The kids who need preschool the most June 26, 2008

This article in the San Jose Mercury News reports that only 15% of preschol-age children living in poverty are in high-quality programs.  This is where I want to tear my hair out and rant that we should more like the French and the Italians, and have universal preschool.  This is where I want to run around and shove yell, “Wake up, people!  We are missing an incredible opportunity to reduce crime and poverty and illiteracy!”

I used to teach kindergarten in high-poverty areas.  Every day I went home feeling like a failure, because it was so hard to give my students everything they needed — but had not received — in their first five years of life.  I needed to go backward and get them through preschool, but then to have enough time to get them through kindergarten and ready for first grade was almost impossible.  Now that I teach preschool, I can take a child who has missed much of what he needed in his first four years of life, and take him through a year of rich preschool experiences, and yes, get him completely ready for kindergarten.  It is amazing the difference a year makes.

Literacy begins at home? May 15, 2008

Well, duh, yes of course it does.  But when I saw that that was the title of an op-ed piece in the LA Times, explaining why Reading First isn’t working, I rolled my eyes and figured it would be more moaning about how parents aren’t doing their jobs, so teachers can’t do theirs.  (I’ve heard that often enough this year from my coworkers; I’m not kindly disposed toward this way of thinking.)

However, I was wrong.  The author, Esther A. Jantzen, brings up one of my favorite books, the landmark study on language acquisition Meaningful Differences, by Hart and Risley.  Here’s what she has to say about what Hart and Risley found:

The most astonishing literacy-related information I’ve ever seen came out over 10 years ago, in Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley’s “Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children.” Their shocking news: There is a huge difference in the number of words and the prohibitive or affirmative tone of words heard by young children depending on whether their parents are on welfare, in the working class or professionals.

They found that by age 3 children of welfare parents heard 10 million words, those with working-class parents heard 20 million words, and those with professional parents heard 30 million words. In addition, with children 13-18 months old in welfare families, almost 80% of the feedback to the child was negative, in working-class families about 50% was negative, and in professional families more than 80% of feedback to the child was affirmative.

Anyone who has read that can’t forget it.  A 20 million word difference?  No wonder we have an achievement gap — the children in welfare families arrive at kindergarten already behind in vocabulary, and what the teacher talks about makes less sense to them than it does to the children in professional families, who keep adding to their store of knowledge and keeping pulling farther and farther ahead.

And the ratio of positive to negative feedback is just heartbreaking.  Plus, Hart and Risley found that the four-year-olds in the professional families had larger vocabularies than the mothers in the welfare families.

Anyway, Jantzen actually has a proposal on what we need to do next.  (Here I’ve been thinking about ways to improve vocabulary instruction.  Solid, but prosaic.)

Here are ideas: How about directing some Title I funds to educate and support parents in lower-wage workplaces–big-box stores, fast-food restaurants, factories, hotels, data-processing companies, government offices — places where many employees are young mothers and fathers. How about enrolling the goodwill of the Salvation Army, Red Cross, United Way and the huge nonprofits that attract lots of volunteers of all classes and education levels, and bring them on board to reach out and encourage parents?

How about harnessing the political campaign troops of all parties, the caring people who make calls to our homes? How about involving the direct sales industry and those who create those recorded sales calls? How about using the public service components of media in all its shapes, sizes and forms — radio, television, gaming and entertainment, newspapers and magazines?

How about providing workshops, materials and leadership for churches, hospitals, clinics and social welfare offices? How about setting up video-link programs in prisons so that parents in jail could talk and read to their children?

The simplest form of the message we need to get out is this: Parents, grandparents, caregivers, baby sitters, uncles and aunts — talk kindly to children a lot from birth on, using big words. Listen to them and read aloud to them in whatever language you want to use. And do these no-cost things often.

If the foundation for literacy is laid in the home, then schools can do their job. If foundation is not laid, even heroic amounts of intervention by the school won’t be sufficient.

It’s that straightforward. And yes, we can.

I’d vote for that.

Remembering my priorities April 16, 2008

Today I spent 45 instructive minutes in a first grade classroom, helping with a writing assignment.  I moved around and helped several children, but mostly ended up at the end of one table with five delightful boys.  The assignment was to write about your favorite place, describing it using your senses — what does it smell like, feel like, taste like, sound like, look like?

B. got to work even before the teacher had finished giving directions, I noticed.  He clearly is a good reader, and a confident writer.  Meanwhile some other children were having a hard time even putting their names down — one boy had his head on the table in misery — so it was a while before I got down to B.’s end of the table to look at his writing.

Here’s what he wrote:

“My favorite place is [name of homeless shelter].  Because it’s good for me and my mom and my sister.  And they give us three meals a day.”

I don’t know B. at all, as he hasn’t been in the class long, and the last time I spent time there was 1st quarter.  I asked him if he would keep writing, but he refused.  I said, “But Mr. R. wants you to write about your senses.  What does it smell like?”  B. replied, “it smells really bad in there.  You wouldn’t want to smell it, no way.” 

“Well, what does the food taste like?”

“It’s nasty.”

“B., are you sure you want this to be your favorite place?” I asked.

B. pointed emphatically at his second sentence.  “They - give - us - three - meals - a - day,” he said, emphasizing each word.

I was silenced, thinking about a boy who feels so grateful to have three meals a day that his favorite place is the stinky shelter where he lives.

B. happily commenced drawing on the back of his page while I helped T., and chatted with the other three boys near him.  T. just started a month ago, too, but he never went to school before.  His parents never sent him to kindergarten, and did not enroll him in first grade until March.  He cannot read or write, and does not know the names of most letters.  He did not know how to write a capital T or capital I until I showed him.

Mr. R. told me that the parents said, by way of explanation, that he had been ”home helping out the family.”

But a sweeter boy would be hard to find.  “What’s your favorite place?” I asked, and T. replied, “Chuck E. Cheese.  I been there TWICE.”  I asked him to tell me each new sentence, and helped him to find the words on the class word list, or wrote them down for him to copy.  He worked really hard, with intense focus, looking at my words, and then copying them down neatly and in the right order.

The other three boys down by B. and T. were just as cute.  Each boy mysteriously decided that Chuck E. Cheese was his favorite place, too, and they argued vociferously about it while surreptitiously copying the words I had helped T. to write.

The five of them were amazed to learn that I happen to hate Chuck E. Cheese.  “It’s so noisy,” I said, “and the pizza doesn’t taste good, and the kids are all running around like wild.”

“Yeah, the kids go CRAZY,” grinned A.

It was a wonderful afternoon. 

I went to the grocery store with my sons after school and felt so grateful to have the money to buy bananas and bread and donuts and yogurt.