Who is sabotaging school reform?

What's wrong with America's schools? The answer, according to Temple University adolescent psychologist Laurence Steinberg, author of Beyond the Classroom: Why School Reform Has Failed and What Parents Need to Do, lies with disinterested parents who have "checked out" on their kids' education and a peer culture of American teens who ridicule academic success. He blames the "frighteningly miserable achievement of America's youth" and "their abysmal level of academic accomplishment," maintaining that the schools are neither the source of the problem nor the best mechanism to correct it.

Based on a 10-year study that surveyed more than 20,000 teenagers, hundreds of parents, and dozens of teachers, Steinberg, working with colleagues from Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin, indicates that "the sorry state of American student achievement is due more to the conditions of students' lives outside of school than it is to what takes place within school walls." He argues that no amount of school reform will raise the level of performance unless students come to school engaged in the business of learning. He challenges both the liberal view that school reform has suffered from inadequate funding and the conservatives' endorsement of nofrills, back-to-basics instruction in the classroom. Instead, he states that, before any reform initiatives can succeed, changes have to occur in other facets of students' lives.

Powerful influences of forces outside the classroom are sabotaging academic success. "We found surprisingly widespread disengagement of parents from their kids' lives," he notes, adding that even well-intentioned parents frequently are coping with the stresses of...