Can achievement gap be closed with extra tutoring?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Well, the achievement gap starts very, very early in life:

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/07/10/the-word-gap-and-one-citys-plan-to-close-it/

"Two decades ago, researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley revealed a particularly stark difference in the experiences of toddlers with different income levels.
As Hart and Risley described it, low-income infants hear many fewer words per day than their middle- and high-income peers, totaling to a 30-million-word difference by age three. They coined this discrepancy “the word gap.” Hart and Risley also found that students who had heard fewer words as toddlers correlated with worse performance on tests of vocabulary and language development years later.

More recent studies have similarly identified a word gap, albeit not to the tune of 30 million words, and shown that spoken word counts
predicted vocabulary and language understanding months later even when controlling for previous vocabulary levels and maternal education. A separate study showed that, by age two,
toddlers from lower socio-economic backgrounds can be six months behind their wealthier peers in vocabulary. Despite widespread acknowledgement of the scale of the problem, including
a push from former President Barack Obama on the issue, progress toward closing the word gap has been slow."

We have technology. Why not have recorded stories played to kids to improve vocabulary? Or show Sesame street on PBS? I am sure there is some things that can be done. Not just lip service but actual, well-publicized and mandatory programs.

"technology" is part of the problem for low income kids. They are plopped in front of the TV 24/7 from birth. Sesame Street has nothing on what their better off peers are getting. Middle class and UC kids are being taken to the zoo, libraries, farms, field trips, playgrounds and educational vacations from birth. They (parents or the nanny) speak to and sing to their kids. They read 5+ books a day to their kids from birth. They delight in their kids and enjoy teaching and learning with them. They constantly read parenting books to better their skills and learn how to manage different ages.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why is extra tutoring and intervention not being made available to groups that are falling behind?

If extra tutoring that is provided by companies like Sylvan Learning Center, C2, Huntington, Kumon, Kaplan, Dr. Li, APlus etc can help the Asian-American and White kids do well academically, should we not allow poor HI and AA students to have access to such tutoring? Maybe all FARMS eligible students also get this opportunity.

Has MCPS thought about providing tutoring and coaching services (for free or at subsidized costs) to the lowest performers or students who want to get accelerated instruction? Perhaps this tutoring can happen during weekends and during summer and other breaks. If they can also provide transportation and snacks, many parents and students can benefit.

Obviously, MCPS by itself is not able to bridge the achievement gap, but, how long will they not do anything for these students?

What do you know about what MCPS does, and why do you assume that MCPS does nothing?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

"technology" is part of the problem for low income kids. They are plopped in front of the TV 24/7 from birth. Sesame Street has nothing on what their better off peers are getting. Middle class and UC kids are being taken to the zoo, libraries, farms, field trips, playgrounds and educational vacations from birth. They (parents or the nanny) speak to and sing to their kids. They read 5+ books a day to their kids from birth. They delight in their kids and enjoy teaching and learning with them. They constantly read parenting books to better their skills and learn how to manage different ages.

Could we please stop with the "poor people ignore and neglect their children" thing?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why is extra tutoring and intervention not being made available to groups that are falling behind?

If extra tutoring that is provided by companies like Sylvan Learning Center, C2, Huntington, Kumon, Kaplan, Dr. Li, APlus etc can help the Asian-American and White kids do well academically, should we not allow poor HI and AA students to have access to such tutoring? Maybe all FARMS eligible students also get this opportunity.

Has MCPS thought about providing tutoring and coaching services (for free or at subsidized costs) to the lowest performers or students who want to get accelerated instruction? Perhaps this tutoring can happen during weekends and during summer and other breaks. If they can also provide transportation and snacks, many parents and students can benefit.

Obviously, MCPS by itself is not able to bridge the achievement gap, but, how long will they not do anything for these students?

Every school district in our area offers extra tutoring. It hasn't and will not close the achievement gap. It can help some students achieve some gains to put them on grade level.

Places like Sylvan, C2 and the like are based on more than a once a week tutoring session. there has been to at home follow up and support as well.

Right now, the internet has plenty of very good sites that can provide help for struggling students. But these are sites that have to be done on the students own time, on a very regular basis and would need an adult to help keep them motivated especially young kids. Most of the kids are just missing that at home and to provide that after school would be difficult because after school programs are staffed at minimum ratios - usually 20 kids per 1 adult and many times the after school programs have adults who themselves struggled with school and can't really assist students.

[Anonymous]

MCPS has already taken serious steps to address the gap though its implementation of 2.0 and Chromebooks.

2.0 allows teachers the freedom to address the unique learning needs of each and every student

Chromebooks brings the system into the 21st century by ensuring each student has access to online educational tools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

"technology" is part of the problem for low income kids. They are plopped in front of the TV 24/7 from birth. Sesame Street has nothing on what their better off peers are getting. Middle class and UC kids are being taken to the zoo, libraries, farms, field trips, playgrounds and educational vacations from birth. They (parents or the nanny) speak to and sing to their kids. They read 5+ books a day to their kids from birth. They delight in their kids and enjoy teaching and learning with them. They constantly read parenting books to better their skills and learn how to manage different ages.

Could we please stop with the "poor people ignore and neglect their children" thing?

PP here. I'm not necessarily blaming poor people. Many are working multiple jobs and can't afford real daycares. Yes, there is a lot of benign neglect going on.

[Anonymous]

Ok. So what can be done that can actually make a difference?

Lets assume that parents will not be able to give the enriched family life to their children. What can we do as a school to mitigate these deficiencies and do more than what is currently being done by MCPS.

I understand MCPS has programs for these students but obviously they are not moving the dial. So what fine tuning is required for these programs to actually be effective?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

"technology" is part of the problem for low income kids. They are plopped in front of the TV 24/7 from birth. Sesame Street has nothing on what their better off peers are getting. Middle class and UC kids are being taken to the zoo, libraries, farms, field trips, playgrounds and educational vacations from birth. They (parents or the nanny) speak to and sing to their kids. They read 5+ books a day to their kids from birth. They delight in their kids and enjoy teaching and learning with them. They constantly read parenting books to better their skills and learn how to manage different ages.

Could we please stop with the "poor people ignore and neglect their children" thing?

PP here. I'm not necessarily blaming poor people. Many are working multiple jobs and can't afford real daycares. Yes, there is a lot of benign neglect going on.

Yes, you are. You seem to think that poor people don't delight in their kids.

(You also think that middle-class and upper-class parents constantly read parenting books, but that's a different issue.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:MCPS has already taken serious steps to address the gap though its implementation of 2.0 and Chromebooks.

2.0 allows teachers the freedom to address the unique learning needs of each and every student

Chromebooks brings the system into the 21st century by ensuring each student has access to online educational tools.

(I understand your frustration. This is an anonymous forum and I vent frequently here. )

What do you think MCPS can do to actually close the achievement gap as it exists now.

I like the idea of trade school very much. I want year round instruction for poor performing students. I want free textbooks for poor students. What can all of us do to fund this? Would everyone be willing to pay $10 annually to fund this?

Do you think that mandatory instruction will make a difference? Do you think students should be held back if they do not get an overall C in core subjects? Do you think if a student is held back for more than two years in a grade, the parents have to pay a fees? Do you think that we need to make sure that all students are legal immigrants in this county, and students who are not legal immigrants need to pay a fee, that will be reimbursed if their immigration status changes?

There are many layers to this. Some are policies of the county, state, nation. Some are things that schools and MCPS can do.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Well, the achievement gap starts very, very early in life:

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/07/10/the-word-gap-and-one-citys-plan-to-close-it/

"Two decades ago, researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley revealed a particularly stark difference in the experiences of toddlers with different income levels.
As Hart and Risley described it, low-income infants hear many fewer words per day than their middle- and high-income peers, totaling to a 30-million-word difference by age three. They coined this discrepancy “the word gap.” Hart and Risley also found that students who had heard fewer words as toddlers correlated with worse performance on tests of vocabulary and language development years later.

More recent studies have similarly identified a word gap, albeit not to the tune of 30 million words, and shown that spoken word counts
predicted vocabulary and language understanding months later even when controlling for previous vocabulary levels and maternal education. A separate study showed that, by age two,
toddlers from lower socio-economic backgrounds can be six months behind their wealthier peers in vocabulary. Despite widespread acknowledgement of the scale of the problem, including
a push from former President Barack Obama on the issue, progress toward closing the word gap has been slow."

This. I work in a school with a high FARMS population and the lack of background knowledge is a huge problem. You can’t build on what they don’t already know, and what they don’t know would astound you. The curriculum assumes they have a certain amount of background knowledge and there’s no time to fill in the gaps because it’s all about exposing them to materials with rich language and if you go back to remediate you’re told you have low expectations for students. The reality is that they don’t know A LOT.

The foundational building blocks of learning occur BEFORE students come to school. If that foundation hasn’t been built, then it’s very difficult to catch up. People want to blame ESOL and second language learning, but I’ve had students who’ve come speaking and understanding zero English but exit ESOL in a year. That’s because they have background knowledge and a strong vocabulary in their native language. They only need to transfer their knowledge from one language to the other instead of learning the content and the new language at the same time. In fact, my students who move here from other countries are generally more academically successful than my students who were born here who also have a second language. This is painting with a broad brush, but the data supports it.

From my experience, the achievement gap is more related to SES than anything else. No amount of tutoring after a certain point will fix it. Parents need to talk to and with their kids when they’re little. Expand their language by talking about anything and everything. Take them to the grocery store and point out that apples are red and round and cucumbers are green and long. It doesn’t need to be rocket science and it doesn’t even need to be in English. But lower SES parents (there are exceptions, of course) either are unaware of how important this is, or just don’t do it for whatever reason and the deficit of language really impacts the kids when they start school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Well, the achievement gap starts very, very early in life:

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/07/10/the-word-gap-and-one-citys-plan-to-close-it/

"Two decades ago, researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley revealed a particularly stark difference in the experiences of toddlers with different income levels.
As Hart and Risley described it, low-income infants hear many fewer words per day than their middle- and high-income peers, totaling to a 30-million-word difference by age three. They coined this discrepancy “the word gap.” Hart and Risley also found that students who had heard fewer words as toddlers correlated with worse performance on tests of vocabulary and language development years later.

More recent studies have similarly identified a word gap, albeit not to the tune of 30 million words, and shown that spoken word counts
predicted vocabulary and language understanding months later even when controlling for previous vocabulary levels and maternal education. A separate study showed that, by age two,
toddlers from lower socio-economic backgrounds can be six months behind their wealthier peers in vocabulary. Despite widespread acknowledgement of the scale of the problem, including
a push from former President Barack Obama on the issue, progress toward closing the word gap has been slow."

This. I work in a school with a high FARMS population and the lack of background knowledge is a huge problem. You can’t build on what they don’t already know, and what they don’t know would astound you. The curriculum assumes they have a certain amount of background knowledge and there’s no time to fill in the gaps because it’s all about exposing them to materials with rich language and if you go back to remediate you’re told you have low expectations for students. The reality is that they don’t know A LOT.

The foundational building blocks of learning occur BEFORE students come to school. If that foundation hasn’t been built, then it’s very difficult to catch up. People want to blame ESOL and second language learning, but I’ve had students who’ve come speaking and understanding zero English but exit ESOL in a year. That’s because they have background knowledge and a strong vocabulary in their native language. They only need to transfer their knowledge from one language to the other instead of learning the content and the new language at the same time. In fact, my students who move here from other countries are generally more academically successful than my students who were born here who also have a second language. This is painting with a broad brush, but the data supports it.

From my experience, the achievement gap is more related to SES than anything else. No amount of tutoring after a certain point will fix it. Parents need to talk to and with their kids when they’re little. Expand their language by talking about anything and everything. Take them to the grocery store and point out that apples are red and round and cucumbers are green and long. It doesn’t need to be rocket science and it doesn’t even need to be in English. But lower SES parents (there are exceptions, of course) either are unaware of how important this is, or just don’t do it for whatever reason and the deficit of language really impacts the kids when they start school.

Alice, you are making me cry!

So for Hispanic parents our aim should be to encourage them to speak to their children in their own language and teach them content.

What about AA parents? What can we do to have them talk more with their children and expose them to content?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Alice, you are making me cry!

So for Hispanic parents our aim should be to encourage them to speak to their children in their own language and teach them content.

What about AA parents? What can we do to have them talk more with their children and expose them to content?

Have you ever met any Hispanic or African-American parents?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:MCPS has already taken serious steps to address the gap though its implementation of 2.0 and Chromebooks.

2.0 allows teachers the freedom to address the unique learning needs of each and every student

Chromebooks brings the system into the 21st century by ensuring each student has access to online educational tools.

(I understand your frustration. This is an anonymous forum and I vent frequently here. )

What do you think MCPS can do to actually close the achievement gap as it exists now.

I like the idea of trade school very much. I want year round instruction for poor performing students. I want free textbooks for poor students. What can all of us do to fund this? Would everyone be willing to pay $10 annually to fund this?

Do you think that mandatory instruction will make a difference? Do you think students should be held back if they do not get an overall C in core subjects? Do you think if a student is held back for more than two years in a grade, the parents have to pay a fees? Do you think that we need to make sure that all students are legal immigrants in this county, and students who are not legal immigrants need to pay a fee, that will be reimbursed if their immigration status changes?

There are many layers to this. Some are policies of the county, state, nation. Some are things that schools and MCPS can do.

There is plenty of money in the school system, but too much of it gets squandered on admin bloat and perks, along with giveaways to developers.

1. Halt all housing development (as occurred in 2005/2006 following the Clarksburg incidents) until serious measures are taken to bring down class sizes, preferably by having developers directly finance school construction.

2. Purchase textbooks for all grade levels along with accompanying teacher guides and workbooks to standardize learning and ensure important elements (especially handwriting, spelling, and grammar) are not de-emphasized. Go back to traditional methods for teaching mathematics.

3. Let Chromebook contracts expire, get rid of the machines, and go back to computer labs. The money dumped on classroom WiFi is both unproductive and wasteful. Use the money to hire teacher assistants instead, until measures are taken to reduce class sizes.

4. Replace Promethean boards with white boards or chalk boards. Studies have shown that bringing more technology does not improve learning and can prove distracting.

5. Teach organizational skills to students beginning in Kindergarten. Have all teacher ensure that assignments are conveyed to parents using agenda books (this is inconsistent in my school). Make students more accountable for completing work in class and for not turning in homework.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Well, the achievement gap starts very, very early in life:

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/07/10/the-word-gap-and-one-citys-plan-to-close-it/

"Two decades ago, researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley revealed a particularly stark difference in the experiences of toddlers with different income levels.
As Hart and Risley described it, low-income infants hear many fewer words per day than their middle- and high-income peers, totaling to a 30-million-word difference by age three. They coined this discrepancy “the word gap.” Hart and Risley also found that students who had heard fewer words as toddlers correlated with worse performance on tests of vocabulary and language development years later.

More recent studies have similarly identified a word gap, albeit not to the tune of 30 million words, and shown that spoken word counts
predicted vocabulary and language understanding months later even when controlling for previous vocabulary levels and maternal education. A separate study showed that, by age two,
toddlers from lower socio-economic backgrounds can be six months behind their wealthier peers in vocabulary. Despite widespread acknowledgement of the scale of the problem, including
a push from former President Barack Obama on the issue, progress toward closing the word gap has been slow."

This. I work in a school with a high FARMS population and the lack of background knowledge is a huge problem. You can’t build on what they don’t already know, and what they don’t know would astound you. The curriculum assumes they have a certain amount of background knowledge and there’s no time to fill in the gaps because it’s all about exposing them to materials with rich language and if you go back to remediate you’re told you have low expectations for students. The reality is that they don’t know A LOT.

The foundational building blocks of learning occur BEFORE students come to school. If that foundation hasn’t been built, then it’s very difficult to catch up. People want to blame ESOL and second language learning, but I’ve had students who’ve come speaking and understanding zero English but exit ESOL in a year. That’s because they have background knowledge and a strong vocabulary in their native language. They only need to transfer their knowledge from one language to the other instead of learning the content and the new language at the same time. In fact, my students who move here from other countries are generally more academically successful than my students who were born here who also have a second language. This is painting with a broad brush, but the data supports it.

From my experience, the achievement gap is more related to SES than anything else. No amount of tutoring after a certain point will fix it. Parents need to talk to and with their kids when they’re little. Expand their language by talking about anything and everything. Take them to the grocery store and point out that apples are red and round and cucumbers are green and long. It doesn’t need to be rocket science and it doesn’t even need to be in English. But lower SES parents (there are exceptions, of course) either are unaware of how important this is, or just don’t do it for whatever reason and the deficit of language really impacts the kids when they start school.

Alice, you are making me cry!

So for Hispanic parents our aim should be to encourage them to speak to their children in their own language and teach them content.

What about AA parents? What can we do to have them talk more with their children and expose them to content?

MCPS and the county already does tons to encourage parent involvement and provides a number of practically free enrichment activities. What else do you think MCPS needs to do or better yet, why do you think MCPS needs to do more? At what point do we say, parents need to be accountable and that there's only so much that a system can do.

[Anonymous]

Let me phrase it differently.

What can we do to mitigate what ever parenting issues we think there exists in these communities? Obviously, every race loves their children and want the best for them. What they think is best for them may not be what we think is best for them. We have to figure out then what is their motivator. Why are we unable to reach them? Do they care about achievement gap or is this our construct. Are we looking at them and saying that this gap exists because we care about this gap, but they don't?

If we assume that all parents want what is best for their children, then should we ask what they think is best for their children? A basic core education is needed for all children to become valuable adult citizens in this country. What are we doing to achieve that?