It won’t surprise you, the first one, I’m sure: teachers. Think back to a great teacher that you had, how that person rocked your world. As we intuitively know, the teacher in the classroom is everything. Doesn’t surprise anybody. But even more so for an under-resourced child. Why? Well, a more affluent kid may be able to compensate when they get a bad teacher by tutoring or doing extra homework at home or working with their parents or something – options that my not be available for an under-resourced child.
So how do we attract and retain great teachers in under-resourced schools? Well, let’s say you were reading a business plan about a company that you were thinking about investing in. And it said things like, “We’re going to give some of our most important jobs to some of our least experienced people.” It said, “We’re going to give very little objective feedback and very little on-the-job training.” It said, “We’re going to treat everybody the same regardless of performance.” It said, “We’re going to pay only based on seniority and not anything to do with the job that you do. And oh, by the way, we’re almost never going to get rid of any of our worst performers.”
I ask you, “Would you invest in a accompany like this? Would you want to work in a company like this?” This is exactly how we treat our teachers. Teaching our teachers to become better, giving them objective feedback on things like student growth and performance, creating a culture of a meritocracy – transformational changes that can happen in education.
Number two: When should kids start school? A fairly robust debate going on – you probably followed everything going on in New York City and other places about this topic. Well, there is no debate when it comes to under-resourced kids. One study that looked at a sample of 4-year-olds from under-resourced families and then from more affluent families – by the time a child reaches the age of 4 years old in an under-resourced home, they had on average 8 million words addressed to them. Compare that to a more affluent home – 38 million words. So a difference of 30 million words.
So it won’t surprise you that an under-resourced child tends to enter school with about half the vocabulary of their more affluent peers. A Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman, who has some really cool research on this stuff, found that the best place to invest in an under-resourced person: early childhood – far better than later in school and even far better than job training. Again, go back to that simple logic. Think about it for a second. Catch them up early and they stay caught up. Let them fall behind and they fall further and further behind.
We talked about exposure being a challenge for under-resourced kids. So how do we get more exposure? Well, two very simple ways: year-round school and an extended school day. Year-round school: You avoid the long summer slide that tends to happen with children, number one. And number two, you avoid the challenge of childcare for those long summer months. So you go to school year-round, you have more, shorter breaks.
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