A Chance to Make History

Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America recently published A Chance to Make History: What Works and What Doesn't in Providing an Excellent Education for All, a refreshing and inspirational book about the lessons learned in 20 years of experience working with students and teachers in low-income communities. Kopp shows us that we can't just be interested in or be advocates of education reform. We must be dedicated and committed to making changes, accepting no alternatives.  Everyone should read this book and become motivated by it.

Mind the Gap

Every mother remembers receiving awkward looks during pregnancy. Early in pregnancy it’s the “are you pregnant or just getting fat?” look. Later, when you feel like you are about to pop it’s the look that says “should you really be out of the house?” I always got the “who are you talking to?” look as I stood seemingly alone chatting away. Sometimes pretending like I was on my phone to avoid the look, I would stand in the aisle at the grocery store asking my unborn child what she thought about lasagna for dinner.  For the first time in my life, I could speak at any time about anything and know that someone was listening and maybe even enjoying the sound of my voice!

Isabella is now turning one and she still hears my voice all day long. The difference now is that I am lucky enough to hear her adorable voice asking, responding and singing. It is estimated that during the first four years of her life, she will accumulate almost 45 million experiences with words.  These 45 million words set the foundation on which the rest of her education will build. These 45 million words make a difference in preschool, they matter for kindergarten readiness, and their effects can even be seen in the 3^rd grade. Studies show that the children who arrive unprepared to the first day of kindergarten have not accumulated 45 million experiences with words during the first four years of life. Many don’t even accumulate one third of that experience.  The average child in a welfare family accumulates experience with only 13 million words in the first four years of life. What’s worst is that out of those first experiences with words, that child in a welfare family will receive 2 prohibitions for every 1 encouragement, compared to 1 prohibition for every 6 encouragements in a child from a professional family.  

How do we make up for this 30 million word gap and bring these children up to speed? Can we do it over a summer? Does it take one year in kindergarten? Or are these effects longer lasting? In the 1960s, in response to the War on Poverty, a program called Head Start was initiated as an 8-week summer program to prepare incoming kindergartners from families of low social economic status. Although we knew that experiences at home during the first few years of life were important for the preparation of the child for kindergarten, we did not understand the gravity of the situation we were trying to remedy. The effects of the summer program were slim and temporary. After all, how can we expect to make up for 4 years of missed experiences in 8 weeks of intervention? Studies have shown that if you take those children from welfare families and teach them words in an intervention program such as the 8-week Head Start program, that increased vocabulary size is temporary because we cannot change the rate at which these children learn new words subsequent to the intervention program.  The effects of the program become washed out quickly. If you follow the trajectory of vocabulary growth through elementary school and high school, the sad truth is that the gap only widens. The children from high SES continue learning words at a faster rate than those from low SES. Unfortunately, the data points to the idea that, for most children, the effects of the number and quality of words the child accumulates during the first four years of life are lasting regardless of the quality of elementary education. This means that the high school students who do not have the language skills to read a grade-appropriate textbook should have received our help not last year, not during middle school or elementary school or even kindergarten. We should have helped those children 15 years ago when they were months old. Rather than spending 12 years of resources on the same child to catch her up, we should have invested in her for the first few years of her life. Had she started kindergarten with a strong language foundation, one built in a rich, stimulating environment in which she accumulated even close to 45 million experiences with words, we likely would not have had to allocate so many resources to remediation throughout the rest of her education.  

People often argue that we should not expand the public education system to include early childhood education until we fix the problems that the system is currently dealing with. We have to understand that this is not a simple expansion we are talking about, it is an expansion that will itself fix many of the problems that the public school system currently has. Imagine the power of our workforce in 25 years if every single child today has the opportunity to encounter 45 million words by age 4. Imagine what that would do to high school drop-out rates, to crime, to our work force. What would it take to provide every infant, toddler and preschooler with the quality care and education they deserve? What would that care and education look like? When would it begin? Where would it take place? How much would it cost? Some attitudes may shock you more than the facts themselves. This is why I started this blog. Stay tuned!

Further Reading:
Hart B., Risley, T.R. (2003) The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3. American Educator 27(1):4-9.