Unstack the Odds: Help All Kids Access College—and Graduate!
by
Joe Rottenborn
by
Joe Rottenborn
Executive Director, Mahoning Valley College Access Program (MVCAP)
3. Research on learning in early childhood
Some indicate the odds begin stacking in a child’s first years. An discussion of this phenomenon was done by then editor Paul Tough in a seminal—and provocative—article entitled “What It Takes To Make a Student: Can teaching poor children to act more like middle-class children help close the education gap?” in The New York Times Magazine of November 26, 2006. In that masterful synthesis of research, condensed into but a few pages, the native Canadian cited a number of studies—and seemed to connect their dots. First, was research on language acquisition published by University of Kansas child psychologists Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley in 1995 on 42 Kansas City families with newborns. For three years, these two researchers “. . .visited each family once a month, recording absolutely everything that occurred between the child and the parent or parents.” (Paul Tough, “What It Takes To Make a Student: Can teaching poor children to act more like middle-class children help close the education gap?” The New York Times Magazine, November 26, 2006, p. 47.)
According to Tough, the researchers learned “. . .first, that vocabulary growth differed sharply by class and that the gap between the classes opened early. By age 3, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1,100 words, and children whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words. The children’s I.Q.’s correlated closely to their vocabularies. The average I.Q. among the professional children was 117, and the welfare children had an average I.Q. of 79.” (Ibid.)
As for the reason for those differences, the writer cited Hart and Risley’s finding as follows: “By comparing the vocabulary scores with their observations of each child’s home life, they were able to conclude that the size of each child’s vocabulary correlated most closely to one simple factor: the number of words the parents spoke to the child [emphasis added.] That varied greatly across the homes they visited, and again, it varied by class. In the professional homes, parents directed an average of 487 ‘utterances’—anything from a one-word command to a full soliloquy—to their children each hour. In welfare homes, the children heard 178 utterances per hour. (Ibid., pp. 47-48.)
Not only did the number of “utterances” vary in homes by class, according to Tough, so, too, did “the kinds of words and statements that children heard varied by class.” As he put it:
“The most basic difference was in the number of ‘discouragements’ a child heard—prohibitions and words of disapproval—compared with the number of encouragements, or words of praise and approval [emphasis added.] By age 3, the average child of a professional heard about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. For the welfare children, the situation was reversed: they heard, on average, about 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. Hart and Risley found that as the number of words a child heard increased, the complexity of that language increased as well.” (Ibid., p. 48.)
As for the payoff, Tough indicated the following:
“Hart and Risley showed that language exposure in early childhood correlated strongly with I.Q. and academic success later on in a child’s life [emphasis added.] Hearing fewer words, and a lot of prohibitions and discouragements, had a negative effect on I.Q.; hearing lots of words, and more affirmations and complex sentences, had a positive effect on I.Q. The professional parents were giving their children an advantage with every word they spoke, and the advantage just kept building up.” (Ibid.)
Other research summarized by the reporter was from a team led by Columbia professor Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, who “. . .has overseen hundreds of interviews of parents and collected thousands of hours of videotape of parents and children, and she and her research team have graded each one on a variety of scales.” According to Tough, they concluded the following: “Children from more well-off homes tend to experience parental attitudes that are more sensitive, more encouraging, less intrusive and less detached—all of which, they found, serves to increase I.Q. and school readiness [emphasis added.] They analyzed the data to see if there was something else going on in middle-class homes that could account for the advantage but found that while wealth does matter, child-rearing style matters more.” (Ibid.)
Tough continued his survey of research on early childhood learning by citing the work of Martha Farah, from the University of Pennsylvania, who “. . . has built on Brooks-Gunn’s work, using the tools of neuroscience to calculate exactly which skills poorer children lack and which parental behaviors affect the development of those skills. She has found, for instance, that the ‘parental nurturance’ that middle-class parents, on average, are more likely to provide stimulates the brain’s medial temporal lobe, which in turn aids the development of memory skills [emphasis added.]” (Ibid.)
The writer also described the anthropological research of Annette Lareau, which looked at the culture of early childhood. As he summarized:
“Over the course of several years, Lareau and her research assistants observed a variety of families from different class backgrounds, basically moving into in to each home for three weeks of intensive scrutiny. Lareau found that the middle-class families she studied followed a simlar strategy, which she labeled concerted cultivation. The parents in these families engaged their children in conversation as equals, treating them like apprentice adults and encouraging them to ask questions, challenge assumptions and negotiate rules. They planned and scheduled countless activities to enhance their children’s development—piano lessons, soccer games, trips to the museum [emphasis added.]” (Ibid., p. 49.)
Tough described Lareau’s findings as follows: “The working-class and poor families Lareau studied did things differently. In fact, they raised their children the way most parents, even middle-class parents, did a generation or two ago. They allowed their children much more freedom to fill in their afternoons and weekends as they chose. . . but much less freedom to talk back, question authority or haggle over rules and consequences. Children were instructed to defer to adults and treat them with respect. This strategy Lareau named accomplishment of natural growth.” (Ibid.)
The reporter related Lareau’s research to the cultural attitudes and behavior children develop. As he states it: “In public life, the qualities that middle-class children develop are consistently valued over the ones that poor and working-class children develop. Middle-class children become used to adults taking their concerns seriously, and so they grow up with a sense of entitlement, which gives them a confidence, in the classroom and elsewhere, that less-wealthy children lack. The cultural differences translate into a distinct advantage for middle-class children in school, on standardized achievement tests and, later in life, in the workplace.” (Ibid.)
As for the assets some children will possess compared to others, Tough characterizes them in this way: “But the real advantage that middle-class children gain come from more elusive processes: the language that their parents use, the attitudes toward life that they convey. However you measure child-rearing, middle-class parents tend to do it differently than poor parents—and the path they follow in turn tends to give their children an array of advantages [emphasis added.] As Lareau points out, kids from poor families might be nicer, they might be happier, they might be more polite—but in countless ways, the manner in which they are raised puts them at a disadvantage in the measures that count in contemporary American society.” (Ibid.)
Paul Tough commented on the achievement gap simply—and starkly: “There had, in fact, been evidence for a long time that poor children fell behind rich and middle-class children early, and stayed behind.” (Ibid., p. 47.)
Writing more recently about a study of 750 pairs of identical and fraternal twins tested on mental ability at 10 months and 2 years of age done by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Virginia, columnist Jonah Lehrer underscored the importance of early learning as follows: “When it came to the mental ability of 10-month-olds, the home environment was the key variable, across every socioeconomic class. But results for the 2-year-olds were dramatically different. In children from poorer households, the choices still mattered. In fact, the researchers estimated that the home environment accounted for approximately 80% of the individual variance in mental ability among poor 2-year-olds. The effect of genetics was negligible [emphasis added.] (Jonah Lehrer, “Why Rich Parents Don’t Matter,” The Wall Street Journal, January 22-23, 2011, p. C12.)
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