The Family: America’s Smallest School, an ETS report, analyzes the family factors that influence children’s learning. The report estimates “factors like single-parent families, parents reading to children, hours spent watching television and school absences, when combined, account for about two-thirds of the large differences among states in National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading scores.”
* Thirty-two percent of U.S. children live in single-parent homes, up from 23% in 1980.
* Thirty-three percent of children live in families in which no parent has a full-time, year-round job.
* By age 4, children of professional families hear 35 million more words than children of parents on welfare.
* Half of the nation’s two-year-olds are in some kind of regular day care. Seventy-five percent are in center-based day care rated of medium- or low-quality.
Some factors influencing student achievement have improved, according to a Rand report I read in my newspaper days and managed to find online. From 1970 to 1990, “the two most influential characteristics — parents’ education and family size — changed for the better.”
Mothers and fathers in 1990 were better educated than their 1970 counterparts. For example, 7 percent of mothers of 15-18-year-old children in 1970 were college graduates, compared to 16 percent in 1990. In addition, 38 percent of mothers did not have a high school degree in 1970, compared to only 17 percent in 1990.
Parents are having fewer children, so they have more money, not to mention time and attention, to devote to each child.
The education level of women, who tend to be the primary child raisers, continues to rise. But that means the children of high school drop-outs are even farther behind the norm than they were a generation ago.
* By age 4, children of professional families hear 35 million more words than children of parents on welfare.
Is this in aggregate, or is this per child? If by child, that works out to be 23,972 words for each day (more!) that the child is alive. Are there any hints as to how they arrived at this number?
And even though parents are better educated now, by most accounts, we are doing worse at school than their parent’s children did.
There’s a fairly well-known study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley, reported in Meaningful Differences in Everyday Experience of Young American Children. The researchers studied young children in 42 families, by visiting the houses and recording every single utterance addressed to the young children while they were there. They report that children in professional families heard an average of about 2100 words per hour, but children in welfare families heard only 600.
The type of language the children heard was different, too. The welfare children were more likely to hear prohibitions, whereas the professional children were more likely to hear positive feedback.
It’s a fascinating study.