| By Zach Marks - Jul 25th, 2007 at 12:10 pm EDT |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
Tags: Achievement First, Bob Casey, early education, Hillary Clinton, KIPP, universal pre-K, Yellow Rage
Hillary Clinton was in the house - the Center for American Progress - to discuss the early education bill she is introducing with Bob Casey. She gave a compelling speech about why universal pre-K is so badly needed and impressed me by backing up rhetoric with facts and a touching anecdote or two.
She pointed out that students from low income backgrounds are at a disadvantage before they get to kindergarten, citing a University of Kansas study which found that low-income parents speak fewer words to their infants than wealthier parents and that when they do communicate with their children, they often give negative messages. This resulted in children whose parents were professionals having vocabularies of about 1,100 words while children whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words. The children’s I.Q.’s correlated with their vocabularies: the professional children averaged 117 while the welfare children averaged 79.
I remember reading about this study in a New York Times Magazine cover story by Paul Tough last November. The article’s opening sentence was provocative enough for a million blog posts on its own: “Can teaching poor children to act more like middle-class children help close the education gap?”
Paul Tough suggested that alternative schools like those run by KIPP Academy and Achievement First were proving the answer was yes. But I remember a number of my friends voicing concerns that Tough left one important question unaddressed: “Should we teach poor children to act more like middle-class children?”
I was never completely convinced by their arguments that families shouldn’t strive to raise their children like typically successful, usually white, comfortable-class families no. Not because I’m some ignorant bigot who thinks that all families should be like typically successful usually white ones, but because I was never comfortable categorizing certain behavior as “middle-class” or “white.” (Indeed, last night I got a nice lesson from two Asian-American spoken word poets about why we shouldn’t.)
But it’s an interesting question to look into. If studies show that the key to success is behaving a certain way, should families necessarily behave that way even if it means sacrificing some of the underpinnings of their culture?
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In terms of preserving "culture," it's one thing if what's being spoken at home are alternative words, or a foreign language. It's another thing if it's much fewer words, and spoken in the context of yelling at a child.
Probably the biggest reason for "acting" bourgeois is post-graduation, looking for jobs. The employing class has certain verbal and non-verbal tendencies when interacting with people. Those who have the same are more likely to get hired.
BTW, that was a great event at CAP last night.
We're talking about being bilingual here - teaching a poor kid from a non-dominant (in this country) culture to be fluent in the ways of the privileged. Poor and underprivileged children don't always know, for example, that sitting in the front of the classroom and asking questions will signal to their teacher that they are intelligent and inquisitive which, most likely, they are.
By the way, I can't emphasize enough how much discrimination occurs because of otherwise well-intentioned teachers. If a scruffy kid comes in on the first day of kindergarden with a runny nose, no lunch, and a nasty attitude, even the most sympathetic kindergarden teacher will most likely decide things about that student (unintelligent, remedial, unmotivated, unsupported, unsuccessful) in the first 5 minutes of his academic career which will directly impact his ability to be successful in life. It's not just about giving all kids access to pre-k instruction (which I'm all for, check out Link for more), it's about training teachers differently and valuing multiculturalism in a completely new way.
Read Teaching to Change the World for more about giving underprivileged kids access to the dominant culture.