By Tom
While leafing through a recent copy of The Stanwood-Camano Crab Cracker, looking for something to do in the greater Stanwood metropolitan area, one event caught my eye:
Ready Reader: Preschool Storytime; 9:30AM or 10:30AM at Stanwood Library. Let imaginations run wild with fun books, sing-along songs, and creative activities that prepare young minds for the adventures of reading. Playtime or craft may follow. Ages 3 to 5 years. Caregiver required.
There it was: the Achievement Gap, in all its ugliness, hiding beneath something as sweet and innocuous as a preschool story hour. But when you think about it, the implications are clear: if you want your child to get ahead – and stay ahead – then you need to get her down to the Stanwood Library on Wednesday mornings. This is what we tell ourselves.
It's certainly what my wife and I told each other. She interrupted her career for ten years and took our children to every story hour, tune-time and kiddy-exercise class in town. And when nothing was scheduled, she read to them or took them to the zoo. Why? For the same reasons you did all those things: she wanted to give our kids every advantage so that they’d be successful in school and beyond.
We talk a good game in this country, but we really don’t want a level playing field. We’d rather play downhill. We want to get ahead and we want our children to get ahead. We don’t want our children to enter school and then learn how to read, we want them to enter school knowing how to read. And if possible, we’d prefer that they enter a school in which everyone knows how to read. That’s the American way. It’s probably the French way, the Mexican way and the Ukrainian way too, for all I know, but it’s definitely the way we do it here.
So we tell young parents to engage their children in all these learning activities. And we tell them that if they do, it will help their children be successful. We also tell them that if they don’t, their children risk becoming unsuccessful. Later on, of course, those prophecies pan out. The Ready Readers get the best grades, go to the best colleges and grow up to get the best jobs, and the kids whose parents couldn’t read the Crab Cracker, or didn’t know where the Stanwood Library was, or simply didn’t have time off on Wednesday mornings fell behind. Just like we said they would.
But then something weirdly ironic happens. After spending untold amounts of time and money giving our children “every advantage,” those of us who got our preschoolers to the library on Wednesday morning bemoan the eventual and predictable results. We’re bothered by the fact that, lo and behold, kids who had access to early learning are doing much better than the kids who didn’t. Or at least we say we are. So we get our legislators all fired up, and before long we’re trying every school reform idea we can think of in an attempt to help the other kids catch up to our Ready Readers. Some of those reforms work to some degree, some don’t, but none of them do a thing to target the real gap in this country; the gap between parents with the knowledge, capacity and desire to do everything they can to help their kids succeed in school, and the parents who don’t know how to do those things, who don’t have the time or money to do those things, or who simply don’t want to do those things.
We can’t have it both ways. We can’t tell young parents how to prepare their children for school and then simply erase the gap between the kids whose parents do or don’t follow that advice.
The achievement gap is all too real. I see it every day in my classroom. I can tell you exactly which kids came from families whose highest priority was reading readiness. I can also tell you which kids came from families whose highest priority was food for dinner. And sadly, I can also tell you which kid came from a mom whose only priority was scoring crack.
The overriding question in American education right now is how to close this achievement gap. I certainly don’t have the answer. But I can tell you this much: The answer involves more social engineering and more wealth redistribution than any serious politician would even consider. And more money than anyone wants to spend. Not only that, I’m not even sure we’re asking the right question.
What I wonder is whether or not we really want to close it.
Touche Tom!
Thank you for the chuckle!
Tracking? That is SO British Empire! This is America. In America we don’t track, we have differentiated preschools, reading groups in grade school, honors classes in middle school, AP and IB in high school, but we don’t track!
Yes! Thank you Tamara. Tracking should not be taboo. Kids should be in classrooms which can cater to a narrow range of specific needs–not all needs at once. It simply makes sense. Which is exactly why people won’t do it. Or, one reason at least.
You are both right: the national commitment to capitalism is what drives this chicken/egg conversation. But where I digress is the money part. I don’t think more money is going to solve anything. Wiser allocation of current dollars might do something. But not more total cash. Because you are both also pointing to an elephant in the room that starts with T. I have mentioned it before: Why is Tracking taboo? You acknowledged we have de facto tracking system: The Ready Readers and the Not-so-Ready-Readers. So why not set aside the proverbial hand wringing, call it like it is and make that defacto system official? Instead of differentiated learning let’s spend the dollars on targetd intstruction (that is instruction NOT intervention). The folks that worry about brain-drain, escalating behaviors without role models, I say to you: Isn’t that what you already have? But as you both pointed out, American capitalism is such that people would rather bemoan the situation than do anything truly meaningfull to change it.
I’m in a punchy mood and just came out of a meeting rife with heated argument, so take all this with a grain or two of salt.
It would be devastating to our country if the achievement gap were closed.
The quickest way to kill capitalism is to promote economic equality. People in power will seek to maintain systems which maintain their power, no matter what rhetoric is advanced. In order for the rich to be rich, someone has to be poor. That’s economics. If the rich want to stay rich, they have to find ways to keep the poor poor. Ideally, they will do so in a way that the poor do not realize this is happening. To help the poor not realize what is happening, it is best to keep them uneducated.
No, I do not believe that some rich group of illuminati are puppetmasters behind the scenes scheming to maintain the achievement gap. The maintenance of the gap is ensured by the system–it does not need a group of rich and powerfuls to maintain it. There is no one mind, nor one committee of minds, to make this happen. It happens because the socioeconomic system moves on its own.
We know how to solve the problem. It will cost money. We do, as a society, have the money to do it. But we don’t. And we won’t. If it were something the people in power wanted solved, it would be solved.
Where’s that salt shaker?