Journal of School Psychology, Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 471–479, 1999Copyright 2000 Society for the Study of School Psychology

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Commentary for “Schooling and High-RiskPopulations: The Chicago Longitudinal Study”

Joan I. VondraUniversity of Pittsburgh

In this era of school reform, with its emphasis on accountability throughtesting, improved learning through new teaching methods, and increasedsafety through metal detectors, the articles in this special issue on the Chi-cago Longitudinal Study (CLS) help to refocus our attention on a funda-mental missing piece in the school reform puzzle: relationships as the basisfor learning. Whether the topic is family mobility during the school years,involvement of parents in schooling, teacher and parent expectations ofthe child, or processes underlying resiliency, the leitmotif of these studieson children at demographic risk in the public school system is the impor-tance of relationships as the foundation for children’s success in school.

Children desire to learn from and imitate important adults in their liveswhen they have close, supportive relationships with those adults. Indeed, inreviewing decades of research on fathering that was devoted to linking per-sonality characteristics of fathers to (most often) sons, Lamb (1997) notedthat:

It took some time for psychologists to realize that they had failed to ask: Whyshould boys want to be like their fathers? Presumably they should only want toresemble fathers whom they liked and respected and with whom their relation-ships were warm and positive. In fact, the quality of the father–son relationshipproved to be a crucial mediating variable. (p. 9)

The extensive literature linking both parental warmth and guidancewithout harshness to children’s competence in school (e.g., Cowan,Cowan, Schulz, & Heming, 1994; Masten & Coatsworth, 1998; Pettit,Bates, & Dodge, 1997) also suggests that behavioral and academic compe-tence in the classroom evolve from a base of caring support. From clinicalas well as empirical work with maltreated children, it is clear that a “securereadiness to learn” (Aber & Allen, 1987) is often lacking in children whose

Received August 1, 1999; accepted August 1, 1999.Address correspondence to Joan I. Vondra, University of Pittsburgh, Department of Psy-

chology in Education, 5CO1 Forbes Quadrangle, Pittsburgh, PA 15260-7478. Phone: (412)648-7297; fax: (412) 624-7231; E-mail: vondra@pitt.edu

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primary relationships are chronically nonsupportive and, periodically, abu-sive. Even after controlling for family poverty and disadvantage, maltreatedchildren tend to have more difficulty in school, and the difference seemslinked both to problems in competence, motivation, and self-regulation(what Aber and Allen termed secure readiness to learn) as well as to prob-lems in relationships with teachers and peers (Youngblade & Belsky, 1990).

In the emerging field of teacher–child relationships (Birch & Ladd,1997; Pedersen, Faucher, & Eaton, 1978; Pianta & Steinberg, 1992), dataindicate that children are more successful in school when their relation-ships with teachers are warm and close, but neither dependent on the onehand, nor conflicted on the other. Children who are able to elicit a highdegree of interest and involvement from a teacher or, alternatively, teach-ers who demonstrate respect, excitement, and caring for their students atan individual level create a deeply motivating context for learning thatprobably has little to do with either the specific teaching method or curric-ulum. It is likely to be the children from educationally at-risk homes who profitthe most from the presence, or suffer the most from the absence, of thesekinds of motivating relationships (Comer, 1988; Knapp & Adelman, 1995).

Unfortunately, boys, children of minority race, children from low-income families, and children from families with problems ranging fromsubstance abuse to spouse abuse to child maltreatment are the least likelyto experience these kinds of relationships, especially with middle-classteachers (Alexander, Entwisle, & Thompson, 1987; Birch & Ladd, 1997;Lynch & Cicchetti, 1992; Vondra, Shaw, Swearingen, Cohen, & Owens1999). These are, not coincidentally, the same children who show higherrates of behavior and academic problems in school (Alexander & Entwisle,1988; Dumaret, 1985; McLoyd, 1998; Pianta, Erickson, Wagner, Kreutzer, &Egeland 1990). It is the children who are least prepared for their lessons,least able to focus and persist, least accustomed to receive and give warmthand affection, or a combination of all three, who most need a close, motiva-ting, and monitoring relationship with their teacher. Similarly, it is the chil-dren who are most likely to have difficulty in school who need to be part of astrong, mutual partnership between home and school. Unfortunately, schools,teachers, and families tend to operate in exactly the opposite fashion.

In their rigorous investigation of school mobility and children’s schoolfunctioning, Temple and Reynolds (this issue) point out that the most mo-bile of their inner-city, low-income families have lower performing and lesswell adjusted children from the first days of kindergarten. They also notethat mobility effects are probably worst for children from less educationallysupportive homes. But high mobility, it can be argued, is one indicator ofa less educationally supportive home. In our own longitudinal study of vul-nerability and resilience among urban, low-income children (Shaw, Kee-nan, Vondra, Delliquadri, & Giovannelli, 1997; Shaw, Winslow, Owens,Vondra, Cohn, & Bell, 1998; Vondra et al., 1999), number of moves by age

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7 correlated negatively, as in the CLS, with maternal education level andfamily income as well as with past and current developmental support-iveness of the home environment and past quality of maternal interactionwith her toddler. Corsaro and Rosier (1992) provided an illuminating casestudy of one such family, struggling to balance financial crises, parental dif-ficulties, and child needs over the course of multiple moves. Discontinuityof experience for the oldest child was a combined result of family economichardship and instability, maternal relationship instability, caring but dis-tracted parents who relegated education to the schools, and cultural dis-crepancies across schools and between home and school. Whether highmobility reflects severe socioeconomic disadvantage, pervasive relationshipdifficulties, parent mental health problems, or some combination of these,it should come as no surprise that mobility accounts for both initial kinder-garten achievement level as well as changes in subsequent achievement.

Like the research on divorce (Cummings & O’Reilly, 1997; Hethering-ton, 1989), indicating that prior and subsequent parental conflict is morepredictive of child adjustment than the divorce itself, it seems likely that theparental and family dynamics associated with school mobility are more in-fluential for achievement than the mobility itself. Mobility may add addi-tional stressors to a child’s already problematic family life or may be amarker for disruptive life events which themselves undermine child adjust-ment and performance (e.g., parental break-up, sudden financial crisis, in-formal child fostering with kin due to maternal substance abuse), or both.The fact that school mobility was associated in Temple and Reynolds’ studyboth with a lower likelihood of parents participating in preschool interven-tion and parental failure during the school years to return questionnaires sug-gests, as the authors note, that these are some of the more elusive families withlittle connection to schools under routine educational circumstances.

To the extent that a school has the resources to intervene in non-crisiscases, support services for such children would appear to be strategic. Mini-mally, extra time for the child from his or her teacher and extra efforts byschool staff to engage the family appear to be warranted. However, high-risk children attending inner-city public schools may receive very little indi-vidual time and attention unless their behavior is disruptive enough tocompete with the many other needy children the schools struggle to serve.And in more mobile families, parents may be particularly unlikely to at-tempt advocating for their children or bridging the home–school divide.

In contrast, parents who enroll their children in early intervention pro-grams and participate actively in those programs likely represent the oppo-site end of the spectrum of functioning. Temple and Reynolds point outthat families participating in early intervention show less mobility in theschool years. In turn, Miedel and Reynolds (this issue) demonstrate thatparents who see or want to see themselves as involved in their children’s

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schooling have children with higher reading test scores and less grade re-tention up to high school, even after controlling for child’s initial level ofperformance, receipt of intervention services, and family background.Teachers and parents seem to agree on who are the most active, investedparents and least involved parents, as evidenced by modest correlations andby similar, though somewhat less robust connections between teachers’ re-ports of parent involvement and children’s test scores, retention, and dura-tion of need for special education services.

It is likely that a subset of low-income parents with fewer mental healthproblems, higher intelligence, more economic and family stability, or acombination of all three, is able to be more proactive about, and more con-sistently involved in, the education of their children. These parents maytake better advantage of various services available to themselves and theirchildren, but may also have children who gain more from intervention fora number of reasons. Their children’s relative success may further motivatethese parents to invest time and energy in the educational process. Less fre-quent crises precipitate fewer moves and school changes are thus avoided,unless it is a switch to a better quality school. Indeed, these families may beoverrepresented in the population of families selecting magnet schools.Perhaps most important, both parents and children impress teachers thatthey have a greater investment in education and that the children have morepotential to profit from it. Whether these children are better able to form mu-tually satisfying relationships with their teachers, simply achieve more academ-ically, or create fewer problems for their teachers, their teachers see themmore positively than children from families that are less involved.

From Gill and Reynolds’ (this issue) analysis of parent and teacher ex-pectations, one may conclude that getting teachers to see more children ina positive, promising light could be the most direct route to greater schoolsuccess. In most cases, however, teacher expectations are simply a reflec-tion of children’s actual functioning in the classroom, which explains therelatively close connection between children’s past achievement, teacherexpectations, and children’s subsequent achievement. Since changes inchild self-perceptions of competence and academic motivation are alsoconnected to previous achievement (and to IQ), at least in the later ele-mentary grades (Deci & Ryan, 1992; Hoge, Smit, & Hanson, 1990), improv-ing children’s academic skills prior to the start of school (and hence theirtrajectory of academic competence) does seem to be one crucial interven-tion route. The CLS has been quite successful in documenting that inter-vention beginning before the start of formal schooling and continuing oninto the early years of schooling can help children start school with greatercompetence and build on that competence over time (Reynolds, 1994;Reynolds & Temple, 1998). Entwisle (1995) argued that the mechanisms bywhich preschool interventions come to benefit children academically in-clude: (a) making the transition to formal school easier academically and

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socially, (b) keeping children out of low-ability tracks in school, (c) helpingthem avoid grade retention or special education, and (d) raising teacherand parent expectations. No doubt the latter derives from each of theformer.

The CLS articles also implicate a second route to higher achievement:getting parents excited about their children’s early competence and poten-tial for success in school and helping them to feel efficacious in promotingboth. Although Gill and Reynolds found that parental expectations had lessdirect association with subsequent achievement than did teacher expecta-tions, high expectations are one component of parent involvement. Whenparents witness new child competencies and get positive feedback abouttheir children through teacher grades and comments, and when they areencouraged from early on in concrete ways to nurture their children’s edu-cation, their motivation to be a part of the process increases. Whether ornot they then engage with teachers and schools depends on both their ownresources—personal and socioeconomic—and the efforts of school person-nel to get them and keep them involved (Connors & Epstein, 1995). Sadly,this combination of “ready” parents and “bridging” teachers and principalsis often lacking in urban, public schools serving large proportions of chil-dren at educational risk (Coleman, 1991; Comer, 1988; Dauber & Epstein,1989; Epstein & Dauber, 1989). Epstein’s research (e.g., Connors & Ep-stein, 1995), however, convincingly documents that the initiative of schoolpersonnel alone can be quite successful in drawing in parent involvementdespite family poverty and disadvantage.

It is the route least discussed in these articles—namely, training futureteachers and administrators (a) to see and nurture every student’s potentialthrough one-on-one interaction in or outside the classroom and (b) to pro-mote and champion parent involvement at every level—that seems mostneeded and most neglected in the current wave of educational reform. AsTemple and Reynolds point out, quality or “authoritative” schools help at-risk children demonstrate resiliency (Hetherington, 1988, 1989; Rutter,Maughan, Mortimore, Ouston, & Smith, 1979). These schools expect muchof their students and do what is needed to ensure that their students willexperience success, even if it means extra time for tutoring, mentoring,talking to parents, or learning more about what goes on at home (War-ner & Curry, 1997). When children come from educationally supportivehomes of parents with more education, the task is relatively straightfor-ward. When children come from homes where less educated parents strug-gle with poverty and instability, the task becomes so challenging that work-ing without some partnership with parents is self-defeating.

If educational training for school teachers and administrators includedspecific work on talking with students and parents, connecting with andmotivating those who are “turned off” and “tuned out,” interacting with a

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class in ways that give students individual attention and daily successes, in-corporating what students and families value into daily class and school ac-tivities, giving constructive feedback to students and parents, and so forth,the kinds of inspirational teachers described by the adolescents in the Smo-kowski, Reynolds, and Bezruczko (this issue) study and by others (Pedersenet al., 1978; Warner & Curry, 1997) might be more commonplace. Thewords of the resilient CLS students of Smokowski et al.’s study, who stayedthe course into high school, are illustrative about the kinds of teaching is-sues school reform might address:

“If they made a movie about my life I would want them to tell how . . .I grew up as a little black boy who people’s thought won’t amount to noth-ing” (p. 435).

“Never let any one tell you what you can do. If you don’t believe in your-self who will?” (p. 436).

The authors noted a common theme among the Black adolescent males’autobiographical essays of “needing to exceed low expectations placed on[their] shoulders” (p. 436). The importance of mastery experiences and ofadult perceptions that these students could accomplish things were also re-curring themes. But the comments about teachers are, perhaps, most illu-minating. Smokowski and his colleagues describe four critical functions ofteachers these adolescents related to their success and resiliency: (a) be-lieving and repeatedly voicing the belief that the student could do high-quality work, (b) intervening with alternative coping strategies at early signsof risk-taking behavior, (c) caring enough to listen to school-related andhome-related problems, and (d) helping the student believe in his or herfuture (p. 442). A few excerpts are worth repeating here:

“[My teacher] always knew I could do better than I did” (p. 442).“Even though I don’t have him for a teacher this year he still helps me”

(p. 442).“[My teachers] would call my house and let my mother know how I was

doing. That made me think, if they think I can do it, then, maybe I coulddo it myself, too” (p. 442).

“They tell me that I can make it, I can be somebody. They help me getout of trouble and things, and that I can make it” (p. 443).

“My religion teacher—she’s like my mother. She tells us what we need todo and stop doing this and all that. She tells us to never give up” (p. 443).

Warner and Curry (1997) described a Missouri school program called“Challenge Up,” in which teachers and principal “select an at-risk studentwho would benefit from a little extra attention: the teacher tries to form arelationship with that student to let the student know that someone is therewho cares about his or her well-being, academic progress, and future” (p.145). Their time together is not limited to school activities such as checkinghomework, talking about classes, and tutoring, but might include a ball

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game, picnicking, lunch together, or a visit to a museum. The principal de-scribed one at-risk student’s emerging response to their time together thisway: “She seemed to want to make me proud of her, to live up to my expec-tations of her . . . she just blossomed” (p.146).

Although both relationship history and personality no doubt play a rolein how students hear and respond to the “motivational messages” teachersgive, the importance of positive relationships—relationships that involvepositive role modeling, encouragement, and monitoring—between individ-ual students and their teachers cannot be overstated. And the higher thestudent’s educational risk, the more important—but also the more chal-lenging—such relationships are. As Smokowski and his colleaguesobserved, “positive social relations tend to arise in clusters” (p. 444). Witha history of supportive family relationships, children are more likely to de-velop positive relationships with their teachers (Pianta & Nimetz, 1991;Sroufe & Fleeson, 1988; Vondra et al., 1999). Without such a history, posi-tive relations in the classroom can be hard to come by. For a lucky minorityof at-risk students, however, an interested, caring, challenging teacher willteach them not only to expect more of themselves, but to see and believethat they can achieve it. Results of the CLS suggest that it is indeed time torethink the core issues in school reform.

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