Buried near the end of A Nation at Risk, the 1983 jeremiad against the schools that launched our national obsession with educational reform, is a little noticed "Word to Parents":

   As surely as you are your child's first and most influential teacher, your
   child's ideas about education and its significance begin with you. You must
   be a living example of what you expect your children to honor and to
   emulate. Moreover, you bear a responsibility to participate actively in
   your child's education.... Above all, exhibit a commitment to continued
   learning in your own life.

Children spend more than 90 percent of the time between birth and age eighteen outside of school. Nevertheless, the educational reform movement has paid little heed to the dominant influence of the home. Instead we have ceaselessly reformed the educational system to little effect: charter schools, curriculum reform, higher standards, teacher certification--although all can claim sporadic successes, none has had a significant effect on overall student achievement.

After almost two decades of reform, only one-third of students are proficient readers, only one-fifth are proficient in math, while few have mastered the basic premises of American history and culture. Between 1963 and 1976, verbal scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) fell by fifty points and have yet to recover. Every attempt at improving the country's educational performance has failed.

Astonishingly, the response to this failure is yet more reform. Today's watchword is accountability: the educational establishment must be accountable to legislatures, to business, and, above all, to parents. Standardized testing is hailed as a means by which parents can judge the quality of their children's education, while "school choice" allows parents to abandon schools that do not perform. Yet two decades of failed reforms--and a historical record that is little better than today's--should give us pause. If so many reform efforts fail, something beyond the schoolhouse must be impeding them.

Parents are the most influential actors in their children's lives. An array of research across many disciplines demonstrates that children's interactions with their parents during the first few years, before they even enter school, largely determine their language ability, their interest in learning--even the structure of their brains. Nevertheless, the only people from whom we do not demand accountability are parents.

Children's earliest experiences are crucial to their later success. Once thought to be a static entity shaped only by genes, the brain is now known to develop through a child's interactions with the environment. Synapses, the crucial connections between brain cells that allow the transmission of nerve impulses between cells, are formed as a child's senses are stimulated--as parents talk to, read to, or play with the child. A neglected child may never develop the brain "wiring" necessary to cognitive health.

Children's emotional health, just as crucial to academic success, is also shaped during the first few years. According to a 1992 study by the National Center for Clinical Infant Programs, success in school depends on emotional characteristics, such as curiosity and self-control, that are largely formed, or not formed, by age three. Children will develop these characteristics if their parents are attentive--if they offer comfort to their children, are patient with them, and engage them in imaginative play. Introducing the report, pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton wrote that, by the time a child enters school, his or her family has "already prepared the child for success or failure."

An extended study of preschoolers by the Harvard Preschool Project, published in 1979 as The Origins of Human Competence, concludes that a "first-rate educational experience during the first three years," including substantial amounts of verbal interaction, is essential to the development of cognitive and social abilities. Similarly, the best predictor of children's early reading ability and their progress in reading during school is whether they are read to as infants. Children whose parents read to them develop an ability to read and, equally important, a desire to read. They inherit that rarest of traits in today's attention-deficit-disordered world: an attention span. While most children are unable to sustain more than a few pages of reading once they enter school, early readers devour whole books.

As the authors of A Nation at Risk acknowledge, in order to succeed children need two things from their parents: their time and their example. Parents must spend time with their children in activities that promote intellectual and emotional health and must show by example that learning matters. Children denied these gifts have no foundation for academic achievement.

Has reform failed because parents are undermining it?

Ultimately yes. School reform has failed because parents are neglecting their children in favor of work and consumption. Between 1969 and 1987, average working time rose 163 hours per year--one extra month of work. The median work week is now over fifty hours. At the same time, married women have stormed the workforce; by 1990 two-thirds were employed. Based on personal time diaries, sociologist John Robinson concluded that the time parents spend with their children dropped from thirty hours a week in 1965 to seventeen hours in 1985. Even this estimate may be generous. Other studies have shown that mothers and fathers each spend less than an hour a day alone with their children and talk to them only a few minutes a day. Perhaps 20 percent of parents read to their children regularly.

Although many poor and single parents are struggling to make ends meet, it is largely professionals who spend their lives at work. Despite politically correct paeans to the virtues of family life, most corporations expect employees to sacrifice their families by devoting ever longer hours to the office. Moreover, too many employees accept this sacrifice as necessary, even desirable--not to survive, nor even to prosper, but to attain dizzying levels of consumption.

We tell ourselves that, in today's economy, we must run ever faster to stay in place. Yet, with the average new home having grown from 1,500 square feet in 1970 to 2,150 in 1997, while goods once considered luxuries routinely become indispensable, many of us are running to get ever further ahead. We take for granted an extraordinary level of consumption and feel deprived with anything less. Therefore, we devote our time to attaining material wealth. According to the 1997 Public Broadcasting System documentary Affluenza, Americans spend six hours a week shopping but only forty minutes playing with their children.

Lacking interaction with their parents, many children are unable to benefit from schooling. As many as a quarter suffer from a developmental, learning, or behavioral disorder. Increasingly, teachers report that young children are not ready for school, largely because of language deficiency: their parents simply don't talk to them and they don't learn how to communicate. Christina Fowler, a counselor at Sunset Elementary School in West Linn--a prosperous Portland, Oregon, suburb--says that each year children enter school who are language-delayed because of an absence of stimulation at home. Fowler reads stories to the children in a class she teaches on social skills. She told me that, in one recent class, "It wasn't until the last two weeks of school that I could read them stories because they hadn't had enough practice listening to stories and to language. They had difficulty focusing and their attention span was very, very short."

In Oregon, a leading state in the educational reform movement, educators are at a loss to explain why schools in the vanguard of the state's reform efforts have shown little or no progress. They need only read a 1997 "youth asset survey" conducted in Multnomah County--Oregon's largest and home of Portland, "the city that works"--by the Multnomah Commission on Children and Families. The commission noted that, of forty potential assets--personal attributes and measures of familial and social support--young people need at least thirty to succeed. After surveying 10,000 students, the commission concluded that the average youth in Multnomah County has nineteen assets, while only 8 percent have thirty or more.

The commission found that what young people lack most is adult support; only one-third or fewer have families that communicate well, parents who are involved in their education, or positive adult role models. In a ten-year study of 20,000 high-school students, Temple University found that only one-third of students have daily conversations with their parents, while half of parents do not know their children's friends or what their children do after school.