The Washington Post

For too many children, school failure begins before they ever set foot inside a school.

You know it, if you’ve ever seen bright, eager youngsters who, nonetheless, never quite get the hang of school. Teachers know it, though they might not say so for fear of seeming to blame parents for their own shortcomings. Education policy makers know it, although they obscure their knowledge with talk of “cultural deprivation.”

Fortunately, Dorothy Rich knows it, too. And for the past three years, she has been doing something about it.

Rich’s assault on pre-school academic failure goes back nearly a quarter of a century, which is approximately how long her Home and School Institute has been teaching low-income Washington parents how to get their children ready for learning. But three years ago, under a demonstration grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, she took her techniques nationwide.

Her emphasis is helping parents to teach their children what she calls “megaskills”—self-confidence, motivation, perseverance, teamwork, personal responsibility and problem-solving—the habits and attitudes that make school-learning possible.

She begins with the conviction that education is a community enterprise, not just the function of the schools.

“Deep inside, too many people think if we can just fine-tune the schools, everything will be all right,” she says. “We have to have a larger vision of what education is today.”

Through partnerships with half a dozen major organizations, she is spreading that vision and enlisting hundreds of parents in helping to prepare youngsters for learning:

The American Postal Workers Union is sponsoring workshops in local schools in Denver, Atlanta and Detroit; the American Red Cross is using a bilingual approach to reach migrant workers in Florida; the American Library Association is making teaching materials available to parents; the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs is putting on a series of intergenerational workshops in which older women tutor children and train young mothers in Tuscaloosa; Parents without Partners and the National Coalition of Title I/Chapter I Parents has established a number of programs in Brooklyn, Northern New Jersey, and Detroit.

The program materials, of Rich’s own creation, show parents how they can teach their children the confidence and love of learning that makes for academic success.

“It’s no good saying that education is everybody’s responsibility unless we also give them the tools to carry out that responsibility,” she says. “We’re helping people to help their own children and also, through their unions, churches, and other associations, to help their neighbors.”

Is it working?

“I can’t give you academic specifics,” she says. “It’s too early for that. But I know it’s working when I hear children say it makes their parents have time for them, when I hear parents say how much better they feel to know that they have something to contribute to the education of their children, when I see participating organizations add new sites, or when I see a 75 percent retention rate for participants. We have trained 234 megaskill leaders in 124 cities in 34 states.”

Most of the parents (the majority of them mothers) are high school graduates who want their children to achieve more. But until Rich formed her New Partnerships for Student Achievement, nobody was showing them how.

Rich (1201 16th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036) says her techniques work even for functionally illiterate parents.

“The whole idea,” she says, “is to mobilize the community outside of school to help kids learn, to spread the word that education is everybody’s job and to get parents in the habit of working with their children and feeling comfortable about it.”

For now, much of the program’s effort goes to help parents help children who are already failing in school.

But Rich’s dream is to reach parents of pre-schoolers to help them prevent failure in the first place.

If she can pull that off, she could wind up doing more for public education than all of the studies of what’s wrong with the schools.