-------------------------
I will pose my usual thoughts when you start criticizing early ed.
Let's assume most children are roughly the same at birth, and that their environment from ages 0 to 5 determines if they will be kindergarten ready.
How would you help them be kindergarten ready if their parents are unwilling or incapable of helping them develop correctly?
Please remember that breaking bad habits, behaviors and beliefs is very difficult once they are well entrenched. Reading "Whatever It Takes" regarding the HCZ's experiences would help you understand.
Food for Thought
http://hcz.org/our-programs/
-------------------------
For the Liberal commenters. How do we reduce the number of children born to those who can not afford them? Or are not mature enough to raise them well?
"In a state in which 42 percent of births in 2013 were to mothers on Medicaid — a share that has been steadily climbing — a lot is riding on low-income children having a chance to catch up and keep up academically with the rest of the class."
"Since the poor are going to insist on reproducing, the many burdens on low-income parents need to be raised. Better access to child care would be a start, along with an increased minimum wage and better job conditions for low-income workers.
It's really comes down to realizing that the looter class is composed of fellow human beings who deserve to be treated with dignity and fairness, just as if they were job creators. And, no, treating them with dignity does not mean shrugging off their lives and aspirations with a patronizing "it was their choice to be poor!"" RB
"As for dignity and fairness, it sounds like you believe that tax payers / society should pay to care for immature single moms and the children they choose to have. This does not sound very fair or logical.
See page 2 and 6 of this document.
https://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/p70-126.pdf
Are you really saying that single parent households are something that society should fund and encourage? I have some low income dual parent friends with 2 kids. Life is challenging but everyone is fine. Single parents with one or multiple kids don't seem to work so well." G2A
20 comments:
My only comment for right now is to share my slight confusion regarding the "looter class" alluded to by RB. When I read that term I was thinking about wall street bankers and the comment didn't make sense to me until I realized he was referring to poor people. I think "looter class" applies better to wall street bankers (and some others of the super rich).
Maybe the biggest contributor to the education gap is an economy that produces to few well paying jobs.
"Second, marriage is increasingly something only educated people do. As my former colleague Jordan Weissmann wrote, the less a man earns these days, the less likely he is to have ever been hitched. College-educated people are increasingly only marrying other college-educated people, and they’re more likely to get married overall. One reason less-educated women are having children out of wedlock is that college-educated men are not interested in marrying them.
“The college-educated young adults can see a good future, where they're likely to find a good partner, pool two incomes, and they're willing to wait to have kids till they can do that,” Cherlin said. Meanwhile, the less-educated women “don't see the possibility of finding partners with good incomes. And many are unwilling to give up the opportunity to have a kid by waiting.”
The Luxury of Waiting for Marriage to Have Kids
"Looter Class" --- You Would... By the way, "looters" can be poor, middle class, rich or very rich.
""Moochers" are Rand's depiction of those unable to produce value themselves, who demand others' earnings on behalf of the needy, but resent the talented upon whom they depend, and appeal to "moral right" while enabling the "lawful" seizure by governments."
That article has to be one of the goofiest causation vs correlation errors.
How about we spin this a bit?
Women who are smart, responsible, capable, etc have the dedication and focus to get through college. Therefore they get married, stable, etc before taking responsibility for a child.
Women who are not so smart, responsible, capable, etc end up pregnant early and this derails their lives. It also limits their academic capability, income, parenting capability, etc. Which sends their children down a similar path.
Definitions
It used to be that one could live a comfortable middle class life with out college degrees. This has gotten much more difficult. I think it makes sense as one of the causes of why so many children are born to single mothers. What is your explanation why the rate of children born out of wedlock has increased so significantly?
My husband has a niece and 2 nephews, one followed the middle class path -college, job marriage, kids,- the other nephew and niece followed the other path- crappy jobs, kids, no marriages. All three of these relatives were raised by the same parents who have very conservative small town values.
The whole problem with this argument is that it ignores the fundamental reason for public schooling in the first place: the creation of equal opportunity for all. Education was to be "the great leveller," insuring that everyone had access to the opportunities that education made available. Now you are telling me that kids born into poverty cannot get an education, that birth circumstance DOOMS these kids from the get-go? I'm sorry, but for 100 years, public education DID exactly that. The question is, what went wrong?
You have part of the reason for the multiplying of unwed births, which is a lack of "education," but add together the corrosive cultural effects of a welfare state with an education system that does not educate, and you have both the chicken AND the egg. Rather than attacking poverty, which we have failed miserably to do, how about we fix education, which we DO know how to do, and let that solve the poverty problem for us?
The answer to both of your comments may be similar:
Our social norms have changed, global competition is infinitely more intense and our ability to measure / record has improved greatly.
50 years ago I am pretty sure that being a single parent was embarrassing and financially devastating. Now it appears to be socially acceptable and people like RB want to pay you for doing it.
50 years ago a child would be in big trouble for misbehaving in school. Now it is more likely that the parents will be angry with the Teacher.
50 years ago one just needed basic reading, writing, and math to get a middle class labor type job. Now the foreign countries are equally capable, communication / shipping is cheap and our American consumers have no loyalty to "Made in America". The higher paying jobs here require excellent communication and academic skills.
50 years ago no one knew the size and scope of the academic achievement gap. Minorities were second class citizens, measuring was intermittent / flawed, and we had no good way to combine the information. Now we can test everyone everywhere in real time and slice the data 30 different ways.
Literacy Info
There is something to what you say, bolstered by those literacy statistics. My guess is that, over the last 100 years, our definition of "literacy" SHOULD have changed, or more correctly, the statistic should have been described as "literacy necessary to function in 1870 society." "Modern society" has demands that are much higher, which is why other studies place the current rate of "functional illiteracy" at more like 20%.
I will grant that, at great political peril, we might get a government that could reverse the cultural rot CAUSED by government's attempts to cure poverty, but that is unlikely as well as difficult. OTOH, changing the education system so that every kid could truly "reach their full potential" requires less political will, money and effort, and gives you the cultural change as a "free" bonus when these kids succeed, go to college, get good jobs and get married before having kids. We keep thinking the "gap" is something intrinsically wrong with the kids, which allows the situation to continue indefinitely, when what we SHOULD be doing is actually "fixing the gap" and stop looking for excuses why we can't.
The 5 Why's... To fix a problem one must know the root cause.
You blindly insist it is the failing of the schools. Whereas I expect that Parents are responsible to have kids kindergarten ready, and a large number are failing terribly. So...
Let's assume most children are roughly the same at birth, and that their environment from ages 0 to 5 determines if they will be kindergarten ready.
How would you help them be kindergarten ready if their parents are unwilling or incapable of helping them develop correctly?
Why do they have to be kindergarten ready??? Millions of kids prior to today started school in kindergarten (neither I nor my kids even had that, we started in 1st grade) and did just fine. I want to ask why, after 6 years of public schools, kids aren't 6th grade ready? or 8th grade ready after 8 years? You are NEVER going to get all children up to the same level by age 5, even if you start at age two, and you're CERTAINLY not going to do it with a public school system that cannot EVER get far too many of them-- as many as 80% in some schools-- to grade level.
To fix a problem you must first define the problem. The problem is
NOT that kids start school inadequately prepared. It is that they LEAVE school woefully undereducated. How is that NOT a "process problem" rather than a "raw material problem"?
Now this is a huge limiting belief.
"You are NEVER going to get all children up to the same level by age 5"
I thought your mantra is that parents are responsible. You even want to give them $10,000 vouchers because they are that responsible.
We aren't looking for genius here, just some basic 4+ year old skills, behaviors, self control and knowledge.
K Prep 1
K Prep 2
K Prep 3
I assume your kids went to Kindergarten with these.
You are NEVER going to get all children up to the same level by age 5, because kids are not all the same. You are certainly not going to do it by putting them in some one-size-fits-all public school environment, as the Governor insists. Kids will do better at home with a responsible parent and, for those parents who cannot do that, there is already a program available to let them choose a private pre-K experience for their kids, and that has proven effective. That's what the Governor wants to kill. It is typical of the liberal/educrat mindset which says that the only reason kids cannot learn is NOT because of our failure to teach, but the failure of certain kids to learn. Blaming the victim doesn't work for me.
"I assume your kids went to Kindergarten with these." My kids never went to public school kindergarten at all, remember? And some of those things I don't think adults can do successfully. Certainly not adults from some of our public schools. Why do most of the advantages of early childhood intervention-- enhanced K, pre-K, small class sizes, etc. disappear by 3rd grade or so? Is it because we keep pushing on the string (at early ages) rather than pulling it through the higher grades? A few schools are now working to require reading at grade level by grade 3, and devoting substantial resources to make that happen. It works, but why is it necessary? We can close the gap with programs like this, made universal, but it's still a band-aid to get what ought to be occurring as a matter of standard expectation in every school.
"You are NEVER going to get all children up to the same level by age 5, because kids are not all the same."
I will need to print and frame this one. Jerry joins Education Minnesota in using the same excuse methodology...
By the way, we don't need all the kids at the same level. We need 90% to 95% of them at or above Kindergarten readiness requirements. (ie special ed kids excluded) Just as we need 90% to 95% of them at or above the graduation capability requirements.
Here is the Ed MN version of your statement.
"You are NEVER going to get all children up to the same level by age 18, because kids are not all the same."
I still see a difference between the two statements. In the first, kids START school at different levels because kids (and their parents) are different, and kids develop at different rates in the early years. In the latter, there is a serious qualitative difference in how kids FINISH school, because the public schools can't even KEEP the kids until age 18, let alone bring [90% of] them up to grad standards (or even basic standards). And what is implied is, "so we won't even try." Somehow, it seems to me that after 13 years of public schooling, they should no longer be permitted to blame their failures on the lack of pre-K.
Time is against them...
0-5: Parents have ~25,000 hours to hold back or worse yet screw up the kid. (~14/day)
5-18: School has kid ~1200 hrs/yr, Neighborhhod has kid ~3800 hrs/yr
That is why HCZ says you need to catch them early and get a majority of the neighborhood in the program.
I used one of my strange comparisons somewhere recently.
Two trees are planted at the same time. For the first 5 years Tree 1 is regularly watered, fertilized, kept in the sun, tied to ensure straight growth, etc. The second one is watered erratically, fertilized once in awhile, kept in the shade, tied to make it grow somewhat crooked, etc.
When year 5 comes Tree 1 is strong and ready to grow, where as Tree 2 is weak and deformed. Even if one brought both trees to the same gardner for the next 13 years it would be difficult for Tree 2 to catch Tree 1.
In our situation, Tree 2 only gets help 1/4 of the time from 5 to 18. The other 3/4 of the time is spent back tied crooked in their shady locale.
I am always amazed that Conservatives have a difficult time believing that ages 0 to 5 are the most critical years of a human's life. I mean that little growing brain is a sponge that picks up everything. The good the bad and the ugly. And once those bad and ugly habits have taken root, breaking them is very difficult.
This is a pretty interesting link on brain development in kids.
Nothing against HCZ, because they are doing everything right in a place where nothing was right before. In places less socially, economically and educationally deprived we can probably get by with something far less pervasive. And I don't think your comparison is fair. Certainly things like intellectual curiosity, self-control and respect are picked up from one's surroundings at an early age, but sending the kid off to a public preschool is going to have the same problem as NOT sending them to the public preschool, because, according to you, the school just doesn't have them for enough hours. But the analogy is flawed in another way. The kid's environment teaches many things, but the schools supposedly only need to teach academics and enough "values" to allow that learning to take place. Not even the best parents are going to spend six hours per day teaching, as the schools do.
Finally, what your math inevitably leads to is the conclusion that these "at risk kids" are simply doomed, by accident of birth, to untold generations of the same misery and squalor, despite the quarter million dollars we will spend on each of them in our halfhearted attempt to educate. Okay, maybe "no child left behind" is too lofty a goal, but "only half left behind" is intolerable.
Post a Comment