Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion NYT opinion: No (rich) child left behind

The super smart are highly likely to invent something that will change our lives. When a gifted kid grows up to be a successful scientist, engineer, or inventor and develops the cure for a disease, discovers a new energy source, or invents the next life-changing device, he or she will have created something for everyone.
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In competitive sports there are bench warmers, average players, and stars. In education there are below average, average, and star students. If a coach decided to focus solely on developing the talent of the bench and average players, it is doubtful that fans would approve—it would reduce the competitiveness of the team. Yet we commit the educational equivalent in America—we focus on educating our below average and average students and tend to ignore our top students. If this doesn't work in the competitive world of sports, why does it make sense in our cutthroat global economy?

LOL. Somehow I doubt that most math instructors see it in quite those exact terms.

There used to be a big educational gap between poor children and everyone else. And not just because they were in failing schools; poor kids showed up at school less prepared than the other kids, and the gap widened over the years.

Now, according to Sean Reardon, there is also a gap between the middle class and the elite. American society is increasingly stratified, he says, because elite parents are investing so much in the cognitive enrichment of their kids.

But is that really the right explanation? The rich pulling away from the middle class is also exactly what we would see if test-taking ability has a substantial inherited component, and the American economy is increasingly selecting for people who are very, very good at taking tests. The latter is undoubtedly true, and there's some fairly strong evidence for the former, in the form of studies of adopted kids. Such studies tend to show that adopted kids bear a much stronger resemblance to their biological parents in terms of lots of things, from weight to income to test scores, than they do to their adoptive parents. Once you've hit a fairly basic parenting threshhold--food, health care, touching and talking to your kid, and not physically or sexually abusing them--the incremental benefits of more intensive parenting seem at best small, at worst unclear.

I have no doubt that Reardon is right, and wealthy parents are investing more in their kids because they can. But how do we know that this, rather than the fact of having parents who are great at taking tests, makes the difference. If you take a newly married graduate of the Naval Academy with strong SAT scores, do their kids show up at kindergarten meaningfully less prepared than the children of a hedge fund manager who makes many times more?

Maybe the answer is "yes". But maybe the answer is that as we have increasingly selected for academic ability, education has become less of a springboard to success, than a barrier to it. All the people who are really good at school are marrying the other people who are really good at school, having children who are really, really good at school . . . and paying lip service to the idea that somehow, we should make all the other kids really good at school too, while reinforcing a selection mechanism that advantages their kids over all the others.

Megan McArdle espouses my views at the Daily Beast:

What we found is that the more talkative parents, like the parents with college educations and the professionals like doctors and lawyers are hearing about 2,100 words an hour, hour after hour after hour. The children of welfare families were hearing about 600 words and hour, hour after hour after hour.

So we said, "All right, what was the difference in language input, in language experience, of the language they heard, words they heard in meaningful contexts?" We estimated that the average child, figuring 100 hours a week, by the time they were four, heard thirty million words addressed to them.

But the children of professional parents -- 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.

ow, the interesting thing is that when look at the amount of talking the parents are doing, and the amount of extra talk they're doing over and above business talk, nothing is leftover relating to socioeconomic status. It accounts for all the variance.

In other words, some working poor people talked a lot to their kids and their kids did really well. Some affluent business people talked very little to their kids and their kids did very poorly. You see what I'm saying.

David Boulton: Totally. And it corresponds, as we said earlier, to information coming from the neurosciences. It makes sense.

Dr. Todd Risley: Absolutely. And there's nothing left for race either. Remember, we stratified by African-American, and nothing left. All the variation in outcomes are taken up by amount of talking, the amount of talking in the family to the babies before age three.