We don't hear much about it, but the "achievement gap" really exists, it's at the heart of education's disarray and its impact is felt across all segments of our culture which means if you have children in school it seriously impacts their academic achievement no matter what their intellectual capacities are. It also impacts property values, job opportunities and limits business growth. Oh, and another thing, achievement gap is NOT created by the schools and certainly not the parents. The essential fact appears to be that many new kindergartners don't get to school on day one with the pre-literacy training that the other more than half of five-year old children possess and that is necessary for acquiring literacy in school --for learning to read and write.
That's right! The achievement gap is NOT created by the schools but it's the schools' biggest problem and shows every sign of getting worse as the years roll over us. However, those schools at the top of the academic heap have solved the problem of the gap at a cost of about $200 or less per entering skill-deficit child per year. The LAMPLIGHTERS shelf in the Lewiston library has a number of books that directly address the problem. Most of the information in this essay comes from the 90& READING GOAL, a short book about the Kennewick School district in Kennewick, Washington in the 1990's describing their experience with this achievement gap, called in these essays, The Gap.
Ready? Good. Let's start with describing the problem and what it looks like. The gap starts with kindergarten and involves entering five year olds. These are the children who lack the skills, increasingly called "pre-literary skills", like letter recognition, ability to print their own names, count to twenty plus others. The number of children who lack these pre-literary skills is about 40% of those entering our national education system every year.
Well, if some kids come to school lacking a few skills other children have, so what? Can't the schools just teach the skills that are lacking, give them sort of an indoctrination period and get on with the education of our children? After all, nobody expects every kindergartner to have the same skill profile. And of course the new kindergartners don't have identical skill profiles any more than high school graduates do.
The answer to the question about bringing all the newbies up to speed when they first get to school at age five is a flat, "NO!!" In-school remediation has been tried often and has not produced significant results and never results that are cost efficient by any measurement. An average class of five year olds can be divided into two main groups: about 60 % of them will be at or ahead of the reading skill curve, some as much as five years ahead and about 40% will be behind. The 40% group with skill deficits breaks into sub-groups, each being 1, 2, or 3 years behind grade level. These data put the problem into stark relief; the teacher has a class of five year olds in which the difference between best and worst prepared pupils can be as high as 5-8 years. This difference -while it changes a bit with each new class-- constitutes the definition of The Gap which is always present in varying but very large degree.
The simple solution as found by the Kennewick School District in Washington State is to prepare the child for the reading skill by reading to the small person twenty minutes a day from birth until the child is established in kindergarten or even to the second grade. This daily experience provides over 600 hours of exposure to words, numbers, sentences and conversation at a time when the brain is developing its abilities to learn language. Daily reading schedules create a love of learning the single skill necessary for an education; without regular exposure to the written and spoken word, the child finds the skill too difficult, becomes discouraged, and disconnects from the education process. When this happens the brain "prunes" away the unused brain cells that were dedicated to language learning and the child becomes locked into illiteracy and helpless to attain his or her full potential in this new Information Age.
Coming Soon! Look for the next installment in this series!
