A teacher's words can make a parent's day. My daughter called excitedly the other day when her child brought his report card home. No, it wasn't all A's but it did carry a sentence from the teacher that made all the difference: "Your child is a wonderful boy."

Oh, how these words matter—even if the teacher had also written it on other cards. I know this from long experience in the giving and the receiving ends of report cards. Education is a very human partnership. It depends on its strength, not just on the right curriculum or the right tests. It depends to a greater degree than we have known before on how teachers and parents appreciate each other and build each other's sense of hope.

We now know what we did not know before. We know that every home is an important partner in education. This has become almost common knowledge.

Yet, there's another vital ingredient in this mix that has not been spotlighted: morale. It takes a hopeful adult—teacher and parent—to raise and teach a hopeful child. Hope is one of the key determinants of achievement. When students get to the point of saying, "What's the use?", it matters little which curriculum and which tests are being used.

When children start school for the first time, you can smell the hope. It's not just the new bookbags and shoes. It's the elixir of possibilities. It's a fire that can be snuffed out or helped to burn brightly.

While I can't put words of encouragement in the mouths of parents and teachers, I want to make the case for how important they are. When so many schools and families are being labeled as failing, now more that ever, morale is critical.

Words actually make such a big difference in building and sustaining hope for our children and their education. I think the meanest thing a teacher ever said to me happened when I brought my first child to school to register her for kindergarten. I was nervous and wanted to make a good impression. Being a teacher, I did not want to be a bragging parent. But I was also concerned that this teacher know about my child.

So I told the teacher that this youngster entering kindergarten could already read, and I asked what provision would be made for this. The teacher put her arm around my shoulder and proceeded to reassure me in this way: "Oh, don't worry, they all even out by third grade." Evening out wasn't what I was concerned about. It was not what I or any parent would want to hear.

The nicest thing a teacher ever said to me came in a telephone call when my younger daughter was in fourth grade. She had been absent from school for three days. Her teacher called to ask about her. "How is she? When is she coming back? We miss her." This teacher knew how to make students and their families feel important. The other teacher did the opposite.

We do hurt each other. And it's not just teachers ganging up on parents. As a teacher, I have seen a wide variety of parental anti-school behaviors. Among them:

* Hard-to-please parents who march into the school office with a daily complaint. At the other extreme are the scared, "helpless" parents who somehow can't bring themselves even to visit the school.

* Parents who hope, even expect, the school to do for their child what it never did for them, or who expect it to do all the things their home is unsuccessful at. They grow increasingly bitter against the school with each passing day.

* Parents for whom any change from what they knew as schoolchildren is threatening, whether or not they liked what they had. Some parents get upset when they see children actually having fun in the classroom. I think of this as the "iodine theory" of education—it has to hurt if it's to do any good.

* Parents who identify so closely with their children that they see themselves, not their children, walk into that school. These parents react to every teacher's comment and every award won or lost as if reliving their own school days.

All this isn't to imply that parents should not criticize teachers and vice-versa. Constructive criticism is essential. But destructive attitudes are worth recognizing and discarding.

One step I would take right away is to get rid of those dull, computerized comments appearing on more and more school report cards. Computers may be more sophisticated than ever, but they don't convey the human touch. Comments made by a computer count for very little.

Human comments can be off the mark, too. One year, when teaching a group of, as they say, "challenging students," I made out report cards and added a comment to each one. I found myself writing on each card words to this effect: "This student needs encouragement." I didn't seem to know what else to say. The principal, reading over the cards before distributing them, suggested that I was the one who needed encouragement. She was right.

Words do matter. The beauty of this is that in this age of accountability when it is really hard to know for sure what we can be accountable for, we know for sure that we can be accountable for our own words.

Dorothy Rich is founder and president of the nonprofit Home and School Institute, MegaSkills Education Center [1] in Washington. www.MegaSkills.org.