Let's say the heavens open and Bill Gates hands you a modest $1 billion to spend where you think it would make the biggest difference in a child's life. Where would you begin?
Endow a special college for elementary school teachers, maybe. Put principals and teachers on a CEO pay scale and insist they make learning so exciting that no child ever wants to miss school.
Perhaps, you'll spend your $1 billion equipping schools, investing in state-of-the-art buildings and technology to make sure there is no lack of resources to explore the boundaries of knowledge.
Or maybe you'll opt for higher education, a stipend for anyone committed to mastery in an academic or vocational pursuit.
I would sink my money in creating the best preschools and kindergartens.
An enduring romantic myth is that this society offers anyone a fair chance to fail or succeed on his or her own. The romance lies in the notion that if you have the will, there'll be a way, somehow. You rise or fall on your own merit. The myth lies in the idea that the opportunity is there for the taking, that as a society, we go out of our way to level the playing field (public schools are there for everyone, aren't they?), and that all things being equal, you get the results of your effort.
Trouble is, things are never equal. For education to serve as the ultimate leveler (to take the myth out of the equal-opportunity ideal, in other words), it is best to concede that much. Some children have more ''native intelligence'' than others, for example. It is easy also to assess the differential impact of household wealth on success at school. If your kid is not doing well in math and you have the funds, you can sign up for a private tutor and measure the amount of funds spent versus improvement in math scores.
Other factors are less evident. We expect, for example, that the background experiences and expectations a child brings to school would have some bearing on the pace and quality of learning, at least in the early school years. Home and school are not that easily divorced. For far too many children, the great inhibitor lurks at home.
Several years ago, I was waiting in the office of a local middle school for an appointment with the principal when a parent walked into the office.
She had been summoned to discuss her child's behavior, which the school considered totally unacceptable. She was angry; very loudly so. Her speech was generously interspersed with multiple variations of the f-word. And she wasn't about to curb her tongue at anyone's say-so — not the secretary's or the principal's — or at the sight of students gawking at the scene.
With a display like that, I thought at the time, it was little wonder her child was running into trouble at school. It seemed a simple one-to-one correlation to me at the time: A parent communicates in foul and abusive language, child carries over said language patterns to school and other venues.
But as I have come to appreciate since, the issue illustrated by this particular incident was not simply a matter of modeling, a child exposed to and copying a style of inappropriate communication. Rather, the display hinted at a more subtle and damaging process, one that inhibits growth and versatility in language skills. Imagine a child growing up among adults who have one pattern of communicating, a colorful but restricted vocabulary to express the breadth of thoughts and emotions they encounter day to day.
Researchers have discovered the size and range of a toddler's vocabulary are pretty good indicators of how quickly the child can understand and learn from her environment. A toddler discovering a new and complex environment needs a wide variety of words to match the growing range of her experiences. She needs words to think around what she sees and hears, to comprehend and express her reactions.
Researchers have found also that the vocabularies of low-income toddlers tend to be significantly smaller and narrower in range than those of their middle-class and wealthier counterparts. The differences stem in part from the quality of exposures — such factors as variety in the toddlers' environment, how often they are spoken to, read to and encouraged to speak.
The language differential is one early advantage that affluent toddlers build on in school, while less fortunate kids struggle to find words to give meaning and shape to new experiences. Give me a $1 billion, and I would make sure low-income preschoolers and kindergarteners don't have a deficit of exposure to the world opening up to them and the vocabulary to say what they think of it.
Ofobike is the Beacon Journal chief editorial writer. She can be reached at 330-996-3513 or by e-mail at lofobike@thebeaconjournal.com
