Continued
I want to spend most of this talk explaining why a narrowing of the quality gap also narrows the fairness gap. And I want to show that any school can narrow these two gaps. Once the underlying principles are understood, adequate yearly progress for all groups becomes less impossible as an achievement.
From my empirical research I understood the underlying reasons for the quality/equity correlation. That’s why I went searching in the NAEP data to compare the states — confidently predicting what the outcome would be, and when the scatter plot showed a .92 quality-equity correlation I was gratified but not surprised. Now I want to spend a few minutes explaining the nitty-gritty reasons for these large-scale results at the level of the individual student.
Most people in education policy and research know the work of Betty Hart and Todd Risley in their book Meaningful Differences. They showed that toddlers in low-income homes tend to hear fewer words and simpler sentences than higher-income children. They come to school with much smaller verbal repertories than high-income children do. In other studies, Keith Stanovich and his colleagues have shown why this early gap often increases with subsequent schooling. His term “The Matthew Effect” comes from the Gospel of Matthew: “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.”
One simple illustration of this Matthew Effect is vocabulary. Vocabulary researchers estimate, as a rough average, that a person needs to know about 90 percent of the words in a passage in order to make sense of it. The rich get richer in vocabulary and the poor get poorer, because a prior knowledge of key words enables advantaged children to learn still more and more new words from a given discourse, while students who are ignorant of its overall verbal context are hindered in learning anything new from it.
Now let’s picture a classroom where the more fortunate students know at least 90 per cent of the words being used by a teacher, enabling them to gain knowledge about the other 10 percent of words that they did not already know. At the same time, the students who did not already know 90 per cent of the words would be mystified by what the teacher said, and would fall still further behind. In such a case exposure to the very same discourse in a classroom causes the rich to get richer and the poor poorer. They feel left out and discouraged, and are likely to tune out and create discipline problems. For such students the verbal gap tends to grow ever larger as they go through school. That is the Matthew Effect.
But according to NAEP scores, that is not what happens on average to disadvantaged students in the United States. The gap between groups does not grow significantly larger as they go through the grades. Rather, according to NAEP, the verbal gap starts out large and remains more or less the same from 4th through 12th grade. So, currently our schools seem to be having a null effect on fairness — which means we are doing better than Germany, Poland, or Luxembourg which have a negative effect that causes the gap to grow larger. Our null result might have been predicted from our midpoint, null position on the quality/equity scatter chart of the OECD. In the United States, we don’t do much to foster either quality or equity. But we can also see from these results that the Matthew Effect is not inevitable. Some entire national systems and some individual American schools have overcome it. How did they do this?
To understand the mechanism we need to make one small change in the picture offered by the path-breaking work of Hart and Risley and Stanovich. Their discussions are centered on language. But language is only part of the story in determining verbal achievement. The family interactions that Hart and Risley observed over many weeks and months were not just verbal in nature. They were also referential; they referred to things and people in the world. If a toddler is being told the difference between a wooden toy and a plastic toy, it’s not just the two words “wooden” and “plastic” that are being learned, but also things about the world. Language is not a purely enclosed system. It’s a tool we use to name, describe and understand physical, social, and psychological realities. Advantaged children experience not only richer vocabularies and syntax but also more of what language refers to. This was implicitly understood by Hart, Risley, and Stanovich, but it’s a point that needs to be amplified, because it holds a key to why some schools and some whole national systems have been able to narrow the verbal gap.
Let’s consider a second-grade classroom to see in detail how it’s done. Let’s say the class is discussing farming and the Nile River. Here’s a passage for children that I lifted from the internet.
Suppose that is read aloud to the students. Let’s pretend that everyone in the class is already slightly familiar with Egypt, with the Nile, and farming, so that the passage makes some degree of sense to everybody in the class. This is a hugely important assumption about background knowledge that I will discuss in a moment. Let’s also suppose that the advantaged children in the classroom also know two words that disadvantaged children do not know — say, the word “annual” and the word “fertile.” But all the students know enough to get the gist of the passage.
In this snapshot, we witness a tiny bit of gap narrowing. Here’s why. When all the children in the class understand the gist of the discourse, they are able to make fairly accurate, if vague, guesses about the meanings of all the words. Both advantaged and disadvantaged children begin to get a better handle on the subject matter. At the same time, disadvantaged students are also making gains in understanding the words “annual” and “fertile,” gains that advantaged students are not making, because they already knew those two words. Under these conditions, disadvantaged children will learn even more than advantaged ones from the same discourse. A little bit of verbal catching up has occurred because those who started behind have learned a tiny bit more about language than those who already knew those two words “annual” and “fertile.” This illustrates the basic mechanism of gap narrowing at, so to speak, the molecular level. The have-nots have gained what the haves already had. This could be called the “anti-Matthew effect.”
But notice how tiny the catching up was in this example, and how very slow word learning is for all children, advantaged or disadvantaged. It takes many exposures to a word to gain a confident sense of its potential connotations. The slow cumulativeness of vocabulary growth cannot be over-emphasized. Tiny changes build up very gradually over many years. Don’t be misled by the frequently-repeated statement that young children learn 15 new words a day. That’s not precisely what happens. Progress in verbal ability occurs with glacial slowness along a broad front. Children learn a tiny bit each day about hundreds of words, and what they learn in any given school year may be almost imperceptible. The accretive process takes place over several years. The gains that occur in an individual class may be so small and so latent as to be un-measurable. (No wonder short-term educational assessment is so hard!) It’s only when a child reaches high-school or college age, and has acquired many thousands of words, that researchers can divide that large number by the number of days the student has lived since age two. That’s how we come up with the somewhat misleading number of 15-words a day.
Your analysis is completely off-the-mark in my opinion. My sisters children went to school in ‘the best’ programs New Hamshire had to offer, were at the top of their respective classes, and found themselves struggling to catch up to the curriculum base they were offered when they relocated to California (Irvine). We have two close friends who have studied (one still their doing research)at Harvard, who will tell you how openly racist the environment there is. People don’t progress well academically in such environments. We would all do much better to follow Dr. Montessori’s philosophy and stop trying to re-invent the wheel.
BML