There has been much talk in the media recently about our failure as a nation to bridge the achievement gap. The gap continues to be gapingly large whether we look at school readiness, fourth grade reading scores or high school graduation rates. The inability of educators, policymakers, and a host of school reform efforts to ensure that low-income and minority children succeed in school, and graduate from high school, should lead us to consider whether we need to think outside the classroom as we struggle to improve educational outcomes for the country and for each individual child.
We have not been able to bridge the achievement gap, because we are not fully addressing the preparation gap that exists before children enter school and we are not properly preparing families to develop, support, and sustain their children's academic careers. Children in school spend at most 20 percent of their time annually in the classroom. Before they enter school, many children, particularly low-income children, spend all of their time at home with family, friends and neighbors. None of the most popular school reform efforts (class size reduction, teacher training, new reading and math curriculums, or charter schools) focuses much attention on the critical role of the families and home environment.
The preparation gap occurs because too many children enter school, whether it is pre-kindergarten or kindergarten, without the early childhood experiences or skill-building opportunities in their homes that they need in order to be successful in a classroom. They have little experience with books. They have not been read to or told stories. They have never held a crayon, done a puzzle, or sung "Itsy-bitsy spider". Their parents have not been shown how to provide their child with the critical experiences that make up "school readiness". They may not have access to the materials that would enable them to introduce their children to books or puzzles or crayons. They may have limited literacy skills themselves and not know that talking, picturing reading, and playing with their child can be critical to school readiness.
By the time they get to kindergarten, low-income children have heard on average only 15 million words, while middle-income children have heard 55 million (Hart and Risley, Meaningful Differences); and they have experienced only 25 hours of one-one-one reading time, while middle-income children have experienced 1,700 hours (Packard/McArthur Foundations). As Richard Rothstein notes in his 2004 book, Class and Schools, "A five-year-old who enters school recognizing some words and who has turned pages of many stories will be easier to teach than one who has rarely held a book. The second child can be taught, but, with equally high expectations and effective teaching, the first will more likely pass a reading test than the second. So the achievement gap begins."
But there are ways to remove or reduce this gap before it ever appears. School readiness programs that deliver services to low-income families through individualized home visiting have proven that they can prevent the achievement gap by preparing low-income children to enter school recognizing as many words and having turned as many pages as middle class children. Programs, like The Parent-Child Home Program, which provides families with a two-year cycle of twice-weekly home visits during which well-trained, well-supervised paraprofessional staff work with 2-4 year-olds and their parents/primary caregivers to increase reading, playing, and conversation in the home, are able to build language and literacy-rich home environments that will provide children with the skills and ongoing support they need to succeed in school.
Reaching children and their parents, through intensive home visiting, before they enter school and before the gap grows too large to bridge is a very effective tool for building school readiness skills and ensuring that children are prepared to take advantage of pre-kindergarten and kindergarten opportunities. Home visiting reaches families who are not accessing needed services and resources, particularly families isolated by poverty, limited literacy, lack of transportation, and language and cultural barriers.
School reform efforts will only yield sizable benefits if children are prepared to take advantage of them. Working with children and their parents in their homes before they ever enter a classroom not only builds children's skills, but also families' skills and knowledge so that they can support their children as they move through school. The Parent-Child Home Program's data shows that this early work with families, at a fraction of the cost of school reform efforts, pays off. Data from the Pittsfield, Mass. public schools demonstrates that 93 percent of low-income kindergarteners who participated in The Parent-Child Home Program and pre-k scored developmentally above their age level, compared to 69 percent of entering kindergartners who had participated only in pre-k. Randomized control trials demonstrate that the significant increases in parent-child verbal interaction experienced by Program participants directly correlates with the children's first grade cognitive and social emotional skills, their school readiness skills. Most importantly, a longitudinal study of the Program demonstrated that students who completed two years of the Program (as two- and three-year-olds) went on to graduate from high school at the rate of middle class students nationally, 30 percent higher than the randomized control group in the community.
If we want to really make strides in bridging the achievement gap, we must start thinking outside the walls of school buildings and work with those who have the most at stake in the future of their children: their parents.
Brian Jones: Dr. King and the Achievement Gap
Academic achievement is strongly correlated with intelligence. It may surprise some of you, but believe it or not smarter kids really do tend to have higher academic achievement.
General cognitive ability (IQ-type intelligence) is a rather highly genetically influenced human trait, in young children about 40% of variation is due to genetic differences (and 60% is due to environmental differences) but by age 18 about 80% of variation is due to genetic differences.
Middle class and upscale parents (college grads and professionals) tend to be smarter than lower class parents (lower level jobs and/or welfare-dependent). Because of the strong genetic influence on transmission of the trait of intelligence, it is not surpriseing that children of middle class and upscale parents tend to be innately smarter than children of lower class parents. This is basic logic: if social class is dependent upon educational achievement and if educational achievement is dependent upon intelligence levels and if intelligence is dependent upon genetics then ergo the biological children of upscale highly educated professional parents will tend to be innately more intelligent than the biological children of high school dropouts (of course there will be many exceptions but in general this will tend to be the case).
There is much that is genetically determined (and I believe studies of identical twins separated at birth demonstrate just how strong the genetic component is), and we also know that there is an interaction between environment and genes.
When the behavioral tendency exists across generations within a family, there is unfortunately not an environmental infrastructure to support the development of more productive behaviors, and the cycle is difficult to break because both genetics and environment "conspire" together.
I am weary of the tendency of "reformers" and the uninformed who downplay the very real and powerful factors that are outside of the school's control. When we hear that the number one factor in a child's educational achievement is the good teaching, we are mislead. The real meaning of this statement is that quality teaching is the number one factor over which we have any control at all.
Intelligence may often correlate to academic achievement (though school does not always do a good job of engaging our very smartest children) but if you could actually demonstrate that social class and intelligence are genetically related -- I mean with some hard evidence -- I would be surprised.
To begin with, many of our smartest people are not wealthy. Most are not poor either but unless accumulating wealth is a personal goal -- and it is not a goal for all of us -- we may not direct our intelligence to such endeavors. It also does not always take superior intelligence to become wealthy. It doesn't hurt to be very smart and certainly some such people are, but there are other qualities that are probably more important. I teach children whose families mostly live below the poverty line and many of my students are highly intelligent (one, who was in my class three years ago, will be graduating this year from MIT where he has received a full ride).
I hope you will reconsider this point. I think it a dangerous one as it could justify withholding educational resources from those who most need them.
My mother read to me every night after waiting tables all day. Little did she know how easily she had been co-opted by the ruling class.
She teaches 28 children in one classroom and said that one-on-one interaction with each of her students is not possible. Without parental support of her curriculum, she said that there is no way to prepare all of those children in one school year to get to the next level when there is no educational reinforcement at home. She laughed and said that that is when she wishes she was Superman!
This article is truly apropos to our discussion. Thank you!
No one is "going begging" and the answer is not just money.
The numbers you need to look at are per student spending. Don't know where you live, but Californians spend roughly $7000 per student per year, which places us 47th in the nation. (see the Rand Report). Our public schools have all but extinguished arts and music and all "non-essential" classes. We have no paid teacher aides anymore, only parent volunteers. Each year, I get a wish list from my kids' teachers so they don't have to dig into their own poorly paid pockets to buy classroom supplies. So I don't know where you're getting your stats, but I can tell you that if we spent as much on our children's education as we do on the nation's defense, particularly in areas like the author suggests, we'd go a long way toward closing those achievement gaps--not just between low income and higher income students, but between the U.S. and the rest of the world.
We are constantly compared with other countries and the we try to fix our system to them. Lets decide to take an American program that builds a solid base for each student and then see where it leads to. I think you will be surprised. By eighth grade I am also for high level high schools in each state for the best students.
Oh, and BTW, I am a teacher. Yes, I make less now in real dollar terms than I did 10 years ago. The second job I'm going to take-tutoring. If we cannot even pay our teachers living wages on par with what people with similar levels of education, what have we come to as a nation?
Illegal immigration, the encouraged tendency of Central American immigrants to resist integration into American culture and language, the ubiquity of gangster rap and its "heroes", the general disdain for academics, the media spiral into trash TV were decency is mocked and outrage exalted, the support for self-absorption and self-pity and the disappearance of sacrifice, the sexual crassness and promiscuity and support for abortion and single mothers, the culture of victimization, entitlement and dependence on government or "someone" to take care of that - all of these are just examples of the achievements of the liberal culture over the past 40 years.
As long as we pretend that our problems with education, health care, and many other aspects of our society are not, in large part, due to the culture of irresponsibility that is fast becoming the American way, we are destined for failure.
People need to be taught about right and wrong, even if that means implying that they, or their parents, made mistakes. They might "feel bad" about that, but they are owed the truth.
And it's true, the poor kids do not have a fraction as many books or creative toys, although the expensive x-box type toys and mammoth TV screens show that they do manage to spend an inordinate amount on entertainment.
Illiterate parents do not even think of educating their kids.
Children whose parents are all consumed with putting food on the table, are of course at a disadvantage. There is no time for story-telling, reading books, visits to the museum, or just generally experiencing the beauty of the world around us.
Seems like such a simple answer and it is...but over the decades, policy -makers prefer to generalize, because: "those people cannot learn"!
Qualitatively, there are huge differences in the two extremes, and the repercussions interms of emotional well-being are also significant.
When we discuss educational reform, some critics are telling us that the most important factor in a child's educational achievement is the quality of his/her teachers. This is not entirely truthful, the quality of the teacher may be the only factor over which we have any measure of CONTROL. The percentage of influence the teacher actually has over a student's learning has been estimated at various numbers, all of which are well under 50%, and more often something well beneath.
Something no one discusses is the influence the home environment continues to exert AFTER the child enters school. Children during their school years continue to spend the overwhelming majority of their lives outside of school. Family support and opportunities continue to heavily influence learning, and one might argue that family experiences continue to contribute heavily to their learning to the extent that children whose families provide meager learning experiences miss out on significant and substantial learning opportunities. Teachers simply cannot provide ALL of the academic learning experiences that we value as education.
One of my coworkers years ago was complaining that the school expected her son to know his ABCs coming in to kindergarten -- "they're supposed to teach them that, not me!"
Most parents have NO idea how to parent a child.