This paper was recently presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. While it gets technical fast, the conclusions should be of great interest to early childhood educators. While there is much that cannot be reliably measured, what is clear is the importance of the first five years of a child’s life.
You can download the paper here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you for posting the article, Diane. I read it. My bottom line: ALL THE MORE REASON TO OPT OUT. I am sharing this post. Again thank you.
I did like the theme for the 2018 AERA Conference.
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The only thing this report does is remind us of what’s been known about the first five years of a child’s life for decades before the arrogant and greedy autocrats like Bill Gates and the Koch brothers launched their war on public education, public school teachers and teachers’ unions.
This isn’t new info. This information has just been ignored or burried by the greedy, democracy hating, autocrats that are out to subvert the U.S. Constitution and destroy the public sector and its labor unions.
I earned my teaching credential back in 1975 at Cal Poly Pomona and through a full-time urban residency program and we were taught back then about the importance of the first five years of a child life before they even started kindergarten.
We learned back then that if a child comes to us at age 5 and they are behind, it is because they didn’t get the attention and support from their parents and/or guardians that was necessary for them to be successful in school K to12.
If a child is born into a home where the parents don’t read, even if they can read, and there are no reading materials around, that is a serious step back for the early development of a child.
When we add in the ravages caused by growing up in poverty, it gets even worse.
In fact, in that misleading, obvious propaganda film “Won’t Back Down” if you pay close attention to the mother played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, you discover she is a very dysfunctional parent that does little to nothing to support her child’s education. In fact, she does all she can to get other people to do her parenting job for her.
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“While there is much that cannot be reliably measured,”
The whole paper is in the paradigm that standardized tests “measure” something and that those supposed measurements can reliably be compared against each other using all sorts of magical statistical manipulations. But only those steeped in the idiology of that magical statistical manipulations are able to make hide or hair of the proclamations. 100% pure Grade AA Bovine Excrement is what I see and smell.
Proclamations based on invalid grounds guarantees that said pronouncement is worthless.
Why waste one’s time on such idiocies?
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Conclusions certainly seem to reflect 50-+y.o. study: “Understanding of the pathway from childhood word poverty to adult disadvantage began with findings of a ground-breaking US study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley. They showed that, in high-poverty households, children were exposed to an average of 30 million fewer words in their early years than were their middle-income peers. The word gap between children from different socioeconomic groups has been identified since the 1960s in the United States and elsewhere, in both developed and developing economies.”
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Wealthy parents spend much more time talking to their children so they develop a better knowledge of language skills. Who gives help to those children who are hampered in learning right from the start? This was put out by the National Institutes of Health, NIH Publication No. 13-4781
Updated September 2010:
How do speech and language develop?
The first 3 years of life, when the brain is developing and maturing, is the most intensive period for acquiring speech and language skills. These skills develop best in a world that is rich with sounds, sights, and consistent exposure to the speech and language of others.
There appear to be critical periods for speech and language development in infants and young children when the brain is best able to absorb language. If these critical periods are allowed to pass without exposure to language, it will be more difficult to learn.
What are the milestones for speech and language development?
The first signs of communication occur when an infant learns that a cry will bring food, comfort, and companionship. Newborns also begin to recognize important sounds in their environment, such as the voice of their mother or primary caretaker. As they grow, babies begin to sort out the speech sounds that compose the words of their language. By 6 months of age, most babies recognize the basic sounds of their native language.
Children vary in their development of speech and language skills. However, they follow a natural progression or timetable for mastering the skills of language… These milestones help doctors and other health professionals determine if a child is on track or if he or she may need extra help. Sometimes a delay may be caused by hearing loss, while other times it may be due to a speech or language disorder.
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We know that this is true. I recall that study( the NIH one) being brought to inservice in summary form. Our reaction was a shrug, for every teacher knows what you summarize beautifully above.
So what do we do? If we remediate extensively we do so expensively, and much of our populace will rebel at the taxes, led by those who could actually pay for the remediation. If we teach folks at their own ability level, all our students will be in different stages of learning, and some in our society will rail against our not getting students material that will “challenge” them. Parents who have students with much potential will support programs that help their child at the expense of the other children.
Public school, like democracy, is messy. Some people will disagree with th way things are done. No one likes taxes. All point to different ways we waste money. I do not have a perfect solution, but I do not agree with an acquaintance of mine who suggested back in the 70s(my students are aghast at such a time so long ago). His philosophy was that you teach the top ten percent of your class and entertain the rest. We cannot afford to do this. Still, if we do not invest in all the children, and try to respond to each of them at the level they need, we will lose them to the public system. They may not leave the system, but they will check out in ways we never imagine. Wealthy ones will leave the system for school which cater to their own particular needs. With them will go the political forces that make good schools.
Thus the obvious truth is that we need support for public schools just like we need the support for parks, law enforcement, public libraries, firemen, and infrastructure. We need to teach for the society, and impress upon the children that we are teaching for the society. I have always told my students that my purpose was not to make them competent for their next level of education, but rather to make possible a positive attitude toward what I am teaching so that their generation might produce competence. It is like the farmer, who fertilizes his field with good compost (manure, for the most part). All the generations that follow will use his wisdom to produce good crops. That little speech always gets one smart aleck in class to make a remark about the manure, and we all get a laugh, but the point is made. Education is meant for the next generations. Our biggest job is to get students raised in linguistic and mathematical wastelands to feel positive about words and numbers. Maybe that is our only job.
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Roy: Beautifully stated.
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The fixation on test scores in math and reading diminishes the value of the study, along with the absence of any references to special education students. This is another example of the degree to which fresh understandings are being limited by relying on test scores and data that is handy, available for re-examination. even if (as here), the statistical leaps required to “compensate” for bad tests are heroic and reveal a preference by the researchers for “adaptive testing.”
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Quite so.
If I may riff off of your observations just a bit: the numbers & stats used by those peddling the wares of the corporate reform education crowd aren’t just subject to being massaged and tortured into giving such gems as “charter school 100% graduation rate!” and “charter chess champions!”
Over and over and over again they attempt to make their numbers & stats SUBSTITUTE for judgment and experience and SUBSTITUTE for substantive thoughtful discussions about goals and values.
You could call it mathematical intimidation in the service of $tudent $ucce$$.
😎
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“they attempt to make their numbers & stats SUBSTITUTE for judgment and experience and SUBSTITUTE for substantive thoughtful discussions about goals and values.”
This is a sickness spread right through health ed & welfare distribution of services. Just watched CSPAN Book discussion – Virginia Eubanks’ “Automating Inequality.” It’s a different subject, but it’s the same approach: GIGO.
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Hyperbolic Extrapolation
What’s easy, test
And leave the rest
Like Skinner’s bird
It’s all absurd
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My theory is that test score gaps grow after death.
But it’s not an easy theory to test.
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I’d bet I could come up with some plausible figures. Let me sleep on it tonight. Who needs to test a test theory anyway?
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If anyone could test it, it’s David Coleman.
I hear College Board is working on the Scholastics After Death test (SAD). Details are sketchy because of tight security, but my sources tell me it involves testing earthworms in the general vicinity of the coffin, specifically, their ability to run mazes.
The plan is that a charge will automatically be made to the deceaseds account every month after they die until College Board ceases to exist or the world does, whichever comes first.
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SDP: How about hiring some channelers? They could test the dead subject and get authentic replies. These dead people are waiting for someone to contact them and they want to give the replies themselves. They don’t want any test slip-ups or inauthentic results.
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Shirley, channelers is a very good idea. Shirley.
They could market themselves as afterlife learning mediums and offer test prep courses like Kaplan to improve scores.
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I wonder how many dead children attend corporate charter/voucher schools
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The ones who leave are dead to them. The ones who leave us are very much an enduring part of our lives where I live.
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I’d bet the online charter ECOT has at least one deceased child on it’s rolls. I doubt they would even know (or care about) the difference between a dead student and a live one, at any rate.
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Interesting bit of information about the positive effects on education of having a good union and collective bargaining rights…from the Economic Policy Institute
……………………………..
Posted April 19, 2018 at 10:01 am by Emma García and John Schmitt
Teacher unions and students’ long-term economic prospects
…other recent research suggests much more directly that collective bargaining by teachers is associated with positive educational and social outcomes. Economist Eunice Han, for example, has demonstrated that teacher unions are associated with better outcomes on a range of measures of teacher quality and with a lower high-school dropout rate. Han used three datasets from the National Center for Education Statistics to build a district-teacher matched panel from 2003–2012, included several measures of union strength, and studied what happened after Idaho, Indiana, Tennessee, and Wisconsin placed restrictions on collective bargaining in 2010 and 2011, and found that districts with strong teacher unions had more teachers with stronger qualifications, higher retention rates for high-quality teachers, higher dismissal rates for low-quality teachers, and lower high-school dropout rates. In addition, she argues that because “the dropout rate of an area is negatively associated with future earnings and upward mobility of children of the area (Chetty et al., 2014), unions are more likely to improve educational attainment and the welfare of all children in the area” (p. 47-48).
How and why teacher unions impact student outcomes and how these impacts are transformed in the long run are important questions to be addressed. But we will learn little about them unless research produces conclusions and recommendations that are based on thorough technical and conceptual frames—ones that do not ignore what is already known on the issues (or, if unaligned, clearly explain why), and that offer a more balanced and rigorous insight.
https://www.epi.org/blog/teacher-unions-and-students-long-term-economic-prospects/
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