Late Off the Blocks: Head Start and the Formative Years

In 1995, Betty Hart, a professor of Human Development at the University of Kansas, and Todd R. Risley, a professor of Psychology at the University of Alaska, published a study examining the difference in language heard by infants of varying socio-economic backgrounds.

The study found that the average low-income child heard just over 600 words per hour, less than half the average total of working class children (1251/hour), and less than one-third that of the average child in a professional family (2153/hour). Using some rudimentary arithmetic, the researchers projected that wealthy kids heard about 30 million words by age 3, while poor kids heard only 10 million.

This divergent led to what the researchers described as an “even-widening gap” between poor and wealthy children, whereby the poor children not only “had smaller vocabularies than did children of the same age in professional families, but they were also adding words more slowly.”

More recent science also supports this conclusion. A 2013 study out of Stanford found that children in different socio-economic groups display dramatic differences in their vocabularies by 18 months.

Thus, it should come as little surprise that Head Start—the pioneering Great Society program designed to improve early learning for poor children—has had limited success in closing the achievement gap. As noted in a column by UC-Berkeley Professor David Kirp this weekend, despite recent improvements to the program, “a 2012 federal evaluation that used gold-standard methodology and concluded that children who participated in Head Start were not more successful in elementary school than others.”

Kirp goes on to argue that one of the essential flaws in Head Start is that it only applies to poor students, in part because branding Head Start as a program for the poor weakens its political power, but more importantly because it concentrates the effects of poverty rather than allowing poor students to interact with and learn from their better educated peers. This interaction has been shown to help poor students narrow the vocabulary/literacy gap with their more well to do contemporaries without hurting the more privileged group.

While socioeconomic mixing in early childhood education can help to mitigate the effects of the “word gap”, we need to do more to narrow/eliminate the gap from emerging in the first place. This means placing a greater emphasis on the formative years 0-3, as well as providing new parents with the skills and tools they need to succeed. Simply put, Head Start is getting out of the proverbial blocks too late for many students to catch up.

Creating children may come naturally to humans, but parenting those children is anything but. And yet despite the incredible importance and difficulty of parenthood, government offers little in the way of supports for soon-to-be or new parents.

One program that has been effective in not only boosting pre-natal care but in improving parenting practices, is Early Head Start (EHS). Launched in 1995, EHS is designed to assist low-income women and families on a variety of childhood development/parenting mattes. A major study of the program in 2005 found that EHS children “performed better than did control children in cognitive and language development, displayed higher emotional engagement of the parent and sustained attention with play objects, and were lower in aggressive behavior. Compared with controls, Early Head Start parents were more emotionally supportive, provided more language and learning stimulation, read to their children more, and spanked less.”

[As previously noted in this space, Early Head Start or similar programs are perfect vehicles for Social Impact Bond financing.]

This conclusion isn’t surprising given that the vast majority of parents want to do well by their kids—they simply need the tools to do so.

Indeed, the fact that many parents do not read to their children as much as would be ideal is not a “choice” in the traditional sense of the term. Not only are many parents unaware of the benefits of frequent verbal interaction with infants, but they also may lack the resources needed to simply have books/newspapers in the home to read.  For instance, parents who are given books and “prescriptions for reading” by their children’s pediatricians have been found to be four times more likely to read and share books with their children.

This fall, New York City will introduce universal pre-K for the first time. It’s a huge step for equity and opportunity for our city’s youth and it is one of many bold ideas that Mayor de Blasio is putting into motion. But even as we navigate the challenges of pre-K, we should be planning for that next great leap forward in early childhood education—to the formative years where the gap first emerges—so that when the starting gun of life goes off, all children can get out of the blocks.

The Limits of Language: Longing for Home and Love

“The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.”

-- Ludwig Wittenstein, 1953

“Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.”

--Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkh (aka Rumi), 13^th Century Poet

Bay State Brahmin is a blog about politics—a topic that easily lends itself to the written word. However, thanks to a few masterful pieces published over the past week, the limits of language have been weighing on my mind.

The first piece is a column titled “In Search of Home” in which Roger Cohen of the New York Times tries to answer the question, “If I had only a few weeks to live, where would I go?”

Cohen references an essay in the London Review of Books in which James Wood asked the same question of Christopher Hitchens before Hitchens was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He told Wood that he would not stay in America, but would return to Dartmoor, “the landscape of his childhood.”

Wood goes on to write that, “The desire to return, after so long away, is gladly irrational, and is perhaps premised on the loss of the original home…Home swells as a sentiment because it has disappeared as an achievable reality.”

That may well be true, but Cohen’s description spoke to a sentiment beyond what can be expressed through the language of loss. The landscape of Hitchens childhood, Cohen wrote,

…was the landscape, in other words, of unfiltered experience, of things felt rather than thought through, of the world in its beauty absorbed before it is understood, of patterns and sounds that lodge themselves in some indelible place in the psyche and call out across the years.

The second piece was Jessica Rassette’s essay “His Promise Would Not Be Denied,” for the weekly must-read “Modern Love” in the Times.

In describing her then-ex-boyfriend (now husband’s) response to her insistence that their relationship was over, Rassette wrote, “He loved every footprint I left behind. He kept his dreams of us tucked away, hoarded them like those gas-station receipts he jams into the back pocket of his jeans. He loved and longed. He waited.”

The two pieces may be about “home” and “love”, respectively, but they are really about the same thing. They are about a challenge that everyone faces many times in life—of what feels right to one’s soul; of where (and with whom) one’s destiny lies.

Someone once told me—in reference to my love of both New York City and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts—that it was imperative that I be honest with where loyalties lie and that to be truly at home in one place or the other required almost every piece of my heart.

I didn’t know how to respond to that idea then, and I must admit that I still don’t today. Language—as it often does—fails to provide a useful instrument. How could I express the tingling of my chest when that distinctive sign comes into view, welcoming home sons from Hatfield to Hamilton?

How could I express the feeling of turning the corner of 43^rd and 5^th Avenue at twilight—the Chrysler Building illuminated above—and walking on air through Grand Central Terminal as the ghosts of generations of my family propel me forward, whispering in my ear that I belong under all those stars?

In Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “To be great is to be misunderstood.” But I don’t think that Pythagoras, Socrates, Jesus, Luther, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton were alone in this scourge. Instead, it seems to me that to be human is to be misunderstood, or, perhaps more aptly, that to be human is to lack the tools necessary to be understood—except, that is, for the “tool” of love.

As Rassette notes, “Tom and I might glance at each other with a weary look that means, ‘Do you love me?’ Neither of us ever has to answer.” 

In the end, if “speech is a river,” Rumi wrote—a flowing dialogue of the inner-workings of our mind—then “silence is an ocean”—a seemingly bottom-less repository of secrets out of sight and far from earshot.

Silence—those thoughts unspoken, dreams unrequited, tragedies unseen, sentiments unshared—is the “dark energy/matter” of our world, weighing us down while powering us forward, to an end we know not of.