Reply to Poll for Teachers. Your top 5 reasons for metro D.C poor performing schools.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

That being said, Pre-K cannot cure everything. I just assessed all of our K students (not just ESOL) on their ability to write their name, ID shapes, colors, numbers to 31, letters and letter sounds. Many of the students who had a year of Pre-K still knew very few of these concepts. Reinforcement at home is key, and it doesn't happen in many families. What we're finding is that many parents don't really engage in much vocabulary-rich conversation with their kids. And by vocabulary-rich at this age, I mean things like talking about the colors of the food they're eating or that the TV is shaped like a rectangle.

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Then there are the students who were born in the US, can speak and understand English just fine, but come to school with extremely limited background knowledge. They come to Pre-K or K at 4 or 5 with very little vocabulary. They need to learn from the ground up. The curriculum (at least in my district) assumes that students have a certain amount of background knowledge from which to draw, but they just don't. So then content becomes more and more in depth and students fall farther and farther behind. Like 4th graders who are learning about different types of government, but don't know what a city, state, country or continent is and think that Barack Obama is the president of the whole world. This happens with ELLs and also students who don't speak or understand any language other than English.

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I think these are incredibly important points that aren't well understood by many. There is an ENORMOUS difference in the way the average person of higher SES/education talks to her young children compared with how the average person of lower SES/education does. It cannot be overstated. Think about how and how much many of us talk to our toddlers and preschoolers all day long:

"Yes, that is a tricycle. Do you see how it has three wheels? One, two, three. Mommy's bicycle has only two wheels. One, two."

"Do you want to wear your purple shirt or your red shirt?" (Kid points to purple) "Purple it is! Purple is one of my favorite colors. Do you know what else is purple in this room? I see something purple on your bookshelf. Can you find it?"

"Oh my goodness, what could that loud noise be?! Did you hear it? There it is again! Let's go look. Do you think it's the trash truck? No? Maybe it's a fire truck!"

"Are you going to use your doctor kit to give me a check up? Okay. I wonder if I have a fever. Can you check my temperature with the thermometer? It goes under my tongue. No, thermometers don't go in people's nostrils." (Kid: What is a nostril?) "You know those two holes that everyone has in their noses? Those are nostrils. One nostril, two nostrils."

"Hey, look, there's the library. Maybe we can stop there on our way home. Do you remember the name of the librarian who helps us find our books? That's right, Miss Larla. What kind of books should we ask Miss Larla about?"

and on and on and on and on and on. All day, every day.

Look at the concepts and vocabulary in just those few sentences above. Now think about a home where these kind of conversations just don't take place. It is like this in many more homes than people realize. These children get to school and they are, literally, YEARS behind. And catching up is almost impossible, because the homes in which those conversations occur between adults and preschoolers become the homes in which adults and school-aged children talk about elections and the discovery of a planet in another solar system and how to calculate a batting average and what the difference is between a hurricane and a tropical storm and what ISIS is and what makes someone born a boy or a girl and why are some people transgender. And on and on and on and on and on. All day, every day. And so the children of the haves continue to pull away from the children of the have nots.

I think the culture of poverty can only be changed by trying to change the culture of *parenting* in poorer communities. But it is incredibly hard, because adults are shaped by the way they themselves were parented. [/quote]

For the record, I don't believe Chinese parents talk to their kids like this (I'm white, married into a Chinese family). My DH is always shocked by how white American parents talk to their children. So, whereas as talking could help, it's not necessarily a simple cause-effect situation. In social work, it's believed that low academic achievement correlates with persistent trauma. In a way, it seems that poverty works similarly to PTSD, and PTSD-affected parents raise PTSD-affected children.[/quote]

I'm the PP who wrote about the way American parents of a certain class/education tend to speak to their children, and I agree that this is probably not universal, but it does, I think, speak to why poor children are often far behind their peers when they start school. I wholeheartedly agree with the notion that living in poverty can have PTSD-type effects. Recent research strongly suggests that living in stressful conditions for prolonged periods of time can have life-long effects on health (including mental health) and well-being.[/quote]

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