Can achievement gap be closed with extra tutoring?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Or we could stop measuring everyone's worth by their PARCC and SAT scores.

Somewhere I imagine Hispanic parents sitting around asking themselves what's wrong with all these UMC white parents. Why can't they clean their own houses and do their own home renovations? Why do they make their kids spend so much time on travel sports and so little time at church? And when will they learn Spanish already?

Are you freaking kidding me? My Hispanic husband is insisting that we move because he's not happy with our home schools' GS ratings.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Or we could stop measuring everyone's worth by their PARCC and SAT scores.

Somewhere I imagine Hispanic parents sitting around asking themselves what's wrong with all these UMC white parents. Why can't they clean their own houses and do their own home renovations? Why do they make their kids spend so much time on travel sports and so little time at church? And when will they learn Spanish already?

Are you freaking kidding me? My Hispanic husband is insisting that we move because he's not happy with our home schools' GS ratings.

Well good luck to you. When you move to the wealthy neighborhood it sounds like the neighbors will pity you for having raised your children wrong due to your ethnicity.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Or we could stop measuring everyone's worth by their PARCC and SAT scores.

Somewhere I imagine Hispanic parents sitting around asking themselves what's wrong with all these UMC white parents. Why can't they clean their own houses and do their own home renovations? Why do they make their kids spend so much time on travel sports and so little time at church? And when will they learn Spanish already?

Are you freaking kidding me? My Hispanic husband is insisting that we move because he's not happy with our home schools' GS ratings.

Well good luck to you. When you move to the wealthy neighborhood it sounds like the neighbors will pity you for having raised your children wrong due to your ethnicity.

Wish me luck when I tell my kids they have to quit their beloved gymnastics and spend Saturdays in church from now on. Right after we clean the house.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Or we could stop measuring everyone's worth by their PARCC and SAT scores.

Somewhere I imagine Hispanic parents sitting around asking themselves what's wrong with all these UMC white parents. Why can't they clean their own houses and do their own home renovations? Why do they make their kids spend so much time on travel sports and so little time at church? And when will they learn Spanish already?

Are you freaking kidding me? My Hispanic husband is insisting that we move because he's not happy with our home schools' GS ratings.

I don't think you are the demographic for Saturday School, then. We have plenty of highly-educated Hispanic families in our part of west Bethesda. And, they do plenty of enrichment and ECs with their kids. You would fit right in.

The question of who cleans our houses and mows our lawns and renos our homes, is a big one. The schools are not responsible for that.

I agree SAT scores should not mean much, if you do not intend to go to college. But, our schools don't have a vocational track, do they?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Or we could stop measuring everyone's worth by their PARCC and SAT scores.

Somewhere I imagine Hispanic parents sitting around asking themselves what's wrong with all these UMC white parents. Why can't they clean their own houses and do their own home renovations? Why do they make their kids spend so much time on travel sports and so little time at church? And when will they learn Spanish already?

Are you freaking kidding me? My Hispanic husband is insisting that we move because he's not happy with our home schools' GS ratings.

Well good luck to you. When you move to the wealthy neighborhood it sounds like the neighbors will pity you for having raised your children wrong due to your ethnicity.

Wish me luck when I tell my kids they have to quit their beloved gymnastics and spend Saturdays in church from now on. Right after we clean the house.

Seriously. Some of these posters are a bunch of racist assholes.

[Anonymous]

Affluent families hire tutors to navigate MCPS's crappy curriculum. Of course, children whose families don't have the resources would benefit from the same type of tutoring!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Or we could stop measuring everyone's worth by their PARCC and SAT scores.

Somewhere I imagine Hispanic parents sitting around asking themselves what's wrong with all these UMC white parents. Why can't they clean their own houses and do their own home renovations? Why do they make their kids spend so much time on travel sports and so little time at church? And when will they learn Spanish already?

Are you freaking kidding me? My Hispanic husband is insisting that we move because he's not happy with our home schools' GS ratings.

I don't think you are the demographic for Saturday School, then. We have plenty of highly-educated Hispanic families in our part of west Bethesda. And, they do plenty of enrichment and ECs with their kids. You would fit right in.

The question of who cleans our houses and mows our lawns and renos our homes, is a big one. The schools are not responsible for that.

I agree SAT scores should not mean much, if you do not intend to go to college. But, our schools don't have a vocational track, do they?

NP

There is no vocational "track," but there is Thomas Edison for anyone who wants to pick up trade skills while completing their HS degree.
Saturday school is not for any demographic, anyone can use it for reasonably priced tutoring typically by MCPS certified teachers.
SAT scores have limited meaning even for the college bound--sure you need the correct threshold to even be considered at a given school but there isn't a number on a scrap of paper that guarantees anyone anything, tie-breaker at best.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Or we could stop measuring everyone's worth by their PARCC and SAT scores.

Somewhere I imagine Hispanic parents sitting around asking themselves what's wrong with all these UMC white parents. Why can't they clean their own houses and do their own home renovations? Why do they make their kids spend so much time on travel sports and so little time at church? And when will they learn Spanish already?

Are you freaking kidding me? My Hispanic husband is insisting that we move because he's not happy with our home schools' GS ratings.

Well good luck to you. When you move to the wealthy neighborhood it sounds like the neighbors will pity you for having raised your children wrong due to your ethnicity.

Wish me luck when I tell my kids they have to quit their beloved gymnastics and spend Saturdays in church from now on. Right after we clean the house.

Seriously. Some of these posters are a bunch of racist assholes.

Their last thread got shut down

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Affluent families hire tutors to navigate MCPS's crappy curriculum. Of course, children whose families don't have the resources would benefit from the same type of tutoring!

Not true that only affluent families get tutoring help. With so many free tutorials online, all families who want their children to succeed can get the help they need. Let's stop thinking that money solves everything. Yes, affluent families have options. But so do non-affluent families. If you have a smart phone, subsidized high-speed internet, you have access to enrichment and remedial help. But, often what low-income parents don't have is time. Many work two or more jobs, are in poor health and don't have the stamina to tend to their kids' non-immediate, non-physical needs. But, despite these limitations some low-income parents do succeed in getting kids the help they need. We live in an area that has so many free/subsidized enrichment: parks, libraries, etc.

[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?

You politically correct fools will never understand the "Achievement Gap" if you are this overly sensitive. Of course not all poor people ignore and neglect their children. Just like I can say "Of course not all poor children do poorly in school". But, I can tell you with almost certainty that poor children whose parents ignore and neglect them will struggle in school. We can even remove the word "poor" from that sentence. Neglect is a strong word (and I think you used it improperly to try and prove some point).

[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.

Wow! Did I write this? We got a new teacher at my Title 1 school last year. She came from a UMC county school and was in shock that her students didn't know anything. She spent days teaching them the prerequisites for each lesson. She would come into my classroom shaking her head everyday. "They don't know directions! North, south, east, west. How can I teach lessons about regions of the county when they don't know that? They don't know where the U.S. is on a world map. They don't know that there are different time zones in the world." Needless to say, she was constantly under fire from admin because she was so far behind because she was trying to fill in the huge gaps. Some teachers just teach the lessons and ph well if the kids don't get it. They are under a lot of pressure to keep up with the pacing guides. I don't know if DCUMs readers can comprehend some of the students we encounter. Kindergarteners who don't know the right way to hold a book or that the story comes from the words on the page, not the illustrations. Native English speakers who enter our preschool at age 3 program regularly test at an 18 month old level for vocabulary. I have a kindergartener this year who had not only never seen her own name in print before, it took her over a month to really realize that what she was copying off her name tag onto all of her work was really her name. The light bulb moment came near Halloween. "Oh! This says, 'Elizabeth?' Oh!" This really doesn't have anything to do with the English language either. Native English speakers would absolutely be eligible for ESOL services at my school. I'd estimate half of them would test as LEP (Limited English Proficient) on the placement test I give to non-native English speakers.

[Anonymous]

Back to the OP's question yes after school tutoring and summer school would help significantly. One aspect that wouldn't resolved though is that it is the same school system. Kids who received supplementing under 2.0 are very much ahead because their enrichment programs didn't follow the Eric Lang curriculum that is atrocious. I'm not sure that even 24/7 coverage under 2.0 would have helped any kid.

[Anonymous]

Here's one statistic that I believe has a direct affect toward the achievement gap. Single parent household percentages. I'm sure that there will be many single parents out there that will not be happy with this idea and there are always exceptions to the rule. It's not a coincidence.

[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.

Wow! Did I write this? We got a new teacher at my Title 1 school last year. She came from a UMC county school and was in shock that her students didn't know anything. She spent days teaching them the prerequisites for each lesson. She would come into my classroom shaking her head everyday. "They don't know directions! North, south, east, west. How can I teach lessons about regions of the county when they don't know that? They don't know where the U.S. is on a world map. They don't know that there are different time zones in the world." Needless to say, she was constantly under fire from admin because she was so far behind because she was trying to fill in the huge gaps. Some teachers just teach the lessons and ph well if the kids don't get it. They are under a lot of pressure to keep up with the pacing guides. I don't know if DCUMs readers can comprehend some of the students we encounter. Kindergarteners who don't know the right way to hold a book or that the story comes from the words on the page, not the illustrations. Native English speakers who enter our preschool at age 3 program regularly test at an 18 month old level for vocabulary. I have a kindergartener this year who had not only never seen her own name in print before, it took her over a month to really realize that what she was copying off her name tag onto all of her work was really her name. The light bulb moment came near Halloween. "Oh! This says, 'Elizabeth?' Oh!" This really doesn't have anything to do with the English language either. Native English speakers would absolutely be eligible for ESOL services at my school. I'd estimate half of them would test as LEP (Limited English Proficient) on the placement test I give to non-native English speakers.

This is heartbreaking

[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?

You politically correct fools will never understand the "Achievement Gap" if you are this overly sensitive. Of course not all poor people ignore and neglect their children. Just like I can say "Of course not all poor children do poorly in school". But, I can tell you with almost certainty that poor children whose parents ignore and neglect them will struggle in school. We can even remove the word "poor" from that sentence. Neglect is a strong word (and I think you used it improperly to try and prove some point).

Sure. And affluent children whose parents ignore and neglect them will also struggle in school. As you say.