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Date Posted: 11:58:39 06/24/03 Tue
Author: Weird_Enigma
Author Host/IP: 166.82.129.22
Subject: Children from poor backgrounds face tough struggle to catch up

Early deficits in learning hard to overcome
Children from poor backgrounds face tough struggle to catch up
KAY MCSPADDEN
Special to The Observer

My garden is a testament to the power of early education.

Twelve tomato plants are hardy, bushy, straining to break free from their stakes.

Six plants are spindly, puny, spare.

All 18 plants began their lives as seeds from the same parents. When I bought them from the agriculture students at my school back in late April, the 18 plants were not only genetically indistinguishable but physically identical as well. The garden plot has the same soil, the same sunlight and the same amount of rainfall for all of them.

So what happened to the six underachievers?

They lived an impoverished life for three weeks.

On the afternoon that I brought the tomatoes home, I managed to plant twelve of them before a drenching rainstorm sent me inside. Bad weather -- and laziness -- kept me from planting the other six, and for three weeks they sat on the porch receiving indirect sun and rain, confined to their tiny starter pots.

They've been in the garden for over three weeks now, and while they are definitely growing, they apparently will never catch up to the ones with the head start.

Children aren't plants, of course, but a recent article in the Spring 2003 American Educator suggests one important similarity -- early deficits are difficult, if not impossible, to make up.

Researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley studied 42 families of varying socio-economic and racial groups for three years and then did a 10-year follow-up on 29 of them. They focused on the children's verbal abilities, measuring the number and complexity of words used by parents and their children.

The upper-income parents, all working professionals, had a vocabulary over twice as large as the parents on welfare. The working-class parents fell between the two.

When the children began speaking, the researchers recorded every word of both parents and children for an hour each month and noted a correlation between the income/education levels of the parents and the vocabulary acquisition of the children. By the time they were 3 years old, all of the children were using about half as many words as their parents -- which meant that the 3-year-olds from upper-income families had larger vocabularies than the adults on welfare.

Not only was the actual number of words the children learned different, but so was the rate of learning. A child of professional parents typically heard almost 500 utterances an hour as opposed to only 176 utterances for a child of impoverished parents. That extra interaction with language seems to make further learning of language easier and faster for the upper-income children.

The researchers estimate that by age 3, the upper-income children had had 30 million more language experiences than the children living in poverty.

Most provocative of all was the nature of those experiences. Children of professionals heard an average of six encouraging, affirming comments to each negative comment from their parents. Children in poverty, on the other hand, heard only one encouraging comment for every two negative prohibitions.

The researchers suggest that this early orientation to the world -- either predominantly affirming or predominantly negative, affects the children's expectations for themselves and their images of themselves as learners.

Hoping that school and experiences in the wider community had helped the poorer children catch up, the researchers measured their vocabulary skills in the third grade, when most of the children were either 9 or 10 years old. Not only had the children in poverty not caught up, they had fallen even further behind.

By the time I see those students in high school, the gaps in their reading ability can be so extreme that the upper-income students are reading on a college level while the poorer students are functionally illiterate.

Early intervention programs such as Head Start, Bright Beginnings and full-day kindergarten can help address the income/achievement disparity, but the early gains evaporate if the programs are not followed with other types of support. Families living in poverty need quality day care, adult literacy programs and job placement help. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds need smaller class sizes and more individual instruction.

All those programs require funding, but money spent on early education -- for children and their families -- will be less money spent later to support those disadvantaged children when they grow up and try to enter the work force with skills far behind their peers.

Kay

McSpadden


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Observer columnist Kay McSpadden is a high school English teacher in York, S.C. Write her c/o The Observer, P.O. Box 30308, Charlotte, NC 28230-0308 or by e-mail at kmcspadden@comporium.net.

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