kitchen table math, the sequel: Direct Instruction Featured in City Journal: "How to do Pre-K right"

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Direct Instruction Featured in City Journal: "How to do Pre-K right"

About City Journal:
City Journal is the nation’s premier urban-policy magazine, “the Bible of the new urbanism,” as London’s Daily Telegraph puts it. During the Giuliani Administration, the magazine served as an idea factory as the then-mayor revivified New York City, quickly becoming, in the words of the New York Post, “the place where Rudy gets his ideas.” The Public Interest goes further, calling City Journal “the magazine that saved the city.”

But City Journal is a national, not just a local, force, with a readership that spans the U.S.—and an especially enthusiastic audience in the nation’s capital. The country’s most thoughtful journalists are among the quarterly magazine’s subscribers, as are top businessmen and financiers. City officials from coast to coast are loyal fans, and mayors from Milwaukee’s John Norquist to Oakland’s Jerry Brown happily acknowledge City Journal’s influence on their own thinking and policy. Newspapers across the land, from the Wall Street Journal to the San Diego Union-Tribune, regularly print adaptations of City Journal articles, disseminating the magazine’s influence to millions of readers.


Here's the meat of the "How to do pre-k right" article

The strongest case against spending even more public money on preschool is the disappointing return on such investments so far. Well-designed evaluations of Head Start and state-run programs have found that children attending them show only modest gains in academic or social skills—and none that endure for long—compared with peers who stay home or go to child care. A large-scale study of Head Start by the Department of Health and Human Services compared the progress of about 5,000 three- and four-year-olds, all from poor families, some enrolled and some not enrolled in the program. Children in Head Start did no better than the control group on assessments of the skills that best predict academic success, including oral comprehension, vocabulary, and math. Both groups remained on average far below national norms in every important measure of cognitive ability. The most rigorous studies of state programs likewise have yet to demonstrate that the academic gains from pre-K show up later in the form of improved scores on states’ early elementary school reading tests, typically given in third or fourth grade.

This persistent failure deserves some sympathy. In their 1995 book, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley quantified a language deficit in young children from welfare families so vast that it’s hard to conceive how even the best preschool might erase it. By age three, the authors found, children from families headed by parents who were professionals had heard, on average, over 8 million more words than children from welfare families. The kids themselves had spoken over 4 million more words than the welfare children. The oral vocabularies of the professional-family kids exceeded those not just of the children but of the parents of the welfare families. This astonishing language gap has grim consequences: follow-up studies showed that it correlates closely with large deficits in vocabulary and reading ability at age nine—which, in turn, correlate with large deficits in the reading ability, and consequent prosperity, of adults.

We should temper our compassion for the overwhelmed Head Start and pre-K teachers, however, by recognizing that they have not only failed to close the education gap but have done much over the years to widen it. Like those who practiced medicine 200 years ago, most early-childhood educators demonstrate little regard for scientific findings and base their classroom efforts on theories and personal preferences that empirical evidence has repeatedly contradicted.

Central to the typical early-childhood educator’s worldview are three ideas: that it’s better for young children to learn through play than through work; that children learn best and are happiest when they can help direct the pace and content of their own learning; and that a child’s mental abilities develop at a natural pace that adults cannot do much to accelerate. If a child fails to learn something, it’s not because the teaching is faulty, in this view; it’s because the child is either “learning disabled” or not yet “developmentally ready” to learn it—a notion derived from the theories of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who believed that mental abilities developed in age-determined phases.

From these premises flow a host of others. Pre-K teachers learn that it’s not “developmentally appropriate practice” to seat children at desks; to give them worksheets; to make them work to master the alphabet, letter sounds, and math; to assess their academic skills (medical, dental, and nutrition assessments are okay); and to group them by skill level for instruction (because all children should receive equal treatment and because children learn as much from one another as they do from adults). Many things that parents would call common sense are, for the preschool professional, high-risk activities.

No amount of contrary data has been able to dislodge this constellation of beliefs, which afflicts not just pre-K but elementary education as well. The largest experiment ever to compare different approaches to instruction in the early grades, sponsored by the federal government in the 1970s and known as Project Follow Through, tracked more than 75,000 K–3 students. It found that only one of the nine methods examined—the one least in keeping with educators’ traditional views—had consistently accelerated the academic achievement of poor children. The least successful approaches all shared the prevailing ideas. And if an approach fails in kindergarten, you can bet that it will fail in pre-K, too.

But Follow Through’s results proved too unpopular for the government to act on. Hence the same flawed ideas continue to absorb public funds and drive the training, accreditation standards, and state policies that shape today’s Head Start, pre-K programs, and elementary education. One can infer their ongoing failure from the lagging academic performance of children from poor families, nationally and in states like Georgia and Oklahoma, which have funded universal pre-K for years.

The one approach that Follow Through found had worked, Direct Instruction, was created by Siegfried Engelmann, who has written more than 100 curricula for reading, spelling, math, science, and other subjects. Engelmann dates DI’s inception to an experiment he performed at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in the summer of 1964. He took two groups of three- to five-year-olds—one white and affluent, one black and poor—and tried to teach them “sophisticated patterns of reasoning. . . . things that Piaget said couldn’t be taught before the age of formal operations—around 11 or 12.” These things included concepts like relative direction (A is north of B but south of C) and the behavior of light entering and leaving a mirror. Both groups learned what Piaget said they couldn’t at their age. But to Engelmann’s consternation, the affluent kids learned faster. He traced the difference to a severe language deficit in the African-American group (the deficit that Hart and Risley later quantified) and resolved to figure out how to overcome it.

Engelmann and two colleagues, Carl Bereiter and Jean Osborn, went on to open a half-day preschool for poor children in Champaign-Urbana that dramatically accelerated learning even in the most verbally deprived four-year-olds. Children who entered the preschool not knowing the meaning of “under,” “over,” or “Stand up!” went into kindergarten reading and doing math at a second-grade level. Engelmann found (and others later confirmed) that the mean IQ for the group jumped from 96 to 121. In effect, the Bereiter-Engelmann preschool proved that efforts to close the achievement gap could begin years earlier than most educators had thought possible. The effects lasted, at a minimum, until second grade—and likely longer, though studies on the longer-term effects weren’t performed.

The school also found that kids enjoyed learning “hard things” from adults and gained confidence as they gained skills. The key was to design the instruction carefully enough so that it worked even for the disadvantaged child—and to blame (and judiciously revise) the instruction, not the child, when the instruction failed. This approach in turn meant trampling the most sacred myth of the profession: that teachers always know best how to teach their kids, and hence deserve wide latitude in the classroom. Unlike other curricula, Direct Instruction programs tether teachers to a tightly scripted sequence of interactions. Engelmann’s field testing found that the scripts were the best way to prevent teacher miscommunications that could confuse the student. The scripting also improves efficiency: DI lessons consume an hour at most of the preschool day.

Engelmann’s results at the University of Illinois were replicated during the 1970s and 80s at nine sites across the country. Yet despite these successes, DI has faced little but scorn, neglect, and incomprehension from the educational establishment. Few education schools teach Direct Instruction techniques, except for special-ed classes, and few preschools or K–12 schools use DI curricula. None of the early DI preschool sites survived the whims of changing leadership, and Engelmann says that he knows of 200 places that improved student achievement after adopting DI, only to relapse after a new principal or superintendent capriciously dropped the program.

One site that has endured is Hampstead Hill Academy, a public charter school (pre-K to grade 8) operated by the Baltimore Curriculum Project, a nonprofit organization specializing in Direct Instruction. Stephanie Brown has taught DI math, reading, and language curricula there for ten years, the last five in all-day, state-funded pre-K. Eighty percent of her students come from poor homes, more than half are African-American or Latino, and one-third are immigrants still learning English. Many arrive not knowing how to hold a pair of scissors, use pronouns, speak in complete sentences, or follow simple directions. By the end of the school year, they have learned to sort objects into classes, identify opposites, recognize logical absurdities, use synonyms and if/then statements, create definitions for objects, read simple sentences, and do simple addition problems.

Brown breaks the rules of her profession. In the first months of school, she teaches her four-year-olds to sit at desks, work independently on exercises with pencil and paper, and concentrate for up to 30 minutes at a stretch (twice each morning) as she delivers the fast-paced DI lessons, one each for language and math. During DI time she breaks the class into three groups, arranged by skill level, to teach them more efficiently. She corrects mistakes quickly, firmly, and consistently.

“We’re going to start off with something really hard, but I think you can do it,” Brown says, beginning a math lesson that I observed in June. Seven children sit in a semicircle around her. Nine others are at their desks, cutting out, coloring, and ordering pictures of the life stages of a butterfly. Two others get extra practice on a language lesson with Brown’s assistant near the door.

“Read this,” Brown says, pointing at the “+2” written on the blackboard. “Everyone, get ready.” Following the script, she signals with her hand, and seven voices in unison say: “Plus two!” The simultaneity of response, a feature of all DI programs, instantly lets her know whether all her students are learning what she is trying to teach without having to take the time to call on each one individually.

“Very good! Plus two means the number that is two more. So, four plus two equals what number? Everyone . . .”

“Six!” they all shout.

The lesson lasts 20 minutes, after which the children return to their clusters of desks and five others take their place for a lesson from “Language for Thinking,” another DI curriculum. The transition takes no more than a minute. Each DI lesson reinforces and extends several strands of knowledge and skills that the children have learned in earlier sessions. Today’s language lesson includes work on the calendar, verb tenses, absurdities, questioning skills, definitions, opposites, and articulating descriptions.

“Get ready to answer some questions about a pair of scissors,” Brown starts. “Can you use a pair of scissors to cut paper?”

“Yes!”

“Can you use a pair of scissors to cut string?”

“Yes!”

“Can you tear scissors into little pieces?”

(Laughter.) “No!”

“Listen to this story and figure out what’s wrong with it. There was a woman. She wanted to wash the dishes, so she got out a broom.”

She calls on a little girl who points out the absurdity.

The least advanced group comes up for a lesson in “Language for Learning,” the program Engelmann wrote to address the language deficit in poor children. The focus today is on calendar facts, opposites, and similarities.

“Name the 12 months of the year,” Brown says.

The group answers correctly in unison.

“The story made us feel sad. Now say the sentence that tells the opposite.”

“The story made us feel happy.”

“I’m thinking of a broom and a hammer. How are they the same?”

One girl answers: “They both have handles.”

“Very good. How are they different?”

A boy says: “A hammer hurts you when it hits you, and a broom doesn’t."

Brown does DI lessons in the morning when the children are fresh. The rest of the day is devoted to standard pre-K fare: art, music, free play, gym, story time, and theme-based centers where students get to choose their activities, such as playing with blocks or kitchen utensils. “The children aren’t stressed out—they feel like the smartest kids on the planet,” Brown says. “Even the ones with behavior problems—it settles them.”

Direct Instruction rests on key findings in educational research. Children, particularly from poor homes, need lots of oral practice to master language and reading, studies have shown—hence the high number of responses-evoked-per-minute built in to DI curricula. Research has also confirmed that it’s possible to teach three-year-olds to hear and manipulate the individual sounds, known as phonemes, that make up words. Further, by three, most can learn to distinguish words that rhyme, and by four, they can understand the concept “letter” (that marks on a page correspond to specific sounds), learn the alphabet, and hear alliterations and syllables. Most middle-class children acquire these essential “pre-reading” skills—known collectively as phonological awareness—in the normal course of their upbringing. Most children in poverty and children with hearing deficits must be taught them explicitly, as DI does.

But the most significant—and least appreciated—research finding that justifies DI’s intensive, prescriptive approach remains Hart and Risley’s data on the language gap. “Time is the great enemy of the at-risk child,” Engelmann says. “He must learn more in less time, he is less experienced at learning, and he needs more practice. You can’t reproduce the form of the middle-class upbringing; you’ve got to try to reproduce the function. That means teaching kids the fast way.

The great stone in the road to a better preschool, in fact, is the dominance of pedagogical programs that don’t show teachers how to teach oral language and phonological awareness the fast way. The most popular, Creative Curriculum, controls about half the Head Start market. Another big seller is High/Scope. Absent major changes in how curricula get developed and approved for use in schools, these giants are about as likely to lose significant sales to the likes of DI as Budweiser is to get beaten by a microbrewery. So far, none of the 38 states funding pre-K has interfered with local decisions about curricula by, say, posting a list of programs that have passed rigorous field tests (or even by requiring such tests)—let alone by requiring districts that take state money to use them. Likewise, none of the studies of state pre-K programs has even compared the effects of competing curricula on student outcomes.

The other hole in the nation’s pre-K system is assessment, still a dirty word in most pre-K circles. Congress eliminated the Head Start National Reporting System, a series of cognitive tests given twice a year to Head Start children, after critics argued speciously that the tests ignored socio-emotional development and that the questions weren’t age-appropriate. Of the $3.72 billion spent by states last year on pre-K, almost nothing went to assessing children’s cognitive functioning or monitoring their progress against established norms. Without such data, states cannot set meaningful performance standards, much less hold districts accountable for meeting them.

Indeed, the nonprofit National Institute for Early Education Research doesn’t even include assessment in its ten-item Quality Standards Checklist, a popular tool for judging state pre-K programs. This is like appraising a painting with your eyes closed. The better curricula, DI included, build checkups in to their programs—another reason many educators don’t like them.

If the early-childhood education industry has persuaded states not to assess preschool children, monitor their progress, prescribe rigorously field-tested curricula, and evaluate the impact of individual preschools on student achievement—and if the state agencies don’t know how to do these things any better than the pre-K field from which their leadership is largely drawn—what can we expect the states to do to make early-childhood education more educational? Not much at this stage.

None of the bills in Congress is likely to increase rigor. Hirono’s Pre-K Act and Clinton and Bond’s Ready to Learn Act would support state plans that require “culturally and linguistically appropriate” curricula that meet the child’s “developmental needs” and are taught by teachers with degrees in early-childhood education or related fields. Either proposal would thus probably wind up spending a fortune perpetuating the fanciful doctrines that still dominate early-childhood education programs: the root of the weed.

The good news is that there are data-driven educators scattered in schools across the country, and even within a few state education agencies, who would be natural allies in a crusade for better pre-K. Alabama, Washington State, Arizona, and the federal Bureau of Indian Education have all built strong leadership in Reading First, the federal program targeted at poor children in K–3 that requires teachers to use research-backed practices. Officials there could gradually extend the use of effective curricula to pre-K. Another way to find allies is to ask vendors of the better curricula for sites that are doing well with their products. Bremerton School District in Washington State and Versa Reece Academy, a public school in Houston, both operate rigorous, data-driven preschool programs for poor children. But such areas remain in the minority.

If the philanthropists now investing in pre-K (more than $1 billion per year, by some estimates) want to try something radical, they might start a preschool modeled on Paul Weisberg’s now-defunct Early Childhood Day Care Center for at-risk kids in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Using teachers who didn’t even have a college education, Weisberg ran a DI preschool that produced impressive student achievement gains in reading and language for a decade, vividly demonstrating that what pre-K providers need most is good training in good curricula, not (as governments are now hearing) degrees in early-childhood education.

Even teachers with fallacious assumptions want to succeed and are generally eager to learn new ways to help their kids. Wise policymakers can promote the ways that work, and wise parents can insist that teachers use them. We cherish our myths about childhood. We must cherish our children even more.

Shepard Barbash is a freelance writer and former education advisor to the Atlanta Public Schools. His most recent book is Changing Dreams.

21 comments:

MariaP said...

A key point in your article is the role of PARENTS in a child's learning. If a parent is unable to read, the child is much more likely to enter school behind and to have trouble catching up. A comprehensive education program MUST include adult literacy education. If parents don't read to their kids as toddlers or value education or encourage their kids to reach for more, the teacher's job becomes much more difficult, and it is the rare child in such families who will truly reach his or her potential. Adult literacy programs are the missing link in current Pre-K strategies.

Independent George said...

MariaP - I disagree. I think the situation you describe indicates that education reform necessarily has to start from the assumption that the students will NOT be taught any academic skills at home, and that only what is physically taught in the schools are the only source of academic skills. Adult literacy programs may affect literacy amongst future students, but it seems unlikely to have much impact on current students.

Anonymous said...

This city journal piece speaks to all of my biases, so it's very difficult for me to examine in critically rather than say
"uh huh, of course, yup" but I'm trying to be thorough.

Can ANYONE tell me what this nonsense statistic means?

"By age three, the authors found, children from families headed by parents who were professionals had heard, on average, over 8 million more words than children from welfare families. The kids themselves had spoken over 4 million more words than the welfare children. "

what does this MEAN????

there aren't 8 million words in English. do they mean Utterances? What difference does the NUMBER of utterances make? Shouldn't the VARIETY of utterances matter? If you watched TV 12 hours a day, you'd definitely get more utterances, wouldn't you?

But let's try some simple calculations. 32 million seconds in a year. If a three year old starting "talking" at age 2 (because how much are they speaking BEFORE age 2???), in one year, then to have spoken 4 million utterances AT ALL means 4 million utterances in that year, 8 seconds. or, since they sleep half the day, a word every 4 seconds for 12 straight hours. to have said 4 million MORE than "the average" welfare kid means, what, doubling this rate, or so--4 million for the poor kid, 8 million for the higher, or something?

Doesn't this strike anyone as madness? My kid says a torrent of words, and still, this seems...um, excessive. plus, it still isn't really "more words" is it?

Anonymous said...

Alison, Here's an interesting interview with Todd Risley. They aren't talking about unique words, just the amount of talking that is going on.

Anonymous said...

thanks ,KPM.

Risley claims on that site "I mean, talkative families and college educated -- heard forty-eight million words addressed to them by the time they're four.

Children in welfare families who were taciturn heard thirteen million words addressed to them by the time they were four."

This is um, hard to swallow.
This claims that in 4 years, a child of "professionals" has had ADDRESSED TO THEM an average of 12 million words a YEAR. Let's go back to the claim: that's a word every 3 SECONDS 24 hours a day! TO THEM! (in a home where at least one parent works professionally....so who is doing the talking, btw?)

So that's a word and a half a second ADDRESSED TO THEM for every hour they are awake.

this is ludicrous. Even if you assume a college educated SAHP, maybe MAYBE a child hears 3 hours of continuous speech in a day, including every utterance NOT addressed at them, and still speech has pauses, rests, etc.

Anonymous said...

Those numbers seemed high to me too, but here's another way of looking at it:

12 million/year=
1 million/month=
33,333/day.

Assuming kids are awake about 12 hours/day, that's about 2750/hour. Women speak about 250 wpm (a little faster than men) although we probably slow down some when talking to little kids. Even so, 2750 words per hour doesn't seem all that outrageous to me. It seems on the high side, but it doesn't seem impossibly high.

Even if the numbers are high, the methodology would indicate non-differential bias, so the disparity between SES groups is probably still there.


I do think there needs to be further study before accepting the numbers though.

Anonymous said...

Hart and Risley's summary is here:
http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/spring2003/catastrophe.html

SteveH said...

We have an attack of "new urbanism" in our town, but it has to do with architecture and a change to the zoning laws. New Urbanists hold "charettes" to try and make us think that this is all about our vision for the town, but it's really all about their vision (SmartCode). I don't know why, but there are those in the field of architecture who see their role as social engineer.

SteveH said...

MariaP said:

"... the child is much more likely to enter school behind and to have trouble catching up."

Please quantify this exactly. What knowledge and skills do schools set as a prerequisite for Kindergarten. What, exactly, do schools want parents to do during the later grades? Schools can't hide behind this vague excuse. Look at the trivial NAEP or state test questions. What on earth are schools doing with 6+ hours a day, 180 days a year? The whole point of the article was DI and the efficient use of class time.

Anonymous said...

--Women speak about 250 wpm (a little faster than men) although we probably slow down some when talking to little kids.

Source please for this statistic!

There is no way that I speak 250 wpm for 60 STRAIGHT minutes to ANYONE, let alone TO my 2 yr old. This may be the "average burst rate" or some such notion, but it's not a sum of words per minute for 24 hours a day divided by 3600. And remember again, these numbers were supposedly reflecting speech toward the child. No one speaks for 60 straight minutes outside of a college lecture hall.

Because the methodology behind these calculations now seems so bizarre, it's not clear at all that we can assume the methodology in unbiased.

Anonymous said...

well, I've fallen down the rabbit hole with this one...

but A-ha! as Rabbit would say:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003419.html

The Language Log, a group blog by folks at U Penn, addressed this in 2006.

The "women speak 250 wpm" claim is attributed to Louann Brizendine and her book The Female Brain.

Not a whit of evidence to support it has been found. The Language Log poster, Mark Liberman, gets an average speech rate in TELEPHONE CONVERSATIONS of 170-175 wpm (and gets almost no sex based difference, either, unlike Brizendine's claim). He can't find any data to support the 250 number, can't find her evidence, and no one else has either.

Even so, you do not walk around the house all day long caring for a toddler speaking the amount you would in a telephone conversation. Easily, we can again reduce these numbers by a factor of 2, maybe 5, and maybe until we get some real data, another order of magnitude.

Anonymous said...

I think I am combining memories...
I remember learning that women speak faster that men in a psychology class I took years ago. I think they were referring to teachers. I can't find a citation for that - maybe it was bad information.

I am a health care provider, and was taught that we generally talk to patients too fast. The 250 wpm was an approximation of what I recalled being taught, but is close to what this article found:

From Rate of Speech of Health Care Providers During Interactions. with Aphasie and Nonaphasic Individuals

Mean rate of speech for all subjects to all assistants (both aphasic and nonaphasic) was 238 wpm. The 50 subjects spoke to nonaphasic assistants at a mean speech rate of 235 wpm. When these people spoke to aphasic assistants, the mean rate of speech was 240 wpm.
The health care providers as a group spoke to all assistants at a
mean rate of speech of 241 wpm. They spoke to nonaphasic assistants at a mean rate of 238 wpm and to aphasic assistants at 243 wpm; an increase of five words per minute in the face of aphasia. Our subjects spoke faster to aphasic than to nonaphasic individuals, but these differences were not
statistically significant.


But from A Quantitative Analysis of CEDA Speaking Rates

The literature is abundant with ranges of acceptable speaking rates for public speaking, and quantitative measurement of speak-ing rates are typically reported in terms of words per minute (wpm). The consensus of experts agrees that the range of normal public speaking is between 100 and 200 wpm (Fairbanks, 1940; Correll & Tiffany, 1960; Ross, 1965; Capp, 1966; Jensen, 1970; Burgoon & Ruffner, 1974; DeVito, 1981; Verderber, 1984; and Mayer, 1988).


I still don't think speaking 2700 words an hour to a small child is an unrealistic number, IF you are interacting directly with him during that time. Even if you assume a rate of 150 wpm, that's only 18 minutes of speaking per hour. But to do that every hour for 12 hours a day does seem unrealistic.

Anonymous said...

>>A key point in your article is the role of PARENTS in a child's learning. If a parent is unable to read, the child is much more likely to enter school behind and to have trouble catching up.


Yes, but it's not because of the inability to read. It's because of the lack of vocabulary & communication skills and time spent interacting with the child. The blind and the uncorrected dsylexics are able to impart school-adequate language skills to their offspring without reading books aloud simply because they have acquired the vocab and communication skills auditorially as well as through some touch and print.



>>A comprehensive education program MUST include adult literacy education. If parents don't read to their kids as toddlers

Disagree, see above

>>or value education or encourage their kids to reach for more,

ah, some motivation to attend perhaps? as well as dollars to provide educated teachers??

>> the teacher's job becomes much more difficult, and it is the rare child in such families who will truly reach his or her potential.

agree; but this is cultural values not adult literacy. It is our cultural boo-boo not to teach this segment of the population....Department of Defense schools and others around the world sucessfully teach the poor, so why can't US public schools adjust instruction to be appropriate beginning in K rather than ignoring the child's needs? The only thing stopping us is ourselves.

>>Adult literacy programs are the missing link in current Pre-K strategies

disagree for all of the above reasons

SteveH said...

"This astonishing language gap has grim consequences: follow-up studies showed that it correlates closely with large deficits in vocabulary and reading ability at age nine—which, in turn, correlate with large deficits in the reading ability, and consequent prosperity, of adults."

Or, it could correlate with the fact that schools don't know how to do their job. Don't you think that schools would notice that there is this "astonishing" gap and do something about it? Are they saying that by Kindergarten it's too late or difficult? Well, they better tell parents up front.

As I said before, what, exactly, do schools expect as prerequisite knowledge and skills for Kindergarten? What, exactly, do they expect from parents in the later grades? If kids get to fourth grade and can't read very well or do basic math, how do they separate the effects of parents, environment, and genetics? They have to have some way to judge their own success or failure, not just blame the parents, the child, or society.

How about for math. Do they see some sort of magical effect of high SES parents in the Pre-K years? Do high SES parents talk about more numbers? I'll bet they could come up with something. Good 'ol guess and check. It couldn't be that there is a huge systemic problem in teaching. It couldn't be that many parents do the school's job and make sure that learning gets done.

Let's quantify this a little bit. Are we asking too much from schools? Nobody says what they mean by success or deficits, but NAEP is as good an indication as any.

These math questions are for fourth grade:

One question (50% wrong) showed a clock and asked what time it would be after 6 hours and 25 minutes.

Another question (65% wrong) asked the students to add two dollar values: $4.95 and $2.45 and look up the tax for this amount in a table. They did not have to calculate the tax. They just had to add the two numbers and read the tax off the table.

Another question asks how much carpet you need to cover a room that is 12 feet wide and 15 feet long. (calculators are allowed) The second part asks how much the carpet will cost if it is $2.60 per square foot. (76% wrong)

Another shows a series of houses with one bicycle between each pair of houses. Each house is labeled and each bike is given a color. They have to determine the color of the bike between Hilda's and Michael's houses. Only 10% got this wrong, so you can probably ignore the effects of "parsing".

Yet another gives a list of the numbers 1 through 15. They have to circle all of the numbers that have 4 as a factor. (63 got this wrong)


If poor kids don't know how to tie their shoes in fourth grade, are they going to figure out what high SES parents are doing in the Pre-K years? Are poor kids destined to wear loafers for the rest of their lives?


Even if there is a correlation between the number of words heard in Pre-K years and success in life, why on earth would they think it is even a minor factor, let alone a major one? They are trying to solve a problem they can't or won't define.

The world of education is one big rabbit hole.

palisadesk said...

I'm glad to see the work of the Engelmann-Bereiter preschool flagged up for wider attention. I've posted about it on D-Ed Reckoning a number of times, but the data available, while detailed and extremely impressive, is in articles published in journals not online or easily accessed, so one has to be highly motivated to run down the primary sources.

I knew the work had been replicated elsewhere but not that it had been replicated in so many sites. Engelmann and Bereiter, in their book about the preschool, cautioned that equalizing the language gap between the disadvantaged children and their middle-class peers was still a distant objective. Though they boosted the language skills of their students to a significant degree, and taught academic skills with great efficiency, the language and vocabulary gap between the experimental group and the middle class controls was reduced, not eliminated. Wesley Becker some years later, reflecting on the efficacy of DI with low-performing students, noted that the vocabulary and verbal reasoning gap persisted despite excellent implementations of intensive instruction. Naturally there was individual variation, but the DI school implementations showed low-income students performing around the 50th percentile, which is significantly above the usual 20-25th percentile.

To date, no one knows how to eliminate the gap, of which preschool language environment is likely a large component. The IQ determinists blame it on IQ, but it is probable that the absence of sufficient language exposure, stimulation and development in the early years is an environmental disadvantage that we have not yet learned to overcome.

palisadesk said...

I recommend that those interested in Hart and Risley's work read the entire book, Meaningful Differences (etc.) which goes into great detail about their methodology and contains much valuable data about factors beyond the number of words heard. Verbal reasoning, ratio of positive to negative interactions, and other extremely important variables are addressed in detail.

They got their "numbers" by recording and counting (a data collection method generally called time sampling, or somthing like that). They explain how they arrived at the various totals. What is most important however is not the totals but the relative differences -- almost 4:1 in the case of verbal interactive experiences between the high and low groups. The type and quality of the interactions were of greater significance, IMO, than the volume. There is much data in the book and a thoughtful discussion of its implications.

As to rate of speech -- anyone wanting to investigate this in depth can find much data in the PT literature. Good readers read aloud at 200+ wpm, ordinary talking speed varies from just under 200 wpm to over 400. There is much variation depending on circumstances, individual differences, etc.

ElizabethB said...

I know people talk way faster than I thought!

I transcribed Robert Sweet's interview for Children of the Code (an excellent interview, by the way.)

I type about 70 WPM, I thought it wouldn't take me long at all to type up the interview. It took several weeks of working a few hours each night! Plus, my online mp3 player doesn't have good fine control for a 30+ minute interview, so I had to keep "rewinding" a bit past where I needed to each time. (The fine control varies on the total mp3 length.)

Also, I kept typing "happy" for "glad" and had to keep checking to make sure I'd typed the exact words spoken.

Anonymous said...

Sorry, but the other wpm issues are simply straw men. The methodology that led to this outrageous "gap" is thin at best. Steve is right, this is another way to blame the parents and the students rather than to say the teachers aren't teaching.

So, Risley says he's got a 42 children sample ("but it's sampled"), he's got an average of 1500 words an hour ADDRESSED TO THEM. And from that he goes on to say hour after hour after hour, rounding up, his math says that's happening 15 hours a day, EVERY SINGLE DAY for 4 years.

show of hands here how many people spend 15 hours a day with their own infants! or their toddlers! I mean, 15 hours of AWAKE time? No daycare?

He didn't even take, say 200 days a year. And where's tv in this picture?

So at BEST now we see that this means it depends on your daycare provider is where this comes from. And we're to believe that the professional parents pick more talkative daycare providers than welfare parents do, somehow, magically?

Let's look at any other culture in any other generation. You REALLY think those kids had their parents TALKING to them all the time? Go to generations where their parents didn't speak English, because they were immigrants! where was the gap then?

As someone else said, the problem ain't the stuff we don't know, it's the stuff we know that JUST AIN'T SO. This belief that there's a language deficit that somehow prevents teachers from pulling these kids up fits our biases, and so we don't question it too much. We don't even see it as a slur. It fits our own ego that we upper middle class folks are better parents. It's probably a calumny to poor people too. But what does it have to do with TEACHING?

Because if there's such an outrageous gap already in Pre K that teachers can't fix, then why in the WORLD should we give THEM OUR KIDS FOR 13 MORE YEARS???? I mean, by their own admission, if the parents' deficits are the issue, then what do they exist for?

Anonymous said...

Let me put it another way:

the article's argument is:

Children's experience is not egalitarian. This is inherently bad. This non-egalitariansim prevents children from learning long division, how to recognize a gerund, or who Lewis and Clark were. Pre K can make their experience egalitarian if "done right."

And by dint of this marvelous egalitarianism in Pre K, suddenly schools will have children that know long division, recognize gerunds, and know who Lewis and Clark were.

I'm all for direct instruction, and for Direct Instruction. But the holes in the above argument fit my M-1 Abrams. And they begin with "egalitarianism" is the highest goal of education, and continue with "magic wand of equality at 4 solves the remanining education problems." And in between, they cite some dubious statistics to tug on the heartstrings of why egalitarianism should be the highest goal, because obviously that's what's wrong with K-12 education.

palisadesk said...

For those interested in the issues re young children and language development, and secondarily what parents, teachers or others can do, some books worthy of study include:

I. General works about language development

1).Well-written for the educated general reader -- peppered with humor and insight, as well as a nice blend of new and old research and understanding into the cognitive development of babies and very young children:
Alison Gopnik et alia, here
The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind

Review here
and here

2). Ernst L. Moerk, The Guided Acquisition of First Language Skills

An engrossing book, a bit more scholarly but very readable, unravelling in detail the complexities of a child's language and cognitive development (the focus is on a particular child and parent case study which serve as examples). The role of interaction, scaffolding and feedback from the adult is vividly portrayed. Moerk wrote another book on a similar theme, A First Language Taught and Learned, but this book is a more gripping read.

3). A good companion volume to Moerk is Hart and Risley's less-well-known The Social World of Children Learning to Talk

It's not a formal academic volume, but a more anecdotal one, with illustrative examples of children learning different types of interactions, and how the child and adults eventually become partners in a dance of verbal communication. Good footnotes and links to more sources on topics like vocabulary, syntax, language patterns in various cultures, etc.

On language development into the school years, see:

4) James F. Kavanagh, (editor) The Language Continuum: from Infancy to Literacy
Essays by several prominent researchers and scholars, including Joanne Carlisle, Regina Ceci, Benita Blachman and others. Very helpful in understanding why some children have difficulty with the language aspect of reading, and includes an excellent chapter on helping children with language delays and significant language impairment.

Lucidly written and a nice balance between technical and scientific presentation and everyday English.

5) Priscilla Vail, A Language Yardstick:Understanding and Assessment

Excellent book for teachers and parents -- short, clearly written, with very specific and helpful guides in a Q and A format, e.g. Expressive Language in second grade: what are we looking for? Why does it matter? How do we assess? and a section on "red flags" for various things, with examples and explanations. VERY practical.

It's detailed enough to be much more helpful than a checklist or chart, with brief explanations of why certain things matter. Covers preschool to fourth grade.

6)A very dense but fascinating book on the origin and neurology of speech and language is this one:
Philip Lieberman, Human Language and Our Reptilian Brain

Not for the faint of heart, but absolutely riveting. The connection between the language and motor systems are explored and explained and most of this was new to me (and would likely be to others). Not a book to read on the bus -- takes a lot of concentration.

II. Language instruction and teaching at-risk children

1) Engelmann and Bereiter, Teaching Disadvantaged Children in the Preschool

Lots of information about the preschool program -- the need for accelerated learning, the details of the language program,language as a teaching instrument, the use of music, the reading and math program. This is not a scholarly book but a narrative one. The articles with the data on the preschool program's success were published elsewhere. This book has been out of print for some time but is easily found through abebooks.com or alibris.com. With occasional changes of wording, it reads like a contemporary story. I met Carl Bereiter at a conference a year ago and had just re-read this book and sadly commented, "Nothing has changed," to which he wryly nodded. Excellent discussions on management issues, the importance of an academic focus, and much more -- the book was 50 years (or more) ahead of its time.

2) Engelmann, Preventing Failure in the Primary Grades

This book, long out of print, is now available at the ADI store. It explains how to use the principles behind DI programs to teach basic concepts that many children have not learned and which are needed for success in school (and elsewhere).

Preventing Failure

There are numerous good books on teaching language skills to children with language delays and autism. I particularly recommend the works of Sundberg and Partington, as here
Children who do not have autism, but do have significant impairment in language, also benefit from these teaching procedures.

The public is not aware of how delayed in language many children actually are. For example, we have some sixth graders doing "Language for Thinking" -- referenced in the article as a preschool program. We have fourth-sixth grade general ed students in this group (or in Language for Learning) nearly every year. Fewer than 10% of our students enter kindergarten speaking in sentences (most have two or three word phrases, some do not speak at all). We have second graders who still speak only in baby talk or phrases. Engelmann is the only one, so far, to have developed school-ready programs to teach these students.

III. Ready, aim, fire!

For those who want to read something written in anger and exploding with rage at the school system, try:

1.Roger Bass, Amy's Game: the Concealed Structure of Education
The author could have used the help of a professional writer, like Catherine, but the story is so horrible, and the analysis of the education bureaucracy so devastating, that the book's structural flaws matter very little.

2. Engelmann, War Against the Schools' Academic Child Abuse


Another book to make you pound your fists on the table and scream. It's instructive to know thine enemy, but at the end, as Zig Engelmann reflected on his website (www.zigsite.com), ranting doesn't accomplish anything and makes you feel worse. He quit writing the book and took up painting. The message I abstracted from this was that it's important to know and recognize problems and identify agendas, but anger, sans a solution orientation, gets you nowhere.

More important, it doesn't help the children . Teaching them the skills they need -- regardless of who is to "blame" for their plight -- is the way forward.

Jamie said...

Your point about good training and good curricula is an important one. That's not to say that excellent teachers can't make a difference, but it must start from a good foundation.

The concept is pretty universally endorsed, e.g. even by the head of KinderCare:

http://education-blog.kindercare.com/2009/06/going-dutch-comparing-early-childhood-education-with-the-netherlands/