This paper reviews research on the family's influence on adolescent academic achievement and other related school outcomes and the few existing empirical studies of relevant prevention and intervention programs. Research on family processes has identified salient factors that impact crucial features of the parent-teen relationship. These include parenting style, parental aspirations, and parent involvement in education. Given the clear connections between family processes and school functioning, one might assume that families would be targeted in interventions for children's school difficulties, but fewer than 100 publications from the past decade that proposed family-based prevention or treatment for school problems were located, and only 10 of these were empirically based investigations. The three types of intervention studied were home-school contingency models, parent management training models, and parent involvement models. Promising results have been demonstrated with an emerging model type, the skills training models. Skills training models are amenable to combining with family-based models to create comprehensive intervention strategies and packages. Comprehensive interventions should target not only school failure but also the concomitant risk behaviors and their etiological roots. (Contains 171 references.) (SLD)