The Achievement Gap Starts Before Kindergarten

"By age three, the children of professional parents
had vocabularies of about 1,100 words,
and the children of parents on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words.
And the children's IQs correlated closely to their vocabularies.
The average IQ among the professional children was 117,
and the welfare children had an average IQ of 79."
-- Paul Tough, in his book Whatever It Takes

A landmark study in 1995 by Todd Risley and Betty Hart found that the number of words a child hears from their caregiver by the age of 3 correlates very closely with their level of achievement during their school years. A new study just came out by Anne Fernald. She found that differences in comprehension were apparent as early as 18 months of age between children raised in low income, low vocabulary families and children raised in wealthier, high vocabulary families. (Both studies also found that lower income families often used less vocabulary. So it wasn't just that they sought out low income families that also used more basic vocabulary. They found that the two just came together in most cases.) So to affectively tackle the achievement gap problem that is apparent as soon as students enter kindergarten, changes need to be made before that point.

What should that look like in the Poudre School District? We already have some early childhood education. Is getting children into school at younger and younger ages the answer? Or should we target teens in high school, many of whom are the parents of tomorrow? If they learn now that the larger a child's vocabulary the better they'll do in school, will that inspire them to talk more to the kids they have in years to come? It certainly wouldn't be a quick fix for our low income schools, but it could have an affect a decade from now.