Can achievement gap be closed with extra tutoring?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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

I’m the first teacher who posted and it’s absolutely reality. The examples PP gives happen all the time in my school as well. And it’s not just the ESOL students, it’s the native English speakers as well.

[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.

DCUM generally prefers to ignore the reality that not all white-non-Hispanic and Asian-American people in Montgomery County are affluent and educated, and not all black and Latino/Hispanic people in Montgomery County are poor and with limited education. Especially the latter part.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:


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.

Well, it does. If you don't speak standard American English at home, then you have to learn it at school.

[Anonymous]

Thank you. So we have solved the problem of achievement gap. Everyone is being educated to their level. I see no problem at all.

[Anonymous]

It’s nearly impossible to reverse years of improper English spoken at home.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It’s nearly impossible to reverse years of improper English spoken at home.

No, it's not "improper" English, and no, it's not nearly impossible. Unless you want to say that it's also nearly impossible for children who don't speak English (any form of English) at home to learn English at school?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The achievement gap will never be closed

Societies will always have lower middle and upper classes and more importantly need them to function

Except this gap has a strong racial and ethnic correlation with documented factors related to teacher bias interfering with access to rigorous and meaningful instruction at critical points.

—AA MCPS teacher and parent

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s nearly impossible to reverse years of improper English spoken at home.

No, it's not "improper" English, and no, it's not nearly impossible. Unless you want to say that it's also nearly impossible for children who don't speak English (any form of English) at home to learn English at school?

It isn’t improper when people say, “He ain’t got no homework”? ESOL students often mimic their peers when they start learning English and then you have an entire class saying, “I don’t got any crayons at home.”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The achievement gap will never be closed

Societies will always have lower middle and upper classes and more importantly need them to function

Yes, I also learned about the Great Chain of Being as a justification for the social hierarchies in medieval and Renaissance Europe. But then came the Enlightenment.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s nearly impossible to reverse years of improper English spoken at home.

No, it's not "improper" English, and no, it's not nearly impossible. Unless you want to say that it's also nearly impossible for children who don't speak English (any form of English) at home to learn English at school?

It isn’t improper when people say, “He ain’t got no homework”? ESOL students often mimic their peers when they start learning English and then you have an entire class saying, “I don’t got any crayons at home.”

No. It's non-standard, and in school the general expectation is that you will use standard English. So I guess it's improper in the sense that you're not using the proper kind of English for school. But in other contexts, it would be entirely proper English.

[Anonymous]

Right and we are talking about school so....

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Right and we are talking about school so....

It's not improper English. It's improper choice of variety of English. And yes, the distinction matters.

Just as, for example, in some circumstances, I might say, "Nobody tells me anything," while in other circumstances, I might say, "Nobody tells me nothing." The important thing is that I am familiar with both forms and know when it's more proper to use the former or the latter. Google "code-switching".

[Anonymous]

Me no thinks that’s college and career ready English.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Me no thinks that’s college and career ready English.

Now that actually is improper English.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s nearly impossible to reverse years of improper English spoken at home.

No, it's not "improper" English, and no, it's not nearly impossible. Unless you want to say that it's also nearly impossible for children who don't speak English (any form of English) at home to learn English at school?

It isn’t improper when people say, “He ain’t got no homework”? ESOL students often mimic their peers when they start learning English and then you have an entire class saying, “I don’t got any crayons at home.”

No. It's non-standard, and in school the general expectation is that you will use standard English. So I guess it's improper in the sense that you're not using the proper kind of English for school. But in other contexts, it would be entirely proper English.

NP. What? Er, no. English is a language. Every language, including English, has grammatical rules. If you aren't following the grammatical rules, it isn't English. It's really as simple as that.

So the PP is correct. Those people aren't speaking English, or at least not proper English. There's no "proper English for school" and "proper English in other contexts". Holy moly. No wonder our schools are failing....

And I also agree with the PP that it's nearly impossible to teach someone to speak proper English when all through their early years, and every morning and night and all day on the weekend even to this day, they're hearing something that sounds vaguely like English but is actually not. And that's not even taking into account the entire class picking up this butchered language and reinforcing it to each other all day. Kids need proper models of the language. I've even seen video footage of teachers who talk that way. They probably know that it's wrong (at least I hope they do) but it's just so deeply ingrained by that point that it's difficult for them to speak properly even when they're motivated to do so.