Educators are optimistic folks. We have to be, as we rarely know how our
charges ever turn out, whether we made much of a difference one way or the
other. I teach college, used to teach
high school. I don’t know how elementary
school teachers feel about it, but their distance is even greater. We have to believe we are doing some good,
that students learn, that their lives will generally work out in the end, and
perhaps we played some small part in that.
Sometimes our judgments are flawed in the other direction. My son had a tough time in grade school, even
after his ADD diagnosis. When my wife, who
taught in the same district for over thirty years, chances to meet one of his
former grade school teachers, they tend to furrow their brow and ask
sympathetically how he’s doing. They are
astonished to learn that he finished college in four years at the most
exclusive University of Minnesota campus (everything’s relative) and ten years
later is a senior developer for a large financial software company based in
Kansas, making considerably more than his old man.
He blossomed in junior high, and in high school was drawn to
an English teacher, a former seminarian who applied Greek and Latin to the
language of literature in a compelling way.
He started to push me, reading my dusty, unread copies of Tom Jones and War and Peace before I had gotten around to them.
Who’d a thunk?
But look at the advantages he started with. Both my wife and I were college educated, had
stacks of books around the house, read to the kids from the time they could sit
up, talked to and with them frequently, took them places of “culture,” enrolled
them in organized (there was hardly any other kind!) activities like scouting
and sports, encouraged their predilections (Dan, origami; Amy, art), and
suffered little privation. All of which
is typical for a middle class family, according to the researchers Betty Hart
and Todd Risley in Meaningful Differences
in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, and Annette Lareau
in Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and
Family Life. They detail the ways in
which middle class life is different from life in lower rungs of the SES
ladder:
In
this historical moment, middle-class parents tend to adopt a cultural logic of
child rearing that stresses the concerted cultivation of children. Working-class and poor parents, by contrast,
tend to undertake the accomplishment of natural growth. In the accomplishment of natural growth,
children experience long stretches of leisure time, child-initiated play, clear
boundaries between adults and children, and daily interactions with kin. Working-class and poor children, despite
tremendous economic strain, often have more “childlike” lives, with autonomy
from adults and control over their extended leisure time. Although middle-class children miss out on
kin relationships and leisure time, they appear to (at least potentially) gain
important institutional advantages. From
the experience of concerted cultivation, they acquire skills that could be
valuable in the future when they enter the world of work. Middle-class white and Black children in my
study did exhibit some key differences; yet the biggest gaps were not within
social classes but, as I show, across them.
It is these class differences and how they are enacted in family life
and child rearing that shape the ways children view themselves in relation to
the rest of the world. (Lareau, 2011, 3,4)
Verbal interaction differs greatly between middle, and
working-class and poor families. This
verbal behavior can make a difference in a number of later academic areas,
particularly reading. First, though,
Hart and Ridley discuss the differences between the children in two different home
lives, working-class and poor in the first case (Turner House) and professional
(college professors):
Parent talk defines
and labels what children should notice and think about the world, their family,
and themselves and suggests how interesting and important various objects,
events, and relationships are. Words and
sentences, internalized as symbols, become a means for organizing experience
and rationalizing and relating it, as well as the basis for logical thinking,
problem solving, and self-control. The
words and expressions that give nuance and preciseness to talk [and,
eventually, writing] to other people also serve when talking to oneself as
thinking (p. 100).
What does the
language “experience” differential look like?
In a 5,200-hour year, the amount
[of words of “language experience”] would be 11 million words for a child in a
professional family, 6 million words for a child in a working-class family, and
3 million words for a child in a welfare family. In 4 years of such experience, an average
child in a professional family would have accumulated experience with almost 45
million words, an average child in a working-class family would have
accumulated experience with 26 million words, and an average child in a welfare
family would have accumulated experience with 13 million words (p. 199).
This talk differential leads to a vocabulary differential:
For the Turner House children, the rate
of adding words to the dictionary in daily use was markedly slower than the
rate at which the professors’ children were adding words…Projecting the
developmental trajectories of the growth curves into the future, we could see
an ever-widening gap between the vocabulary resources the Turner House children
and the professors’ children would bring to school. This seemed to predict the reality of the
findings of school research: that in
high school many children from families in poverty lack the vocabulary used in
more advanced textbooks (p. 10, 11).
Hart and Risley soberly assess the mountain educators and
families have to climb to narrow the divide:
we saw that by the age of 4, when the children had become competent users of
the syntax and pragmatic function of their language, patterns of vocabulary
growth were already established and intractable
(emphasis added) (p. 16).
Just to provide an average welfare
child with an amount of weekly language experience equal to that of an average
working class child would require 41 hours per week of out-of-home experience
as rich in words addressed to the child as that in an average professional
home (p. 201).
We teachers know such
disadvantages can be overcome. I’ve
taught the excerpt from The Autobiography
of Malcolm X where he describes his ignorance of words and his copying
pages from the dictionary he was allowed to have in prison. So we know it can be done. How many are motivated to do so, and what is
the hook? Will only the extraordinary
bite? I think we all know that the
answer is “of course.”
The most cogent article Paul Tough
has written about education is not about grit but about the need for parents of
all SES levels to own responsibility for the intellectual growth of their
children, because that seems to be the closest thing we have to an answer (Tough, 2016). Many, of course, need to learn what to do,
and I suspect many won’t be able to do what is necessary. We aren’t even considering the potentially
high handed paternalism this implies. In
any case, as Laureau has describe, the financial pressures on working class and
poor families make such a change unlikely.
Until we stop blaming schools for outcome disparities and talk seriously
about the inequities inherent in capitalism as practiced in the United States,
our efforts at real solutions will be misdirected. I think, frankly, that this is intentional,
since the monied class seems to control the political debate these days, and we
certainly don’t want to seriously question the merits of unrestrained capitalism.
Consequently, our efforts to
intervene in the lives of our students will have success only at the margin. The conclusion I draw from the multiplicity
of studies is that there is no silver bullet, that we aren’t really sure what
to do to increase graduation and transfer rates, so we are willing to try all
sorts of things. We are going to have to come to grips with the facts of the
matter soon, because the coffers to support interventions are bleeding cash and
patience is wearing thin, which is behind the misguided appeal to business
efficiency to save the day.
That doesn’t mean we give up
trying to be the best teachers we can be, or that we stop helping students who
want our help. That is the social
contract we signed when we first walked into a classroom. But the hand-wringing should stop. The coercion should stop: programs like Achieving the Dream and NYC’s
ASAP focus only on full-time students, which is a distinct minority in
community college. It may be true that
full-timers are more likely to graduate or transfer to a four-year school, but limiting
our notion of student success to those two outcomes is short-sighted and more appropriate for
four-year colleges. Wild and Ebbers have
the best advice yet for getting perspective on community college retention: focus
first on identifying each individual student’s goal and their persistence
toward achieving it. It may be that
students are in school just to try it out, to see if it’s something they can
do. It may be that a few classes are all
they need to get the better job they seek.
It may simply be that they are curious about something and that’s
it. They tell us they want an A.A., or a
certificate, or to transfer to the local university, but whether their stated
goal is real or not may escape the instructor and the researcher. Beware self-reporting.
The defensible course for us is to
find out what our students want as well as what they need, and to simply tell
them when the two don’t match. Giving
students options on how to cope with the discrepancy would foster agency and
maturity, whether they stick it out or not.
Letting young people make mistakes and accept the consequences is also
an empowering move which educators, more and more emulating helicopter parents,
seem unable to accept. It’s time we did.
References
Goleman, D. (1985, May 12). Insights into
Self-Deception. New York TImes. Retrieved June 10, 2016.
Hart, B., & Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful
differences in the everyday experience of young American children.
Baltimore: P.H. Brookes.
Lareau, A. (2011). Unequal childhoods:
Class, race, and family life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tough, P. (2016, May 21). To Help Kids
Thrive, Coach Their Parents. NY Times. Retrieved May 21, 2016.
X, Malcolm. “Learning
to Read” excerpt from The Autobiography
of Malcolm X. Prof. Rachel Bell’s Home Page. San Mateo Community College.
Accessed June 10, 2016. http://accounts.smccd.edu/bellr/readerlearningtoread.htm
