman, there is a “powerful relation of the child’s own family background characteristics to his achievement, a relation stronger than that of any school factors.”

Coleman’s research spawned a number of studies replicating his work and building upon it. These studies consistently confirmed Coleman’s central finding that families exert considerable influence over student achievement. For example, a 1984 research review by the National Institute of Education concluded, “Extensive, substantial, and convincing evidence suggests that parents play a crucial role in both the home and school environments with respect to facilitating the development of intelligence, achievement, and competence in children.” A 1993 survey of the research literature by Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues reported, “The home environment is a most powerful factor in determining the school learning of students – their level of school achievement, their interest in school learning, and the number of years of schooling they will receive.” And a 1994 report issued by the U.S. Department of Education noted, “Thirty years of research show that greater family involvement in children’s learning is a critical link to achieving a high-quality education . . . controllable home factors account for almost all the differences in average student achievement.”

What is especially important about this research is that it consistently shows that what families do really matters. That is, differences in student learning are not determined simply by the quality of one’s gene pool or by which side of the tracks one lives on. Instead, differences in child learning stem significantly from the values, habits, and relational dynamics at work within the household.

Indeed, a research review published in the Phi Delta Kappan found that the home learning environment has an effect on achievement that is at least twice as great as family socio-economic status (SES). A study commissioned by the Toronto Board of Education found that parental encouragement at home and participation in school activities have a more significant effect on children’s achievement than either SES or student ability. And Bloom and his colleagues summarize their findings by observing, “Parents from a variety of cultural backgrounds and with different levels of education, income, or occupational status can and do provide stimulating home environments that support and encourage the learning of their children. It is what parents do in the home rather than their status that is important.”

A Stimulating Home Environment

What characterizes the home learning environment in which children are most likely to succeed? In a 1994 review of the research literature, Anne Henderson and Nancy Berla of the National Committee for Citizens in Education reported that children fare best when their parents establish regular bedtimes and a daily family routine, monitor TV viewing and other out-of-school activities, express high but realistic expectations for achievement, stimulate reading, writing, and discussions among family members (including mealtime discussions, bedtime stories, and letters to relatives); and encourage use of libraries, museums, and other community resources.

That these “home” variables contribute to children’s learning should not surprise anyone. What may surprise many, however, is just how much difference these “home” factors can make.

Take, for example, family meals together. While some might consider this a rather trivial family ritual, several studies have found the frequency of family meals together to be a strong predictor of student test scores. In explaining this high positive correlation, Chester Finn of the Hudson Institute says that consistent mealtimes give parents regular opportunities to ask questions about what kids are doing in school. Mealtimes also give parents regular opportunities to broaden children’s educational horizons. For example, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt’s interest in public affairs is said to have been cultivated when he was a boy by the rich dinnertime discussions his family regularly enjoyed.

Just as family interactions around the dinner table pay surprising dividends, the number and variety of learning tools (books, tapes, puzzles, encyclopedias, computers, and the like) in the home have a profound effect on student achievement. In his groundbreaking book, School’s Out, Lewis Perelman of the Discovery Institute reports that data from the High School and Beyond Survey shows that the number of learning tools available in the home is a much stronger predictor of academic achievement than factors such as whether parents expect children to attend college.

Other studies also have found a high correlation between home learning tools and student achievement. For example, a report issued by the Appalachia Educational Laboratory shows that apart from fixed characteristics like family size and SES, student achievement is influenced by variables like having books available, reading to children, taking trips, and guiding TV viewing. A study of third graders in southern California indicates that high achievers are more likely than other students to spend time on homework, to use the dictionary, and to take part in learning activities with their parents. And education analyst Ann Milne concludes from her review of more than 100 studies, “What is important is the ability of the parent(s) to provide pro-educational resources for their children – be they financial, material, or experiential.”

Not surprisingly, the positive impact of home learning tools is especially high when these materials are used in direct parent-child interaction. For example, a 1985 report from the National Academy of Education found that the single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is for parents to read aloud to children. Moreover, a 1992 study at the City University of New York found that average IQ scores of low-income preschoolers are boosted by nearly two points for each day of the week that a mother reads to her child.

The benefits of parent-child verbal interaction can also be seen in recent research showing preschoolers placed in full-time day care settings often lag behind their home-reared peers in language development. What is the primary reason for the difference? Young children at home spend much of their day interacting verbally with people (particularly Mom) whose language skills are more advanced, whereas kids in day care spend most of their day interacting verbally with peers whose language skills are no more developed than their own.

Structure Counts, Too

To say that family practices and processes make a significant contribution to child learning does not imply that “non-process” family factors (such as family income, size, structure, genetic make-up, and parents’ education) are somehow unimportant. Indeed, Milne reports that research consistently shows “that both males and females from single-parent families performed less well than those from two-parent families.” A University of California study shows that “parent inputs do reduce the proportion of low achievers, but they do not overcome the disadvantages of low income.” Studies of twins suggest that genetic factors account for at least one-third to one-half of the differences in IQ scores. And a study of Los Angeles elementary school students finds that “home process variables, parental responsibility variables, and family background circumstances worked together to shape student achievement patterns (emphasis added).”

These and other studies indicate that certain family structures and backgrounds facilitate child learning more than others. And they suggest that the combined effect on student achievement of “process” and “non-process” variables is most apparent when either both sets of factors naturally pull in the same direction (when, for example, highly-educated parents make time to teach their children things at home) or when family roles are adapted to facilitate home learning.

Consider, for example, the effect of family size on child learning. For many years, researchers in the United States have reported that a child’s learning potential is threatened by the addition of new siblings to a household. This notion that “smaller families are better” springs from the fact that, in most American households, children are primarily educational “consumers” taking from their parents’ learning resources, rather than significant “producers” contributing to the family’s overall learning environment. When children are given opportunities to contribute meaningfully to the home learning environment, however, the negative effect of increased family size can be eliminated -- if not turned into a positive.

That, at least, is one of the most important findings of a fascinating 1992 University of Michigan study about the children of Southeast Asian “boat people” who came to America during the late 1970s and early 1980s. This study found that the refugee children’s remarkable educational achievement (their average scores were well above average in math and science, and only slightly below average in reading and English) was due in no small part to an effect similar to that found in the old one-room schoolhouse. Here’s how the study’s authors describe a typical evening in a refugee home: “After dinner, the table is cleared, and homework begins. The older children, both male and female, help their younger siblings. Indeed, they seem to learn as much from teaching as from being taught . . [A] great amount of learning goes on at these times -- in terms of skills, habits, attitudes, and expectations as well as the content of a subject . . . Such sibling involvement demonstrates how a large family can encourage and enhance academic success.”

Not only does this study of Indochinese refugee families challenge prevailing assumptions about the educational impact of larger family size, but it also challenges prevailing assumptions about whether poorly-educated parents can contribute significantly to their children’s cognitive development. Even though the refugee parents had very limited English skills, they still enhanced their children’s literacy by reading to them. In fact, “the effects of being read to held up statistically whether the children were read to in English or in their native language,” the University of Michigan research team report. “This finding suggests that parental English literacy skills may not play a vital role in determining school performance. Rather, other aspects of the experience -- emotional ties between parent and child, cultural validation and wisdom shared in stories read in the child’s native language, or value placed on reading and learning -- extend to schoolwork.”

Policy Implications

Just as it is important for families to appreciate the magnitude of their influence over child learning, it is also important for education officials to design policies and programs that envision parents playing a major role in their children’s cognitive and moral development.

Unfortunately, this occurs far too infrequently -- in part because education officials have far less control over family structures and processes (thankfully!) than over school policies and procedures.

Yet, if hopes for reversing education decline are to be realized, serious attention must be given to the role of families in improving student performance. As Bloom and his colleagues acknowledge, “It seems most unlikely that a significant improvement in the quality of education for all students can be achieved without active support from other quarters . . . particularly families.”

To that end, four reforms are especially needed:

1. Redefine “parental involvement” to give emphasis to the role parents play as their children’s first and most important teachers. While virtually everyone these days supports greater “parental involvement” in education, few Americans -- including many parents themselves -- really believe it is critical. If educating children is a pot luck dinner, then most Americans perceive that schools provide the “meat and potatoes,” while families contribute the dessert.

This analogy can almost be taken literally. In many places today, “parental involvement” is defined to include little more than making brownies for school bake sales, being room mothers for class parties, volunteering to chaperone school field trips, serving on school advisory committees, and attending open houses, PTA meetings, sporting events, plays, and musical performances.

While no one would dispute the legitimacy of some -- if not all -- of these functions, it is instructive that most of these traditional parental functions do not center around learning. Indeed, traditional definitions of “parental involvement” do not fully appreciate the instructional contribution parents can and should make to their children’s cognitive development.

This is unfortunate, for the instructional role of parents is not only very important, but is often more appealing to families than other forms of involvement. “What appears to be a crucial role for black parents is their role as teachers in the home,” notes Jacqueline Jordan Irvine in her book, Black Students and School Failure. “It is the role that parents prefer and the one directly related to the achievement of their children.”

In fact, Irvine believes part of the reason many parents are apathetic about serving on advisory boards and in other traditional capacities is because they perceive that their roles on such committees are “marginal” and that their participation has little or no direct impact on the achievement of their children.

2. Refocus “educational choice” to give emphasis to the way in which it increases parental involvement in education. Currently, the case for giving parents “school choice” often emphasizes ways schools would improve in a competitive free market environment. If parents easily could move their children from one school to another, the argument goes, then schools would work harder to educate students, thereby raising the quality of all schools.

There is nothing wrong with this argument. Competition would improve schools. That is a bedrock free market principle.

But this is not the only (or even the most) compelling argument for adopting an educational choice plan. Just as a break-up of the government school monopoly is apt to affect supply-side behavior and give us better schools, it is also apt to affect demand-side behavior and give us better families. If genuine “educational choice” existed, parents would be active, discriminating consumers of various educational options rather than passive recipients of schooling chosen by government planners using proximity-is-destiny guidelines.

Indeed, no longer would parents enjoy the privilege of blaming the government for supplying bad schools. With parental choice comes parental responsibility. Ultimately, parents would be responsible for the decisions they make -- whether those decisions produced positive outcomes or negative ones.

In such an environment, parents undoubtedly would devote greater time and attention to considering ways to improve their children’s academic outcomes. They would carefully weigh the advantages and disadvantages of different educational options -- and carefully monitor the outcomes of various educational decisions.

And so long as the resources with which they have to work are fungible, parents would be empowered to consider and pursue all sorts of learning strategies that might benefit their children -- including some that lie outside the realm of conventional schooling.

3. Replace the existing model of education, which is heavily based upon late-19th Century norms, with a new model designed to seize 21st Century opportunities. Several months before issuing its much-publicized 1994 report on parental involvement, the U.S. Department of Education issued a separate report that said America’s schoolchildren are “prisoners” of an outmoded school schedule. Specifically, the report said that the typical nine-month school calendar (which was originally built around the annual agricultural schedule) hinders learning continuity and requires teachers to do considerable review after summer breaks. The report also said the average school day ends before teachers have adequate opportunity to cover all the subjects contemporary schools seek to address -- and before many employed parents arrive home from work.

Based on these observations, the report called for lengthening the school day and the school year. It also called for expanding early childhood programs directed at preschoolers, in the name of improving school readiness.

While at first blush these ideas may appear eminently reasonable, their collective thrust towards more schooling fails to appreciate the fact that data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that U.S. students already rack up more “seat” time in school each year than their counterparts in Japan, Germany, England, Italy, Canada, and Korea. (Compared to others, however, time in U.S. schools is more likely to be devoted to non-academic pursuits like gym, driver’s education, counseling, and assemblies.)

More importantly, the drive for more schooling seems to be at odds with the growing volume of research data showing how critically important parental involvement is to children’s learning. Indeed, this research argues for policies which facilitate greater parental involvement in children’s lives -- not year-round, all-day, cradle-to-college school programs that leave little time for families to learn together.

Moreover, the most interesting educational trend in America today -- the growth in home schooling -- is being driven both by a frustration with rationalized, factory-style, morally-neutral schooling and by a desire on the part of many parents to be highly involved in the moral and cognitive development of their children. What is especially interesting about this trend is the degree to which some public school teachers have embraced it.

“Family is the main engine of education,” observed junior high teacher John Taylor Gatto in a speech commemorating his selection as New York City’s Teacher of the Year. “If we use schooling to break children away from parents -- and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 -- we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now.”

Gatto finds it “curious” that the literacy rate in Massachusetts prior to compulsory attendance laws was 98 percent -- seven percentage points higher than it has been at any point since. And he finds it “curious” that home-schooled students score significantly better than their conventionally-schooled peers on achievement tests. Indeed, a 1999 University of Maryland study of more than 20,000 home-educated students found that the median test scores in math for home-schooled students were between 16 and 35 percentile points higher than those for conventionally-schooled children – and in reading, homeschoolers outpaced their conventionally-schooled counterparts by an average of 32 to 42 percentile points.

While conceding that we won’t “get rid of schools anytime soon,” Gatto says greater attention needs to be given to facilitating learning opportunities that bring parents and children together. “The curriculum of family is at the heart of any good life,” says Gatto. “The way to sanity in education is for our schools to take the lead in releasing the stranglehold of institutions on family life.”

Similarly, Seattle public school teacher David Guterson says “the notion of parents as educators of their children is, in the broad sense, neither extreme nor outlandish.” Indeed, Guterson points out that “homeschooled children learn under the ideal conditions that schoolteachers persistently cry out for.”

Guterson writes, “Today it is considered natural for parents to leave their children’s education entirely in the hands of institutions. In a better world, we [parents] would see ourselves as responsible and our schools primarily as resources. Schools would cease to be places in the sense that prisons and hospitals are places; instead education would be embedded in the life of the community . . . Parents would measure their inclinations and abilities and immerse themselves, to varying degrees and in varying ways, in a larger educational system designed to assist them. Schools -- educational resource centers -- would provide materials, technology, and expertise instead of classrooms, babysitters, and bureaucrats.”

In essence, Guterson is calling for an educational system that facilitates “customized” learning programs tailored to the unique needs of each child, with many “part-time” schooling options between the current polar opposites of 100 percent home schooling and 100 percent conventional schooling.

Whatever one may think of such ideas, Guterson is right to suggest that families hold the key to improving education in this country. Indeed, despite all of the research on the importance of parental involvement, virtually all public discussion about improving education in this country centers around school-based reforms of one kind or another. Unless and until our education debate begins to focus on the family, significantly improving student performance in America is likely to remain an elusive goal.

4. Recognize that greater home-based learning is apt to lead to better-socialized kids, not poorer-socialized children. In view of the research findings on the extraordinary academic achievement of home-schooled children, many people in America today do not question the educational merits of home education. Instead, homeschooling today is more often questioned on “socialization” grounds since most folks who have never met a homeschooling family imagine that the kids are culturally isolated and socially awkward.

In truth, the typical home-schooled child is regularly involved in 5.2 social activities outside the home each week, according to a recent study by Dr. Brian Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI). These activities include afternoon and weekend programs with conventionally-schooled kids, like ballet classes, Little League teams, scout troops, church groups, and neighborhood play. And they also often include mid-day field trips and cooperative programs organized by groups of homeschooling families.

So, what most distinguishes a homeschooler’s social life from that of a conventionally-schooled child? Two things stand out in my mind. First, homeschooled children tend to interact more with people of different ages. Not only is this more like the “real world” – what businessperson’s social interaction is largely restricted to those born in the same year? – but it also reduces the degree to which children find themselves constantly and obsessively being compared to, and comparing themselves with, other children their age. (From an educational standpoint, this reduced consciousness about age also means that homeschooled “late bloomers” tend to avoid being stigmatized as “learning disabled” or “slow learners” – which is no doubt one of the many reasons why average test scores for home-schooled kids are so much higher than for conventionally-schooled students.)

Second, homeschooled children tend to draw their primary social identity from their membership in a particular family rather than from their membership in a particular peer group. This increases the likelihood that young people will see themselves as a vital member of an intergenerational community rather than as a member of “A Tribe Apart.” That’s the phrase author Patricia Hersch uses to describe the conventionally-schooled suburban kids she followed through adolescence recently. According to Hersch, many schoolkids today feel isolated from the grown-up world and alienated from parents who fail to take an interest in their lives and to set boundaries for their behavior.

Now, Hersch’s intention isn’t to make a case for homeschooling. (She doesn’t significantly address the issue.) But the angst-ridden teens she describes in “A Tribe Apart” closely resemble the peer-obsessed students Guterson sees regularly at his Seattle public high school. Guterson reports that the kids in his conventional school often have difficulty navigating the turbulent social scene at school, with “its cliques, rumors, and relentless gossip, its shifting alliances and expedient betrayals.”

Guterson writes, “Peer obsessiveness and the clique mentality are the natural responses of children to mass schooling, which in essence removes adults from their lives or rather puts them there at a ratio of one to thirty and in an authoritarian role not entirely conducive to the forming of meaningful relationships.”

Moreover, Guterson says that preoccupation with peer acceptance often encourages young people to become “acutely attuned to a pre-adult commercial culture that usurps their attention (M-TV, Nintendo, fashion magazines, teen cinema)” and often fosters a sense of alienation from people of other ages.

Interestingly, educational researcher Susannah Sheffer of Cambridge, Massachusetts says that facilitating peer-dependency is part of “How Schools Shortchange Girls” (to borrow the title of that highly-publicized report issued several years ago by the American Association of University Women). In a recent research project patterned after some Harvard studies showing a dramatic decline in self-esteem among girls aged 11 to 16, Sheffer found that homeschooled adolescent girls did not typically “lose their voice” or lose confidence in themselves when their ideas and opinions weren’t embraced by their friends.

Now, none of this means that every homeschooler is socially well-adjusted. Or that homeschooling is the only way for parents to raise children successfully. Or that good things never happen in conventional schools. Indeed, there are many outstanding teachers and principals involved in conventional schools today who really do make a significant difference in the lives of their students.

Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly clear that the key to improving student achievement lies not so much in working to improve schools as it does in working to strengthen families. As the head of the National Education Association conceded several years ago, “The most effective and cost-efficient place for children to acquire the foundation for learning and moral values is in the home.”

And as Seattle public school teacher David Guterson reminds education reformers, “We should think clearly about the problems of schools [and] ask ourselves why every attempt to correct them seems doomed to fail . . . We should recognize that schools will never solve the bedrock problems of education.”

Only families can. Only families will. That is the lesson Guterson thinks we need to learn. And if indeed, we learn it, this time we really should thank a teacher.