'Language-Gap Barrier Bolsters a Push For Pre-K'

I doubt it. I think that steers into the education gap, though not necessarily. Lower income moms who work multiple jobs/have no time/no books in the house vs. college educated women with one good job and lots of books in the house...obviously, there's a whole spectrum in there. There are lots of houses without books.

 

I would be curious if having a stay at home parent makes much of a difference. I don't know... I have relatives who are stay-at-home parents and there is no way their kids read or do artwork or get outside the way kids who are in a good daycare do. Our daycare would read to them every day and then we'd do the same at night and my kids have had reading as part of their everyday life for as long as they can remember.

Obviously, it's not always like that.

 

More than likely, the uneducated parents had uneducated parents themselves, and don't know inherently that talking to their kids and reading to them is going to give them a leg up. The educated parents might not know that inherently, either, but they do know that's what their parents did with them. My kids' high school has a wide range of education levels, and draws from one particularly poor community, so a lot of time is spent explaining stuff you know already if you went to college (such as, the grades start counting now for college), but would likely have no idea if you didn't, or didn't know people who did.

 

I'm a SAHM, so whenever a new study on this is reported, I pay attention (though not with the rigor quant gave to the one about spanking.) Repeatedly, the findings are very close for the children of engaged mothers and those in high-quality daycare. The children score somewhat differently on individual components, because some are benefitting from better socialization and the others from increased one-on-one attention, but their overall performance is usually a toss-up.

I've never seen a study comparing negligent SAHMs with poor daycare; not sure how you'd set that up.

Our school district is 90% middle and upper-middle class, with a pocket of poor families. I know from volunteering at the elementary school that some of those kids arrive in kindergarten not recognizing their shapes and colors. That's something any non-mentally impaired 5-year-old can understand, but they need parents who know that it should have been taught already.

Extrapolate from something that fundamental across all the different pieces of knowledge the privileged child will acquire naturally and you end up with a huge discrepancy, including the vocabulary words "extrapolate" and "discrepancy."

 

That is astounding. I don't know that I've even tried to teach my son shapes and colors. It naturally occurs because, well, you have to describe shit.

 

Is your kid in day care?

 

Yes. There's also his mom, my wife, the elementary school robo-teacher who probably taught him some of that. But it seems astounding to me that a kid wouldn't know his colors by elementary school. Don't they use crayons?

 

They would know red/blue/yellow/black/white. After that, it was a crapshoot. For some reason, green was better recognized than orange.

They would know circle and, usually, square. A triangle was unlikely, and a diamond (which is now a rhombus) was unheard of.

Obviously, this is a small sample. It's just what I saw.

 

My oldest, who's now a sophomore in college, wanted to go to a particular school for K-5* because her best friend was slotted neighborhood-wise for that school. Given available capacity, they'd let you go out of your neighborhood school in that district (and, in reality, it was no more than a block or two farther away). There was one caveat, however, and that was that, since this was some quasi-magnet school, if you were coming in from out of its zone you had to be "admitted." So, seriously, my daughter had to take an admissions test to get into kindergarten.

Anyway, so we took her in there to meet with some teacher/counselor for the test. One of the first things the lady did was to take out a purple crayon and and ask my daughter, "Do you know what color this is?" My daughter got this really perplexed look on her face and then said, "Well, it says it's purple on the label ..."

*Whatever you call that year before 1st grade

 

Or, was this study wrong, and are you a racist for believing it?



https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cdev.13072

 

Good God, man. Do you have a database of old threads or something?

 

Duh.