Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion The Rich-Poor Divide Starts With Kindergarten

YES. Thank you. Exactly.

Having money is clearly helpful for your child in terms of educational opportunities. To me, that is quite obvious.
That doesn't mean your child can't do well without money.
As some posters have mentioned- if both parents have to work long hours (or a single-parent family), that is less time available to supervise homework or do informal teaching at home for the child.
Our community college offers wonderful courses in the summer for rising gifted 5th graders. A one-week half-day course is $250; all day (until 3:30 pm) is $500. When my kids get to that age, we will enrol them- spending $3000 or more for them to take accelerated math, chemistry, etc. Plus we can drive them there and pick them up.
I bet there are many gifted kids whose parents can't afford those courses or take off work to drive them to and from the courses.
I'm sure many of you in your communities have similar types of activities.

Who mentioned un-PC? I'm talking about facts.

Could you cite your sources please? Because I believe you are misunderstanding the evidence, and I'd like to get specific.

There's actually a book that talks about this - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/04...89&creative=9325&creativeASIN=046501867X

And another - http://www.amazon.com/Nurture-Assum..._1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302557891&sr=1-1

Studies -
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1520-iq-is-inherited-suggests-twin-study.html
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2011.02421.x/pdf


Of course, none of these suggest that a terrible home environment won't cause poor school performance. However, what we are seeing in the divide mentioned in the original article is more than can be explained by children in extreme environments, IMO. Most families in lower socio-economic situations have more stress, and probably more time out of the home, but most are not in abusive/destitute/horrific situations. Those situations are rather rare in the US. Here, a "poor" family will, more than likely, live in a single family apartment or home, own 1-2 cars, have more than one television, internet access, cable tv, cell phones, etc, etc, etc.

This is an interesting topic, but controversial.

I think the reality is that we are all personally responsible for educating our children- not the school system. Sme people do not think they have any personal responsibility in educating their children. We send them to school and we have to finish the job at home- starting before K. Those of us that know we have an important role start reading to our kids even bEfore they are born, we look at life as a teachable moment. We are constantly teaching. So they have 5 years advantage than the child who has not been taught a thing before entering K. It also does not stop at K just because they are " in school now". There are a number of people that think it is the schools job to completely educate our children- that is very far from the truth but it will provide a basic education to function in the lower level of our society with minimum wage jobs unless someone provides enrichment of some kind. I think that the middle and upper classes understand that and take the enrichment in to their own hands. If our kids are gifted- we have a greater responsibility in our part of the job in educating our children to challenge them- we are also lucky because our kids are hungry for it and receptive. However the parent of the underachiever has a similar responsibility to help their child keep up. It has never been only the public schools responsibility to educate our children to the manner that we see fit. They provide a basic education- period. The fact that we get any accomodation or help in teaching our gifted kids in public school- we should really be thankful. sad but true. We can supplement at home or pay for a private school- that's reality. I knew when my 3rd grader tested on standardized tests at a high high school level in science- there was NOTHING the school could do about it( the principal was shocked when we were in his 504 meeting for PANDAS) and took his supplementation in my own hands. We may or may not end up in a private school that accelerates. Right now he wants to stay with his friends-as that is really important as well- so he takes high school text books to school and reads them from time to time. Whether he learns high school Biology in 3rd grade or 5th or even 7th is not a detriment to his growth- there is plenty of time for moving him ahead in accelerated subjects inside a school. I believe it is more likely the middle to upper middle class knows how to enrich better than the lower classes and we know that we have to do more than the basics for our kids to succeed. We also innately understand that not all the education our child receives is from the school. The kids in lower sociology-economic groups may not understand that. We are a dual working house and spend a lot of time at work( definitely more than 40 hours a week each and could probably be compared to people that have more than one job) but our first priority is the kids as soon as we are off and their enrichment is a big part of that. I don't know if the lower socio-economic classes have the same distinctions or have been taught they need to do more to change the patterns. So beyond the likely higher IQ levels in then middle and upper classes the culture that has been taught may also be part of the equation if they don't know they have any responsibility in educating their kids too. We pass our education tradition down to our kids.

I totally agree with bgbarnes. However, they do have time for special ed. (I'm just sayin'.) I have butted heads until I am tired. The principal/teacher/superintendent says that I am making a wrong decision by placing her in courses from the community college, but she does well in them.

Many years ago, I worked in a pilot family literacy program funded through Even Start and Head Start targeting low-income families where the parent(s) were receiving welfare benefits and did not have high school diplomas. Our program was designed to help improve educational and economic outcomes not only for our students, but for their children. Many of my students (the parents of young children) walked into my classroom nearly totally illiterate, unable to read books fluently at even the first or second grade level. Naturally, they didn't read to their young children, and they didn't help their older children with homework. How could they?

One of the most rewarding parts of my job was hearing students tell how they were so proud and happy because they had been able to read a story to their toddler for the first time in their lives, or how good it felt to be able to help their fourth grader with his multiplication homework. Some of my students had very low IQs, to be sure - I have some heartbreaking memories of a few students who were clearly incapable of holding down any kind of job, let alone earning a high school diploma, but who were denied SSI because they scored two or three points too high (so, an FSIQ of 72 or 73) on an IQ test - but many of my students had average intelligence but significant learning disabilities, and most were not only the children of illiterate parents themselves, but were also the victims of the rural Florida school system in the 1960s and 1970s. The majority had never had any phonics instruction in their lives. Most had not been given remedial instruction in school, but had been given passing marks and advanced from grade to grade until they were old enough to drop out.

About 50% of my students went on to pass the GED and earn a Florida state high school diploma. Nearly 80% of my students who remained in the program for six months or more improved their reading and math scores on the TABE by more than 4 grade levels. These gains had a significant impact on their families in terms of their income and, more importantly for this discussion, in terms of the level of academic support they were able to provide for their children. There is an extraordinarily close relationship between parental literacy level and child academic achievement. The U.S. Department of Education reports that the single strongest predictor of a child's academic achievement is the mother's literacy level. I guess this post is primarily to point out that while there is certainly a strong correlation between IQ and literacy level, neither literacy nor income is a perfect proxy for IQ, or my students would not have been able to make such dramatic changes in both in such a short time. It is also to point out that it is both cruel and unreasonable to blame low income parents who may be functionally illiterate for not doing a better job educating their children at home.

One of the key factors in the success of our program was that, at the time, Florida allowed welfare recipients to count educational activities as hours engaged in a "work activity", so they could attend school and still retain their welfare benefits. Those rules changed in the mid-90s to exclude education from the definition of "work activities", which, in my opinion, helped radically reduce the potential for upward economic mobility and helped ensure that the inter-generational cycle of poverty would continue.

Some interesting reading:

http://www.proliteracy.org/NetCommunity/Document.Doc?id=18

http://www.air.org/files/The20Literacy20of20Americas20College20Students_final20report.pdf

http://www.ascd.org/publications/newsletters/policy-priorities/fall06/num47/toc.aspx

Maybe some people just don't know enough to educate their children in subjects like math and science and English.


Seriously?


I'm not completely sure what you meant here, but maybe people with low IQs are passing their educational tradition to their kids too.

It's possible that part of the problem is expecting low-IQ people to be able to help their kids with homework after a certain point. How realistic is this idea? Is it reasonable to believe that a person with a low IQ who's barely used math in 15 years will really be able to help his child with dividing fractions or relatively complex long division problems?

People here are open about the idea that some people are smarter than others. Yet whenever a topic touches on the other side of the coin --- the idea that a lot of people aren't very smart --- many here suddenly seem to get uncomfortable and the discussion on the subject turns to vague factors other than cognitive abilities.

Most of the population isn't very smart. Almost 73% have an IQ below 110, and roughly half are below 100. Then throw in average household incomes (a bit over $49,000 in 2010 ). It seems to me that, simply because of arithmetic, low IQ must influence the difference in school performance among economic groups.

I'm not making judgments about how the IQ differences got there to begin with or that IQ is pre-determined in the next generation of a population. It's possible that better access to healthcare and high-nutrient foods would raise IQs among poorer people. But I think that raising the IQ by even a few points would have to occur over generations. I also think that this would require policies related to healthcare, farming (ie corn and soybean subsidies), and other things that are far more humane than what we have now.

But none of that previous paragraph changes the idea that some people are just not as smart and that arithmetic dictates (to me anyway) a big part (not all of it) of the achievement gap.

OK, I have to take very strong issue with the claim that "all of those things have been shown to have very limited impact on a child's education."

Quality pre-school has been overwhelmingly shown to have a positive and lasting impact on a child's education. I am not going to google now for the studies, but they are there and I have read them. Just one example, out of many:
http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news-imp...-role-in-later-reading-math-achievement/
"Using information from the longitudinal Study of Early Care and Youth Development, which was carried out under the auspices of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, they discovered that children who spent more time in high-quality (that is, above-average) child care in the first five years of their lives had better reading and math scores. This was especially true for low-income children; in fact, their scores were similar to those of affluent children, even after taking into account a variety of family factors, including parents’ education and intelligence."