Everybody’s talking about The Achievement Gap in education. This is the gap identified by test scores and considered, at least in the headlines, to be the big gap in education. Yet something is supporting the gap — and keeping it wide.

What is it? It’s the behavior and attitude gap beneath the test score gap. This is not to discount the effect of poverty and poor health and all the other outside-of-school issues. This gap is keyed to school and home, one we can concentrate on and do something about relatively quickly.

Within this gap are two formidable elements: expectations and self-discipline. When these are weak, they are the holes under the thin ice of achievement, ready to break and unable to sustain the effort achievement takes. When they are strong, they provide the infrastructure that makes test score achievement solid and prolonged.

Do we expect more or less of students and schools today? In many cases, expectations are narrowing, becoming less realistic, and insufficiently appropriate. For example: For high schoolers eager to get into the best colleges, expectations, like their gilded resumes, are mountain high, sometimes ridiculously high.

For elementary graders asked to help with even a few household chores, expectations, from several families I’ve checked with are remarkably low.

When all we expect from school is for children to test well, to learn, to read and do some math, these are not high expectations. In fact, they are quite minimal. When schools cut science and music and art because they are not tested, we narrow our expectations and children’s prospects.

Self-discipline is having a rough time these days. Many of us are not sure how to build it. We try to figure out incentives — toys, money, stars. These are all external motivators, and they may work for a while.

But we are on thin ice. Old fashioned as I am, I have always believed in intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation — building a child’s want to know rather than want to have. And it’s done the old way — through conversation, through sharing of values, both at home and at school.

Without a strong infrastructure of expectations and self-discipline, we are “defining education down.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, sociologist and former senator, coined the term “defining deviancy down.” When we accept minimal standards for education and children’s behaviors, when we accept the status quo for schools and teachers, when we accept parental irresponsibility, we define education down. And that spells trouble in any basal reader.

We are struggling to find the “right” expectations and self-discipline for today in homes and in schools. I am hearing increasingly about what educators call “teaching the whole child.” Two groups have come to my attention with the “whole child” as the rallying cry: United Voices for Education and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. If what is meant by “whole child” is that schools become more concerned about putting the elements in place to develop self-disciplined, curious, creative learners, then I am all for it.

A whole child is a learner who has emotions as well as brains. It takes emotional strength as well as intelligence to extend and use the basics. This is the child whose parents and teachers understand that it takes more than stuffing heads with facts to produce a real learner.

Children, once they learn to read, have to want to read. They have to feel good about reading. That’s the emotional part, and it is tough stuff. It’s not testable in the usual ways, but we know a good learner when we see and hear one.

Teaching the whole child is not for weaklings. It is far more demanding than teaching the basics alone.