Askwith Education Forum
Parents' Role
New York Times writer talks about parenting and the achievement gap
by Lory Hough
He’s spent the last few years immersed in trying to understand the achievement gap. He’s read the reports, talked to experts, and come up with his own list of questions. He even spent a year observing Geoffrey Canada, Ed.M.’75, head of an inner city nonprofit that works with low-income children and families. But New York Times writer Paul Tough still wondered: Why were some kids so far behind other kids when they got to kindergarten and what could teachers do to help them catch up?
“I realized that although schools are to blame for part of the gap, a lot of the problems begin early, in the home, before kids even get to school,” said Tough at a March Askwith Education Forum. What, he wanted to know, was going on in those homes?
As he started working on a Times Magazine story, he discovered that what parents say to their children, and how often they say it, is a big factor. Tough, whose November 2006 piece, “What It Takes to Make a Student,” received a lot of attention, said that by the age of three, the average child in a professional home has a vocabulary of about 1,100 words. Children on welfare have vocabularies of about 525 words.
The researchers “concluded that the size of each child’s vocabulary correlated most strongly to just one specific factor: how many words the parent spoke to the children,” Tough said. “By age three, a child in a welfare home hears about 10 million words. A child in a professional home hears about 30 million. The kinds of words they hear also vary by class. By age three, the average child in a professional home hears about 500,000 words of encouragement and 80,000 discouragements. For the welfare child, he or she would hear about 200,000 discouragements and only 60,000 encouragements.”
Tough was joined on the panel by moderator Ron Ferguson, a lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government, and by Assistant Professor John Diamond and Lecturer Rick Weissbourd, Ed.D.’87, both at the Ed School.
Tough joked that this kind of research on “parenting up close makes people nervous,” but was an important step to take. “We can’t change the genes of poor children. We can’t make them all middle class,” he said. “But we can target certain behaviors that are having negative impacts on poor children. Resources are certainly a part of it, but the bigger problem is that poor families don’t see their children’s lives as a constant series of educational opportunities.”
Diamond said that all parents want the best for their children, but there are obstacles.
“It takes money, time, and know-how,” he said. “It’s not just a choice. To the extent that we don’t create opportunities for parents to actually have context in which they can purchase books, purchase computers, purchase resources, get access to tutors, and engage in the processes that can enhance their children’s educational opportunities by creating structural opportunities for them to do so, then we’ll run into trouble and we will not be able to address these inequities that are so intense.”
Diamond said it was also important to look at other issues that shape children’s development such as low wages, health care, and nutrition.
“About a quarter of low-income children suffer from iron deficiency,” he said. “A large percentage actually experience protein deficiencies and other kinds of deficiencies in their diets, again, tied to specific structural constraints on families. I argue that social policy, to a large extent, has a lot to do with the situation we find ourselves in.”
Weissbourd said that although he is all for influencing the home language skills of children, rich or poor, we shouldn’t dismiss different parenting styles as better or worse.
“Lots of poor parents and parents of color don’t want to treat their children as equals. They want to maintain their authority and I think they’re right,” he said. “It’s middle and especially upper-class families who are treating their kids as friends, who are indulging their kids, who are failing to create high expectations and standards. There’s an epidemic of praising in middle and upper-class communities that I worry about.”
To watch this and other Askwith Education Forums online, visit www.gse.harvard.edu/news_events/webcasts.
About the Article
A version of this article originally appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
