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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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."

[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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.[/quote]
This is heartbreaking [/quote]

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. [/quote]

Universal preschool could be beneficial for these children.
There is a 2017 OLO report on the costs and benefits of such a program.  The benefits are massive but the costs are also really high 
(full day PreK for 10,000 students in the county would cost around $120 million).  Right now only 3300 get county funded preK, mostly in half day programs.
see page iii of the report
https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/OLO/Resources/Files/2017%20Reports/OLOReport2017_7PreKinMontgomeryCountyandinOtherJurisdictions.pdf[/quote]

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