What It Takes to Make a Student - New York Times

What It Takes to Make a Student - New York Times:

But all these questions point to culture differences as I pointed out in my previous post, assuming no genetic root causes.

"There had, in fact, been evidence for a long time that poor children fell behind rich and middle-class children early, and stayed behind. But researchers had been unable to isolate the reasons for the divergence. Did rich parents have better genes? Did they value education more? Was it that rich parents bought more books and educational toys for their children? Was it because they were more likely to stay married than poor parents? Or was it that rich children ate more nutritious food? Moved less often? Watched less TV? Got more sleep? Without being able to identify the important factors and eliminate the irrelevant ones, there was no way even to begin to find a strategy to shrink the gap."

Further in the piece is this observation from some research:

"Hart and Risley showed that language exposure in early childhood correlated strongly with I.Q. and academic success later on in a childÂ?s life. 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."

And then this:

"Brooks-Gunn, a professor at Teachers College, 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. Their conclusion: 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. 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."


This is a culture issue!

Here's one of the piece's concluding thoughts:

"The evidence is now overwhelming that if you take an average low-income child and put him into an average American public school, he will almost certainly come out poorly educated. What the small but growing number of successful schools demonstrate is that the public-school system accomplishes that result because we have built it that way. We could also decide to create a different system, one that educates most (if not all) poor minority students to high levels of achievement. It is not yet entirely clear what that system might look like. It might include not only KIPP-like structures and practices but also high-quality early-childhood education, as well as incentives to bring the best teachers to the worst schools . But what is clear is that it is within reach."

After reading it, it is culture, deeply ingrained, generational culture born out of ignorance that's at the root of the problem. Parenting is key as the piece points out. Yet if we look at the parenting deficiencies of blacks (70% of black kids born out of wedlock) .With that poor start at parenting, kids have little chance to suceed without massive intervention. It's no surprise that this culture of failure perpetuates itself. Intensive remediation as employed by the successful charter schools described by the author will be necessary to break the cultural cycle that prevents youngsters from developing as white, middle class and Asian kids do.

Here are some data that show disparities by race and ethnicity of educational attainment in the U.S.