The Department of Education believes that by rating schools, someone, somehow, will be able to improve student performance. Seeing the latest foray into improving education reminded me of some simple data gathering I did last spring. The results I call "The High Performing Student."

First, a little background. I teach mainly seniors at Triton High School in Dodge Center, which is located between Owatonna and Rochester. Triton pulls students from three different towns and happens to be a perfect economic cross-section of Minnesota: students come from families that are part blue-collar, part white-collar, and part rural.

I have taught 27 years and have always been a believer in parental involvement, but I thought I'd like some specific data to back up my beliefs. So last spring I surveyed all the seniors. They had the option not to take the survey. For you statisticians, about 3% declined, and another 2% gave me oddball answers.

I asked them three basic things. First, they were to rate their parents' involvement in their education. I mixed up the possible answers so that it wasn't a simple "great" to "lousy" response. I asked them to think of their parents as "coaches"- what style of coach were their parents? Were they silent coaches on the sidelines? Were they constantly encouraging them? Were they missing the game? Were they aggressively shouting?

I also asked how regularly their parents came to conferences.

I also asked their approximate class rank.

Students did not need to put their names on the survey, but that didn't matter too much: recognizing most students' handwriting, I saw that they were honest in their class ranking.

It came as no surprise that there was strong correlation between conference attendance and class rank. In the top fourth of the graduating class, 73% of parents always or usually attended conferences while in the bottom fourth of the class, 80% of parents rarely or never attended conferences. Simply put, parent-teacher conferences either had a direct bearing on student success, or student success had a direct bearing on parental attendance at conferences. Which was the cause and which was the effect really couldn't be determined by my simple survey.

However, a stronger criterion for student success seemed to be a parent's encouragement (or perceived encouragement) from home. This showed up in all 4 quartiles of the graduating class. The vast majority of top students (73%) said that their parents were constantly encouraging them. Less than a fifth of the lower ranked students (20%) called their parents "encouraging coaches." Most of these called their parents "missing the game."

Along with this came my biggest surprise: even though the percent of encouraging parents fell with class rank, the overall majority of Triton students ranked their parents as "encouraging coaches." That is a huge A+ for Triton parents.

Because of this parental A+, I dug deeper into the surveys from the students in the middle of their graduating class.

I knew these students "in the middle." They were hard-working and reliable. Because they were not at the top of their class, did this mean that they were somehow not "good students"? Many of them held jobs from the school dismissal bell until late into the evening. Their class ranking wasn't in the top quartile, yet I wouldn't hesitate for a second to hire them. Others didn't hold jobs, yet I knew them to work to the best of their abilities. I would call all these students "good students" - in fact, any student who is working to the best of his or her ability, I would call a "High Performing Student."

Many of these parents of the "middle" were actively helping their students to do their best. That is what we really want our children to do, isn't it-to do their best-even if we can't always be "the best"?

The Department of Education will continue to "star" schools, believing it will have an impact-and it might eventually. But in the meantime, I know from 27 years of teaching and a simple survey, that nothing creates a High Performing Student like parental encouragement.

And to parents, when you can't make a teacher conference, create your own parent-student conference. Ask your child about favorite classes. Inquire about homework. Encourage when your child is discouraged. Sometimes you can't help with algebra and you certainly can't fix most of the trials of adolescence. Just listen. Usually that's all you need to do. Then add a simple, "I'm proud of you for trying."