May/June 1999

At-Risk Students Exceeding Expectations

A Talk by Janine Bempechat

Every month, the Harvard Graduate School of Education invites a number of educators, researchers, community activists, and policymakers, from across the country to talk about such topics as school violence, multiple intelligences, teaching science, and the politics of school reform. We are pleased to be able to provide you with an edited transcript of some of these talks.

Below is an edited transcript of a talk that took place at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on December 3, 1998. The speaker is Janine Bempechat, Assistant Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. For easier reading, we have divided the transcript into the following sections:

Introduction
Talk by Janine Bempechat
Questions from the Audience
About the Speaker
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Introduction

Tonight, we come together, galvanized by a wonderful new book, Against the Odds: How At-Risk Students Exceed Expectations. It's a real pleasure to introduce the author, Janine Bempechat, who's an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in human development and psychology. She is, as you will soon see, anything but the dry academician. She is irrepressible and lively, and her laughter frequently peals through the halls of Larsen. She has a terrific sense of humor: who else would dare title a section in this book -- a parent, no less -- "Let Children Suffer." She is a rigorous researcher and a demanding instructor who practices what she preaches when it comes to tough love, and is much appreciated by her graduate students. Most amazingly, she is a researcher who speaks and writes in layman's English, choosing dialogue and communication over inscrutability. Her book is imminently readable.

Janine has always been interested in the achievement motivation in children and young adults. She's particularly interested in ethnic and cultural differences in this area, and in the socialization of achievement. She has taken on some of the toughest questions that we deal with in education: in similar situations and similar circumstances, why do some children succeed and others fail? What can we do, as educators and parents, to make sure that all children perform well in school and reach their full intellectual potential? She deals with these issues, not only as an academic and an educator, but as an empathetic, in-the-trenches parent.

Her research and findings come, as we know, at a crucial time in our nation's history, as the number of children living in poverty, and of minority children who face discrimination are increasing dramatically. We all are aware of the odds that are stacked against too many children, and we often feel overwhelmed about what we can do to address their social and economic conditions. Janine has chosen to look at the problem of achievement from a different perspective: what are the factors that can help each child beat the odds? In doing so, she adds important information to the discussion about what are dubbed "at-risk children" and, in fact, about all children. And she gives us some good news about factors that can make a positive difference.

Talk by Janine Bempechat

And this is what I was teaching my own students, until one student, who graduated from our program a few years ago and is now teaching at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, challenged me not to accept, but rather to encounter theories of achievement motivation in the context of my own experiences.

These experiences were defined by historical factors over which my family had no control. In early 1957, at the height of the Suez crisis, when I was an infant and my brother was a preschooler, my parents fled Egypt and left everything material that they had behind. Their struggles for survival and upward mobility, so characteristic of the many refugees who preceded and followed them, had a profound influence on how I came to understand the relationship between education and the future. In my family, it was a given that we would do well in school. We had no other option. We had no relatives to fall back on for financial support, there was no inheritance in the offing, no rich uncle somewhere who could bail us out. And so despite the overt anti-Semitism of the Egypt that they left, and the Montreal that became their home, my parents maintained an unwavering belief that education would provide us with a good life.

Over time, and after many opportunities to speak with high-achieving children of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, I came to see that the messages my parents communicated -- very subtle messages, not ones that are easy to measure -- were not unique. When I spent time with poor Cambodian, Laotian, Puerto Rican, African American, and Korean children, and asked them to tell me what their home lives were like, what their parents were like, what was said at home about school, they said things that my parents said. They could have been speaking of my own mother and father. And so, in a curious way, I came to realize that there's nothing terribly special about being Asian, or Jewish, or African American, or Puerto Rican. I came to believe, very simply, that high achievement is high achievement.

And so, that brought me to the overarching question that I have been seeking to answer now for some time: What goes on in homes where children are doing well that may not be going on in homes where children are doing poorly? Now some people may ask, "Why should we care about high-achieving, low-income students? They're doing well, and they're going to be okay. There are so many others who are underachieving, who are failing; let's put our efforts into them. And in my mind, that view is very shortsighted.

We are living through a period of massive underachievement in our nation, especially in mathematics and science. At the same time, globalization has put a much greater dependence on technologically relevant skills. I think all of us would agree that our nation can ill afford to see its children put increasingly at-risk because they lack the skills that they are going to need to be productive members in the new century. It only stands to reason that we will learn a great deal about promoting school success by studying those children who seem to defy the odds.

The truth is, educational researchers have been focusing almost exclusively on school failure for decades and I am not sure how far this has gotten us. We have been single-mindedly oriented toward trying to find out and identify what deficiencies must exist in low-income parents and their children: "If only we can understand what is wrong with poor families, then we can fix them, make them, by implication, more like White, middle-class families. I think we would all agree that White, middle-class families are not necessarily exemplars of well-functioning families.

Financial security in and of itself is not an inoculation against family dysfunction; nor is intelligence for that matter, however you want to measure it, an inoculation against negative attitudes about school or low academic self-esteem. Rather, children's beliefs about what it takes to do well in school have a much more profound influence on whether they will choose to take and encounter challenging tasks in the classroom, or whether they will shy away from anything that looks new and potentially threatening. They have a much more profound influence on how hard children will try, on how much they will persist in the face of difficulty and challenge.

And so, in this regard, it's been impossible to ignore the striking differences in academic achievement between Asian and American children that we all are very familiar with. Much of this information has come from the work of Harold Stevenson at the University of Michigan. By now, we are all very familiar with the facts: Japanese, Taiwanese, and Chinese children all significantly outperform American students, even the best of our students, in mathematics and science. And, we have been left wringing our hands.

Stevenson has said that it's because these Asian students try hard, and they believe in the value of effort. So we have been thinking, "Well, maybe if we can be more like the Japanese or the Taiwanese, then maybe our underachieving students can pull themselves out of the mathematics quicksand that they are in." This line of thinking has never convinced me. For one thing, we're not Japanese, nor can we become Japanese. We can certainly learn from the Japanese educational system, but what we need to know and understand is how our children understand the causes of success and failure in their schools. What do effort and trying hard mean in our culture, in our classrooms?

Now, having set a bit of a stage for you, let me tell you briefly how I chose to examine achievement against the odds. Over a period of five or so years, I had the opportunity to survey over a thousand children in the Boston area, 5th and 6th graders drawn primarily from poor neighborhoods, both in public and in Catholic schools. Why Catholic schools? I love that question and I'll tell you why. We have known, for nearly two decades, that poor and minority children in Catholic schools excel. They far and away outperform their peers in public schools by any measure that you can throw at me. Grades, GPAs, SAT scores, completing high school, going on to college, etc. And so for me it wasn't so much, "Let's see if the Catholic school children are doing better than their public school counterparts," but rather, "Something very interesting is going on in Catholic schools." And I wanted to know what that was. What is it that teachers and principals might be doing to motivate children to do so well and, I might add, to motivate the poorest, the most disadvantaged in our society.

I am well aware of the criticisms that attach to this kind of comparison. Parents and children who make the choice to go to Catholic schools may, in fact, be fundamentally different from those who do not make this choice. Perhaps it is the smartest and the most motivated kids who end up in Catholic schools, but I don't think so. And I'll tell you why a bit later. In both school settings, I wanted to understand whatever ethnic differences and similarities might exist between children's beliefs about the causes of success and failure, their perceptions of how their parents try to encourage them to do well in school, and how all of these influence their mathematics achievement. Well, what we found calls into question a number of common assumptions about factors that many people have believed to be influential in children's school performance, and also presents some cultural paradoxes that left us somewhat puzzled.

As to the first, it is common for people to think that poor parents are completely uninvolved in their children's schooling. Everyone thinks that poor parents don't care about their kids. Everyone thinks that they care even less about their kids' education, that they're not there for them. But, we found, quite to the contrary, that poor parents, in each ethnic group, intervene in very fundamental ways when their children's mathematics achievement is low.

When their children are at risk for failing, the families step in to provide the kind of support that's critical in helping children do well in school. Not only did they sit down with their children to help them with homework, or find somebody else who could help them with homework, or organize study groups so that kids could do their homework together; they also talked to their kids, and talked, and talked, and talked, and talked--too much, if you believe what the children told us. These parents talked to their kid about the relationship between their performance in school, and their future in life. These kids reported that their parents said things like, "If you don't do well in math and science, you're not going to be able to have a good job when you grow-up." "If you don't try hard to do your very best in school, you are not going to graduate from high school, and you're going to have a rotten life." I need to clarify who the parents were that we were looking at. We were looking at four groups of parents: Indochinese, largely Cambodian; African American; Latino, largely Puerto Rican; and Caucasian. When we looked at how well these children did in mathematics, their performance was pretty much what you would predict, knowing the overall trends in our nation. The Indochinese children far and away had a much higher average on the math test that we gave them. The Caucasian children were next and then the African American and Latino children. But keeping that in mind, when there was some perception on the part of parents, that their children's performance was slipping, they stepped in. Indochinese, Latino, African American and Caucasian-all of them. It was like they all had my mother and father.

We found a number of ethnic paradoxes, as we came to call them. We found, for example, that Latino and Indochinese children shared similar views of their parents' child rearing strategies, especially as they related to education, and that they reasoned in similar ways, about the causes of success and failure.

In both groups, for example, the children reported that their parents talked to them a lot about the importance of effort and learning. And in both groups the children reported that they felt guilty that their parents had to work so hard to provide them with a good education. Yet, the differences in the outcomes between these two groups were striking. The Indochinese students were the highest achievers, and the Latino students among the lowest. Why would beliefs that are conducive to learning be associated with high achievement in one group, but not in another?

Here is where we thought a lot about culture, about the influence of cultural context on children, and on parents' child rearing strategies. There is no question that culture guides parents' socialization practices, and so, it is possible that the Indochinese families, as typical refugees -- much like my parents were -- may have been more resilient in the face of the kind of prejudice and discrimination that they face in U.S. society. They may have been able to let it roll off their back, so to speak, more than the Latino parents, who are more what John Ogbu has called "caste-like minorities"-- minorities who are in this country through no choice of their own, who are here through conquest.

It's also true that, for many Latino families, the concept of education has a double meaning. It isn't just becoming a well-educated person; it is also becoming a moral person, a righteous person. And there are scholars who have demonstrated that, as much as they value education, some Latino parents will sacrifice opportunities for their children to gain new knowledge, to go to a special math class, to take enrichment courses at another school, for example, if they fear that their children may come under the negative influences from other kids. So the picture is not as simple as many people would like to believe. It's not that Latinos don't care about education very deeply; they care about education very deeply, but they also care about the moral and religious and righteous education of their children.

Among the African American children, we found that their parents were also very actively involved in their schooling. These were parents who provided a lot of assistance with their children's homework. These were parents who knew who the teachers were, who were familiar with the schoolwork. These were parents who provided opportunities for their children to learn at every turn, who made sure their kids did their homework. And yet, these children did relatively poorly on our objective measure of mathematics achievement. Now why is this? Well, here again, we turn to the culture and context of learning for an explanation.

John Ogbu is a noted scholar on ethnic differences in achievement. He has described what seems to be a recurring case for many African American mothers who report that they are deeply involved in their children's schooling. That they drill their kids. That they make sure they do their homework. But by the beginning of third grade, they say they seem to lose their children to the streets, to the influence of peers. And when you add to that the anti-academic achievement sentiment that runs somewhat rampant among these kids, the combination is distressing. What it means is that whatever parents have done to instill good study habits in their children, for some kids that's not going to be enough.

Remember what I said about Asian and American achievement in mathematics? That beliefs in the value of effort are associated with mathematics achievement? This is what Harold Stevenson has been trying to tell us. that Asian children do better than American children because they believe more in the value of effort. Because they try harder. That's why they do better.

Well, it's not true. In our studies, we found that the higher achievers believed strongly that they were smart, that their success in mathematics was due to ability. And they also believed strongly that when they encountered any kind of difficulty or failure, it was not due to any lack of ability. These kids had a strong and healthy self-perception of their academic abilities. So, our students are not like the Japanese. And for that matter, the Japanese aren't like the Japanese either. I have read everything that Professor Stevenson has written because this has been such a puzzle to me, and, in fact, what he has told is simply a story. It's not something he has been able to provide evidence for, not in the way we talk about evidence in educational research. When you read between the lines, the nitty-gritty, the sections you like to skip over, that's where you find, in fact, that many Japanese children, and their mothers, have reported to him that they believe strongly in the value of innate ability to propel children toward excellence.

So what does all this mean? I think it means that you have to believe that you have some ability in order to be able to make it worthwhile to yourself to try hard. If you don't think you have any ability, then there isn't really any point in trying. So it makes sense to foster academic self-esteem in children.

Catholic Schools

What did we find out about Catholic schools? Well, for the first time, we were able to show that in addition to the academic benefits that come from attending Catholic schools, there are distinct motivational benefits. And these are not trivial. Relative to their public school peers, we found that the African American and Latino students in the Catholic schools express more positive and instrumental beliefs about learning. They are much more likely to believe that success is due to their own abilities. They are much less likely to believe that success or failure could be due to external factors, such as, "The teacher doesn't like me." or "I studied the wrong thing." or "I was unlucky that day."

Now I know that what we did does not prove anything. I know that what we did does not show causality. I cannot say that Catholic schools foster what we like to refer to as adaptive beliefs, positive beliefs about learning and motivation, because it could be that their students came in more motivated. But I don't believe that. And I'll tell you why I don't believe that. There may have been a time, when Catholic schools were able to pick and choose from the cream of the crop. To take whoever they wanted into their schools. To throw out whoever they wanted to throw out, if any particular child or family didn't suit their need. But that was a long time ago.

When people started having fewer babies, it affected everybody's school demographics. So now Catholic schools are out advertising themselves to try and attract a larger student base. They do not pick and choose from the cream of the crop. They accept everyone into their fold, and they do their best with everyone. Many others who have studied Catholic school achievement, particularly where poor and minority studies are concerned, have argued that the commitment of the church to serve the poorest families in our society gets translated into a structure, into a classroom discipline that is very clearly communicated to children. This translates into very demanding schoolwork and very high expectations and very high standards for performance. Nobody fails, but not because they're passed up, as in social promotion, but because the teachers work with them, and work with them, and work with them, and talk with them, and talk with them, and talk with them.

From a motivational perspective, this is not trivial. Demanding teachers and demanding schoolwork communicate to children that we expect that they can learn. That we expect that they can master schoolwork at the highest levels. And I believe that kind of implicit faith in a child's ability to learn, encourages children to have faith in their own abilities. And when that happens, it helps children realize that it makes sense to try.

So, having come to this point, I want to say something that can be useful for parents and for teachers. Unfortunately, so much research on children's achievement in school has very practical or pragmatic implications for the classroom. And so I thought long and hard about what all of this means. I need to say what we all know, those of us who study children, that I believe in a certain set of circumstances that foster children's intellectual development. But that's just what I believe. You know your children better than anyone else, and nobody can tell you that there is one best way. There is no formula for ensuring academic success for any child.

There are multiple pathways to the same or different developmental outcomes. I grew up in a home where we were not allowed to watch television during the week. I grew up in a home where when we had homework to do, the TV or the radio could not be on. I grew up in a home where we never dared to criticize either God or the teacher. My dear husband grew up in a home with ten rooms, with a TV in each room that was on all the time, regardless of whether anyone was in the room. [laughter] He grew up doing his homework in front of the television. As far as he can remember, his mother, who was a high-school math teacher, never asked him if he had a test, when he had a test, how he was doing, if he studied, if he had to study--whereas my recollections are packed with questions like that. So you see, there are multiple pathways to the same developmental outcome. So this is what I think--and you have no choice but to agree with me, because this is my night and I'm up here. [laughter and applause] We need to set education, in each of our families, as the top priority. The only priority. Priority implies the one thing at the top. There aren't many priorities. There's one. And the one is schooling. We talk a good game, but when push comes to shove, many of us, rich or poor -- I have heard this in Boston's poorest and wealthiest neighborhoods -- many of us are concerned with what our society describes and values as the well-rounded child. We want our children to be good in school, popular with their friends, athletic, play a musical instrument, be artistic, dance, whatever. We want all these things. And, this is the ideal American child--well-rounded.

It is very likely, I believe, that you will pay a price for this ambition. I don't see how we can push our children to be good at everything we want them to be good at. Some things fall to the bottom and, unfortunately, what often tends to fall to the bottom is schoolwork, because we seem to be reluctant to pull children out of extra-curricular activities.

Now, I don't want to sound like I'm coming down hard on parents, because I am a parent and believe me, I have my problems. But, it has become apparent to me that teachers, probably unwittingly, are finding ways to undermine their own students' success in school. Now I'm not saying this is rampant, I'm not saying it happens all the time; I don't have a list of 500 teachers who do this. But I do hear stories, and the stories are disturbing. A good friend told me that her 12-year-old daughter came home last year with her chin to the ground and said, "I think I'm going to get a C- in social studies." The girl was mortified and her mother, my friend, said, "Okay. It's a good thing you told me this. And what we're going to do is focus on social studies, and we're going to bring that grade up. But I have to tell you, you're not going to be able to play softball in the spring." So there were tears and crying, and she's a horrible mother, and blah, blah, blah.

The next day, the girl mentioned this conversation to her social studies teacher. And her social studies teacher said, "You know what, I think it's really important for you to play softball, because I know it means a lot to you. I'm going to give you a B." What the heck is that? Leaving aside for the moment that he completely undermined her parenting, did he give this girl a gift? I don't think so. I don't think that was a gift. I think that was a punishment.

In one of our communities to the north, there is an elementary school where they give the kindergartners necklaces with Fruit Loops. We'll talk about intrinsic motivation another time. [laughter] And so for every good thing you do that day, you get a Fruit Loop, right? And then you go home with your Fruit Loop necklace and you can say, "Ma, I have X Fruit Loops," right? The teachers discovered that parents surreptitiously were adding Fruit Loops to the necklaces. [laughter]

I really think it's okay if we let our children suffer. I know you think I'm a horrible person, but I'm really not. I don't know what has happened, but we have become so concerned with our children's happiness. We want our children to be happy. Well, look, I want my children to be happy too. It's not a bizarre sentiment. But something has gone awry. We have become so concerned with our children's happiness that we say things to the principal, to our children's teachers, like, "He works so hard during the day, I really don't think he should have homework at night." "I don't mind if you give out homework, as long as it isn't stressful." What the heck is that? What is homework that isn't stressful? That's nothing. You're better off having nothing. You're better off watching "The Rugrats." [laughter]

I think what this means is that we don't want to sit down at the table anymore. We want our own lives. Well, you know what? My parents had no life. Now that doesn't mean nobody else should have a life, just because my parents didn't have one. Nor do I wish to put my parents and my family up as exemplars of the best thing -- because, clearly, that is also not the case. But there was for us, in our home growing up, a vision that went beyond the next day in school. There was, for us, a vision of what the future would look like beyond tonight's homework, beyond next week's math test, beyond promotion into the third grade. There was a vision that was communicated, and I can't tell you how, except in the most subtle ways, that education was our only salvation in a society that was not going to like us because we were Jews.

And this is what many African American, Latino, Cambodian parents have told me, that this is what they tell their children: "This is a society that will not like you because of the color of your skin. So you have to do better than everybody else. And if you don't think that's fair, that's okay, because it isn't fair. And you have no choice. You have no choice." That has given these children, I believe, a vision for the future that stretches them very far out, that gives them a sense of direction.

And you know what? I don't care if you don't like that I'm going to say this, I'm going to say it anyhow. I think this is what's going on in Catholic schools. Something is going on there that is helping to give the most disadvantaged children a vision, a greater vision, of what their lives can be like. And how their lives, and their outcomes, depend on themselves--and, of course, on their faith in God. But on themselves to work hard, to do well, to try even they fail, and to keep trying.

All of this work that we did with minority children led me to recognize that we need to practice cultural sensitivity. We need to understand that there isn't one way that parents can get their children to do well in school. That what a White family does will not necessarily work well with a Black family; and, frankly, what works well with this particular Black family, won't necessarily work well with another Black family. And if you want to get down to it, what works well for one child will not necessarily work well for another.

But all that aside, we need to understand the cultural context in which parents are guiding their children, socializing their children, for academic achievement. Because that can help us to help their children. It can help us to help their parents. Now, that doesn't mean that we lower standards. It does not mean that because you don't speak English at home, I'm not going to give you two sheets of homework to do tonight, I'm just going to give you one, because I don't know if your parents can help you with it. No, that's not what it means. Which brings me to my next point: We have to continue to maintain very high expectations, and very high standards for every child.

Every now and again, some politician stands up and says, "We need to raise standards." Well, there is nothing magical about raising standards. Saying that you now have to pass at this level will not suddenly make 80 percent of 11th graders graduate from high school, just because you raised the standards. We have to raise the standard, and put the supports in place to help children meet those standards. It's easy to say, "School's too easy, we have to raise the standards." What is that? Is that helpful? That's not helpful, that's stupid. What is helpful are more aides in the classroom. What is helpful are more student teachers in the classroom. What is helpful are more parent volunteers in the classroom. It has become popular to blame teachers for everything that has gone wrong in our schools but you know what? I strongly believe that we have no one to blame but ourselves.

We need to learn from Catholic schools. We need to learn what they are doing, and try to understand how we can do some of the same things in our schools. I see no reason why, with a third or less of the public schools' per pupil expenditure that the Catholic schools have, what is going on there cannot go on in our public schools. I know they don't have the special needs children that public school students have. I know they don't have the kinds of burdens and responsibilities that public schools have to carry.

And for all of us who have been screaming school reform, we have had a model of school success in our midst for a very long time in the Catholic schools. And for some reason, we have shunned that model. I'm here to tell you that you've got to walk through those doors and you've got to sit at the back of the classroom and you've got to look and you've got to listen. And I don't care that they have Bunsen burners from the 1930s, I don't care that the cafeteria, the auditorium, and the gymnasium are the same room. I don't care that maybe there isn't the most incredible, innovative portfolio assessment. What I see is that these children are leaving prepared to succeed in society. Prepared to do well in college. And that's something not a lot of urban schools can say about themselves.

So, here's what I think. I've been doing this for more than a decade. And after more than ten years of very rigorous empirical research, for which I was trained by the best minds in the nation, thousands of hours huddled over regression analyses, hundreds of Talmudic discussions with my students and my colleagues, I have come to the following, well thought out and unarguable conclusion: that where our children's education is concerned, we live in a world gone mad. We say we are really committed to providing the best we possibly can for our nation's children, but what we really mean, is that we want the best for our children. We're lucky enough, many of us, to be able to make educational choices. But we're also very happy to sit back and deny poor parents the opportunity to make those same choices.

And I know this is not popular, but I'm here to tell you that I am for public education and for school choice. I think it is the height of hypocrisy to have middle-class educators arguing that school choice is going to skim the best students away from the public schools and into the Catholic schools, the private schools, the whatever schools, and leave them with whatever is left. Yet they feel very comfortable being able to send their kids to whatever school they choose to go to. Now, I'm not against public schools, but in this regard, I wear two hats. I'm an educational researcher and I really believe that our schools are going to get better. But I'm also a parent, and I'm here to ask you, how long do I have to wait? My child will be 84 before I see any substantive changes in my neighborhood public school. That's unreasonable and it's unfair.

We are appalled, even shocked, at how poorly our students are doing in math and science, especially compared to almost every other industrialized nation in the world, except Bosnia. How did this happen? Well, I'll tell you. I think many people don't care to know how it happened. Many people are more comfortable marching into the principal's office and saying, "What are you going to do about this?" And the same people who cry for higher standards and expectancies, more rigorous course work, better teachers in our urban schools, are the same ones who say, "What do you mean more homework? What do you mean more complex assignments that will take three weeks to complete? That my child has to do with four other kids, which means I have to schedule with four other mothers? You need to know that my child has a life outside of school?" Well, you know what? I don't care about your child's life outside of school.

What I'm saying is that your child has one life. An integrated life. A life that includes a lot of things: family, church, the synagogue, the mosque, activities, friends. But if education isn't made the top priority in your family, you are going to pay. You may not pay now, but you're going to pay. And then you're going to turn around and blame the principal, and blame the MCAS, and blame everything else. We are speaking out of two sides of our mouths, and I don't know whose needs we think we are serving. I fear we are serving our own, not our children's needs.

Motivation is not a one-time present that you can wrap-up and put under a tree. It's a gift that we have to nurture from very early on. We do no one, least of all the children, any favors at all when we give them easier work to do because we feel sorry for their shattered lives at home. When we give them easier work to do because they are so good at baseball and their father is so certain they're on the way to a college scholarship. I don't think that's giving anybody a gift. I think that's a punishment. I don't think school should be easy. It isn't easy. And you know what else? It only gets harder.

The best thing we can do for our children, I think, is to take the time we need to take, to have the arguments we need to have, to have our children hate us. That's okay. To have our children angry with us in order to help them develop the kinds of motivational qualities that teachers so admire and try so hard to cultivate. Diligence, persistence, and the ability to delay gratification---these are the gift that we, as parents and teachers, can give our kids to help them do well in school.

Questions from the Audience

Audience: What is your view on parents? A parent would have had a terribly hard time in school and so the confidence and the ability to do well in school is not part of that family's life. I would think that that would be the case in many inner-city schools. And on the homework issue, there are well-meaning parents in the school where I teach that really do not have the skills to help their children.

Bempechat: Let me take the second question first. There are many parents who don't have the skills to help their children with homework. But what we found over the course of these investigations was that many of those parents do other things that motivate their children to do well in school. Many of these parents openly acknowledge that they're not able to help their children. But, they do tell their children to come home with two or three friends. They get an older sibling to sit down with their younger kids. They essentially get homework groups together to help. In other words, the parents' ability to physically help with homework, is not a necessary precursor to kids' doing well in school.

Many parents find other avenues to get their children the kinds of help they need. And it doesn't always involve having to pay for that kind of help. Many schools now have after-school programs, encouraging peers to work together, to do their homework before their folks come to pick them up. There's somebody there to help them out. Much of that after-school time is increasingly being wisely used in that way.

As to your first comment, it is true that many parents have not had positive experiences themselves in school. And, you see, when I was growing up, my parents could have faith that the principal and the teachers were operating in our best interests. Today that's not the case. For many parents, it's irresponsible to think that the teacher, or the principal, is operating in your child's best interest, because of the negative experiences that you, yourself, had. And so, I think we need to turn more towards what James Comer has been arguing for, what Joyce Epstein has been arguing for-- reaching out, the communities, making a school a community that parents feel welcomed into and not threatened by. And, parenthetically, this is what Catholic schools are. They are communities of learning. They are communities for parents, for families.

I got the sense, talking with many parents over the years of this investigation, that they felt very deeply that the Catholic school and the teachers weren't just concerned about their child, but also about the entire family, about the other siblings, about their spouses, about their ill mothers. There's a sense of community that pervades many Catholic schools that gives everyone a sense of safety, a cocoon, a place where people really care about you. And that, I think, goes an awfully long way in helping to rebuild the trust that has been eroded for many parents.

Audience: I work with young adults, 16-, 17- and 18-year olds, in a school in Cambridge and my students are average students. They probably were since the time they were, I don't know, maybe 7 or 8 years old. Now they've come back to school, some of those who have been out of school for a year or two and what I'm looking for is some suggestions, some advice from you on how to motivate them. I try to tell them how smart they are. I give them lots of homework, but they don't do it, because they're too interested in hanging out with their friends. I'm looking for some help.

Bempechat: I have some very good graduate students that I can send your way. It's very hard when a culture of underachievement pervades a school. And that, I think, is what you are battling. It is not easy to stand up and be one of the few who is committed to doing well in school; who openly acknowledges that she has a greater vision for what she wants to become later in life. It's very, very hard. Your choices seem to be either/or. Either you are accepted into a group of friends who will love you, and care for you, and make you feel included; or, you will be ostracized and made fun of and feel increasingly isolated as you get older. And very few students have that kind of courage.

Ron Suskind, who was here a few weeks ago discussing his book, Hope and the Unseen, described these kinds of experiences for Cedric Jennings, the young man he followed for several years from his high school in Washington, DC, to Brown University, from where he is graduating this year. It's a very difficult thing to do.

Do you remember the movie "Broadcast News?" The opening scene showed each of these main characters as schoolchildren. And Albert Brooks' character, as a child, was in the playground being beaten to death by his peers. And when he finally scraped himself off the ground, he looked at them and he said, "I don't care, because you're never going to make more than nineteen thousand a year in your whole lives." And these kids looked back at him and said, "Nineteen thousand dollars a year! Wow!"

I often tell this to my students because to me it was, of course, a funny scene, but it was much more than that. It was a child with a vision of what his life could be like, and how he could get there. And this is what you are trying to do with your kids. You may think that they're not listening, but one or two of them might be. You never know.

Audience: As a teacher or administrator, how can we communicate to the parent the importance of making their children's education a priority without insulting or undermining the role of the parent?

Bempechat: Well, you know, I have to tell you that our school principal is a saint. He has the patience of Job. He has these principal coffees once a month or so at which, after we drop our children off, we can sit with a cup of coffee and talk about whatever. And he sits there and he listens to all of this stuff, and he says, "I understand. I understand. I understand." Last year, when the topic of the coffee discussion was academic challenge, there were parents who raised their hands and said things like, "I've sent 5 children through this school and not a one of them has ever been challenged." And he stood there and he said, "I understand, but I heard you last year when you said you didn't want stressful homework for your children."

So you do risk offending parents. I don't know what to tell you, except that you should say what you need to in as diplomatic a way possible. And maybe they won't hear you and maybe they will. But you know what? It's not your kid. It's their kid. Eventually they'll know, and then they'll remember you.

Audience: Aren't there other models of successful schools besides Catholic schools, and don't we risk simplifying things when we say one particular system is all good and one is all bad?

Bempechat: Certainly. Thank you for your comments. Forgive me if I seem to be selling the Catholic school model. I'm just so used to getting tomatoes thrown at me when I talk about Catholic schools that I fear that I may come out a bit too forcefully. I believe very strongly in what Catholic schools are offering poor and minority children in this nation, but Catholic schools are not the only model of success. They are a model of success that I think we can learn a lot from. So let me deal with that first.

You are right. By virtue of making a comparison we end up with either/or, and that's not the way it should be. And I have to tell you that education officials from Singapore and Japan and Taiwan, and education officials from the United States and Canada, are on different planes passing each other above the ocean. The Japanese are coming here, touring schools to find out what it is we're doing that's making schooling more enjoyable, that's fostering creativity, that's using all these portfolio assessments. And we're going to Japan, Singapore, and other countries to see what they are doing -- to see how they are managing to instill a kind of respect for learning that somehow has gone awry.

And there are many things here that are wonderful about our nation's educational system, very broadly speaking. Very wonderful and exciting things are happening in our schools. When you take a macro view, and you see the degree to which we are sinking deeper and deeper in our ability to compete in a world that is getting smaller and smaller, it's very scary. And that's why I believe I feel so strongly about setting high standards, and holding children accountable to those standards.

About the Speaker

Janine Bempechat is assistant professor of education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is the author of Against the Odds.

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