Middle-class Peers Research Articles

Teacher Professional Development for At-Risk Preschoolers: Closing the Achievement Gap by Closing the Instruction Gap

Students entering school from economically disadvantaged homes may have difficulty developing early literacy skills, leading to subsequent reading difficulties and poor academic performance. It is not sufficient for at-risk children to make progress; their achievement has to be accelerated, given that their middle-class peers are also making progress. This article describes a professional development model that has evolved from work with grants based on Early Reading First. The model grew out of action research, during which we reflected on our practice to determine why children served by one grant were not making anticipated gains. The model consists of three necessary but not individually sufficient components: Appropriate environment, research-based curriculum, and instruction informed by professional development. We present the research base for the model and empirical evidence for the efficacy of the model.

Seeding Success in Charter Schools

It's hard to overstate the hopefulness the nation brings to the challenge of educating students living in the debilitating grasp of urban poverty. To Oprah Winfrey, the School of Washington, D.C., 320-student public charter boarding school for 6th through 12th graders that sends most of its graduates to college, is a dream come true. President Barack Obama called a true success story when he signed public service legislation before an audience of dignitaries gathered at the campus last spring. Journalists also are drawn to inspirational charter schools like SEED. What makes them successful, they want to know, when so many schools leave so many students so poorly educated? Culture is big part of the answer. The schools tend to be small, personal places where adults and students are closely connected, where students care because they feel cared about. They're often tough-love places that demand discipline and send relentless message to students that education matters and that, if they work hard, they'll be successful, an orientation to the world that's utterly lacking in our deeply dysfunctional urban cores. There's regular recognition for strong grades and good citizenship. Students are taught sense of optimism that helps them get through the long school days and years required to catch them up to their middle-class peers. As charter they've been able to select teachers who share the schools' belief systems. They are inspiring places that prove that we can do better in urban education. But journalistic portraits invariably leave us with less-glossy image of inspiring charter schools like SEED. They convey sense of the difficulty and expense of the schools' work and the difficulty of scaling up these entrepreneurial educational enterprises. The New York Times Magazine duly noted in profile this fall that the school--which opened in 1998 and graduated its first seniors in 2004-had won college acceptances for 97% of its graduates and that 90% of the school's impoverished, almost exclusively black, graduates go directly to college, compared to 56% of black students nationwide. But the Times also points out that the school has very high student attrition rate, and that many of the separations are not voluntary, reality that diminishes the impressiveness of the school's college-going rate. SEED unapologetically expels more students than day schools, about 20 year, journalist David Whitman wrote in Sweating the Small Stuff (Fordham Institute, 2008), which profiles high-achieving urban schools. One-third of students repeat 8th grade, Whitman reports, and only about half of the school's 7th graders will graduate from SEED. The Times puts the school's graduation rate even lower, at about 30%. Last year, reduced its attrition by limiting the number of staffers permitted to expel students. But high student attrition afflicts many high-achieving charter including the well-regarded KIPP and studies show that it's the weaker students who leave. The accounts of and other schools also reveal that it's extraordinarily expensive to surround struggling inner-city students with the supports they need, making the schools difficult to replicate. The Times points out that now spends $35,000 year per student, or about four times the average federal, state, and local spending per public school student. It required an act of Congress to establish the school's funding at that level. When opened second school, in Maryland, in 2008, it again required special funding stream, provided by the Maryland state legislature. On Track to College To get sense of what it takes to get impoverished urban students on college track, consider the nine-year-old MATCH Public Charter High School, near Fenway Park in Boston. The school has an open-admissions policy and three-quarters of its students live in poverty, yet nearly 100% of its graduates win places at four-year colleges, and U. …

Switching Social Contexts: The Effects of Housing Mobility and School Choice Programs on Youth Outcomes

Despite years of research, methodological and practical obstacles make it difficult to conclude whether policies aimed at improving schools and communities are effective for improving youth outcomes. To complement existing work, we assess research on the educational and social outcomes for comparable youth who change school and neighborhood settings through unique housing policy and school voucher programs. Research shows that housing programs have helped poor families move to much safer, less disadvantaged, and less segregated neighborhoods. Some housing programs have also provided early educational benefits for young people who relocated to less poor and less segregated neighborhoods, but these gains were not maintained in the long run. School voucher programs have helped disadvantaged youth attend higher-performing private schools in less segregated environments with more middle-class peers. Although some voucher programs have shown small positive effects, the results of others are less certain owing to methodological weaknesses. Future research should directly examine families’ selection processes and be cautious with quantitative research that uses naturally occurring variation to model the effects of potential social programs. Researchers should also recognize the family processes that interact with social policy to determine how youth development can be improved, alongside the structural and political processes that condition how programs work at a larger scale.

Reading Achievement in Eastern Kentucky

Reading Achievement in Eastern Kentucky Sky Marietta (bio) In September of 2008, the Lexington Herald Leader published the results of all Kentucky schools on the annual state assessment, including ranking the top ten schools in the state. No particular attention was paid to the three top-scoring public elementary schools, even though all were located in Appalachian counties: Floyd, Johnson, and Magoffin, in order of scores. In fact, across Eastern Kentucky a trend has emerged in test scores that would be the envy of the urban districts that get the attention serving high-poverty students. From Bell County to Wolfe, in small schools and large, in elementary schools through high schools, reading achievement is normal in Eastern Kentucky, despite high proportions of children living in poverty. Until 2006, the battery of state assessments in Kentucky included the California Test of Basic Skills (CTBS), an achievement test that allowed students in Kentucky to be directly compared to other students of the same grade level across the nation. The average for all Eastern Kentucky districts on reading performance in the 2005–2006 school year was within the average range for the nation. More recently, the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that, for the subgroup of elementary students taking the test who could be identified as poor, no state scored significantly higher in reading than Kentucky, a trend likely driven by the 190,000 children currently enrolled in Eastern Kentucky's public schools. This achievement is remarkable, if largely unnoticed. From crowded tenement homes on city streets to rickety shacks set next to cotton fields, poor children enter school already behind. They are less likely to know their letters or colors in kindergarten, or that they should sit quietly in their seats, or how to answer the teachers' questions. Of all the academic and behavior challenges these children face, one of the greatest obstacles is learning to read with the fluency and background knowledge necessary to learn from high school textbooks, which is, in turn, necessary to make it to college. Low reading achievement is one of [End Page 56] the most pernicious problems for those who see education as the path to social equality. Certainly Appalachia, a region long associated (fairly or not) with anti-intellectualism and illiteracy would not be expected to buck this trend. My own teaching experience, which began in a tiny school located within a remote section of the Navajo Nation, showed how mightily children living in poverty can struggle with reading. My students were certainly bright and cared for by loving families, but reading and books were not a central part of their lives, nor particularly necessary to maintain the types of jobs or lifestyle available locally. I was often struck by the landscape of the picture books I read to my first graders, which were extraordinarily removed from their lives. And these difficulties predictably manifested in their test scores, which were discouragingly, persistently, dismal. As tough as it is to teach young children how to crack the code of English orthography, the real challenge for reading emerges in late elementary school. It turns out that children living in poverty are exposed to far fewer words than their middle-class peers, who hear a great variety and depth of language as their parents' discuss their day over dinner or read them books at night. These types of incidental language exposures lead to a reservoir of academic words that can be pulled from to understand more complicated texts. Poor children have no such reservoir and so struggle comprehending the textbooks and trade books that are central to academic success by fourth grade. It can be hard to help a child sound out words correctly, particularly when there is a disability, but it pales compared to the challenge of imparting the thousands and thousands of words that separate the vocabularies of the rich and the poor in kindergarten. If children in Eastern Kentucky are learning to read as well as middle-class peers, there must be some way they are getting exposure to rich language. And this exposure was undocumented in educational research on the lives of children living in poverty. Last summer, I set off to understand...

Accountability Comes to Preschool: Can We Make it Work for Young Children?

Early childhood educators are justifiably concerned that demands for academic standards in preschool will result in developmentally inappropriate instruction that focuses on a narrow set of isolated skills. But Ms. Stipek believes that teaching preschoolers basic skills can give them a good foundation for their school careers, and she shows that it is possible to do this in ways that are both effective and enjoyable. PRESSURES to raise academic achievement and to close the achievement gap have taken a firm hold on elementary and secondary schools. Now, preschools are beginning to feel the heat. Testing for No Child Left Behind isn't required until third grade. But as elementary schools ratchet up demands on children in the early grades and as kindergarten becomes more academic, children entering school without basic literacy and math skills are at an increasingly significant disadvantage. Accountability is also beginning to enter the preschool arena. Both the House and Senate versions of the Head Start reauthorization bill require the development of educational performance standards based on recommendations of a National Academy of Sciences panel. Head Start programs would then be held accountable for making progress toward meeting these goals, and their funding would be withdrawn after some period of time if they failed. States and districts are likely to follow with initiatives designed to ensure that children in publicly funded early childhood education programs are being prepared academically to succeed in school. There are good reasons for the increased attention to academic skills in preschool, especially in programs serving economically disadvantaged children. Children from low-income families enter kindergarten on average a year to a year and a half behind their middle-class peers in terms of school readiness. And the relatively poor cognitive skills of low-income children at school entry predict poor achievement in the long term. Meredith Phillips, James Crouse, and John Ralph estimated in a meta-analysis that about half of the total black/white gap in math and reading achievement at the end of high school is explained by the gap between blacks and whites at school entry. (1) Preschool education can give children from economically disadvantaged homes a better chance of succeeding in school by contributing to their cognitive skills. Moreover, all young children are capable of learning far more than is typically believed, and they enjoy the process. This new focus on academic preparation will undoubtedly have significant implications for the nature of preschool programs, and it could have negative consequences. Until recently, kindergarten was a time for children to prepare for school. Today, it is school--in most places as focused on academic skill as first grade used to be. Will the same thing happen to preschool? We need to think hard about how we will balance the pressure to prepare young children academically with their social/emotional needs. How will we increase young children's academic skills without undermining their enthusiasm for learning or reducing the attention we give to the many other domains of development that are important for their success? The early childhood education community has resisted a focus on academic skills primarily because experts are worried that it will come in the form of whole-group instruction, rigid pacing, and repetitive, decontextualized tasks --the kind of drill and kill that is becoming commonplace in the early elementary grades and that is well known to suffocate young children's natural enthusiasm for learning. My own recent observations in preschools suggest that these concerns are well founded. I am seeing children in preschool classrooms counting by rote to 10 or 20 in a chorus. When I interview the children, many have no idea what an 8 or a 10 is. They can't tell me, for example, how many cookies they would have if they started with 7 and I gave them one more, or whether 8 is more or less than 9. …

Learning to Forget: A Rite of Adolescence?

Stephen Lassonde. Learning to Forget: Schooling and Family Life in New Haven's Working Class, 1870–1940. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. xvi + 301 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00. As a young boy growing up in an Italian immigrant neighborhood in New York City during the early 1900s, Leonard Covello recalled bringing home an elementary school report card for his father to sign. But a conflict between family and school quickly surfaced in their tenement household when the father spotted a different spelling of his last name. "What is this 'Leonard Covello'?" the father exclaimed. "What happened to the i in Coviello?" A silence fell over the family. "From Leonardo to Leonard I can follow," the father continued. "A perfectly natural process. In America anything can happen and does happen. But you don't change a family name. A name is a name. What happened to the i?" Leonard defended his teacher's actions. "Mrs. Cutter took it out," he explained. "Every time she pronounced Coviello it came out Covello. So she took out the i. That way it's easier for everybody." "And what has this Mrs. Cutter got to do with my name?" the father demanded. "What difference does it make?" Leonard shot back, one of the first times that he ever dared to oppose his father. "It's more American. The i doesn't help anything." Leonard watched as his father bitterly fumed over the school's intrusion into their family life, then shrugged his shoulders in resignation, signed the report card, and slid it back across the table to his son. This initial conflict between family and school grew larger over the years, particularly when Leonard and his adolescent peers moved on to a newer, more encompassing institution: the American high school. "We soon got the idea that 'Italian' meant something inferior, and a barrier was erected between children of Italian origin and their parents," he wrote. "This was the accepted process of Americanization. We were becoming Americans by learning how to be ashamed of our parents."1 Historian Stephen Lassonde's book, Learning to Forget, captures the spirit of these tense relationships between working-class immigrant families and [End Page 201] American schools. But he interprets the conflict as more than a second generation failing to identify with the culture of the first. Rather, Lassonde argues that the expansion of American schooling from the nineteenth to the twentieth century led working-class families to abandon traditional expectations for their youth and reluctantly embrace middle-class ideals of a "sentimental childhood" (p. 11). Children's roles as active, obedient contributors to the family wage economy faded away as they spent more time in a special place—school—that valued children's "development" and socialized them for a future adulthood less directly tied to traditional family expectations. "The school was the primary vehicle of this change," Lassonde contends, "but it was the elaboration of a system of schooling for all children and its physical location beyond the child's neighborhood that drew working-class boys and girls into contact with their middle-class peers who embodied the very cultural ideals espoused by the schools" (p. 11). Moreover, at the same time that parents surrendered their children to the official American middle-class culture operated by the schools, these children were also adopted into the unofficial "emerging national youth culture" of their adolescent peers. "In either instance—whether native-born or immigrant—working-class youths were 'learning to forget' . . . the very lessons their parents had taught them about the connection of their needs and aspirations to their commitments to others" (p. 12). Schooling socialized students to disregard the traditional family compact, which held that economic decisions were made within the familial hierarchy, with the goal of providing appropriately for all members from cradle to grave. Disrupting this compact was a far greater issue than dropping a letter from the family name. Lassonde bridges two fields of historical...

The Production of a Beloved Community: Sesame Street's Answer to America's Inequalities

The children's public television program Sesame Street strived exemplify and create an egalitarian and more tolerant community both on screen and in actuality. Sesame Street's aim educate disadvantaged urban preschool children and put them on an equal intellectual level as their middle-class peers when they entered grade school was central the development and direction of the show. To appeal their audience, the producers designed reproduction of working-class, urban city block for television studio set and directed multiethnic and multilingual cast of human and puppet characters that taught fundamental skills for reading, writing, and mathematics as well as social practices of open-mindedness, tolerance, and goodwill. The diverse cast commingled and solved problems together in their neighborhood setting. With the debut on November 10, 1969, and at least three years prior of preparation and research, Sesame Street grew out of the era's milieu of the civil rights struggle and the effort of social reform. The vision and principles of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s beloved community signified the central commitment of the show. The idea for beloved community developed long before King espoused his message the civil rights movement, but the concept became popular as result of his leadership and appeal. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thinkers Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebhur, and Josiah Royce combined Christian doctrine and the practice of moral compassion define their ideal vision of beloved community (Zepp). By the mid-1950s, recognized as the beginning of the civil rights movement, King pronounced in speeches and published writings his primary goal as the fulfillment of such society. The roots of King's philosophy and the beliefs he carried throughout the movement remain in contention as scholars debate King's major influences and primary goals. Zepp situates King's influences in the history of American liberal theology, while James Cone and Richard Lischer find the source of King's position in the Southern Baptist Church and African American religious tradition. Throughout the movement, King's thinking proved anything but static, but his goals expressed in his publications and major speeches, designed for mostly white audience, emphasized nonviolence and the realization of beloved community. In beloved community, the diverse peoples of the United States and ultimately the world reconciled their differences, integrated, cooperated, and coexisted with one another. I have dream, King called out at the March 1963 on Washington that ... the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able sit down together at the table of brotherhood (qtd. in Carson and Shepard 85). He asked for peoples of all nationalities and religions join hands and respect one another (Carson and Shepard 87). Childhood is not simply time of innocence - free from the social and cultural pressures of the adult world -but defined by historical trends and political agendas. Joel Spring argues that, throughout its history, the behaviors and goals of the public school system have sustained the goal of cultural domination. Public schools particularly have become one form of what Spring calls ideological management (4), or the act of creating and dispersing knowledge throughout society. From its incipience, the public education system sought to manage the distribution of ideas m society (3) in order preserve and uphold democracy. Sesame Street became an example of such school; originally financed by the federal government and nonprofit organizations, the program educated children through the medium of television before they entered the school system. Spring argues that the Children's Television Workshop (CTW), the production company behind Sesame Street, attempted shape public morality and present a standard as what the world should be like (384). …

Deviant (M)others: The Construction of Teenage Motherhood in Contemporary Discourse

Paradoxically, the focus on teen motherhood as an object of concern in the West has coincided with declining rates of teen birth. This suggests that the view of teenage motherhood as problematic is underpinned by changing social and political imperatives regarding the role of women in these countries. This article examines the literature surrounding teenage motherhood from the United States, United Kingdom and New Zealand, and explores the way in which normative perceptions of motherhood have shifted over the past few decades to position teenage mothers as stigmatised and marginalised. Two specific discourses – those of welfare dependency and social exclusion – are highlighted, and their mediation through scientific discourses examined. The increasing trend to evidence-based policy development has masked the ideological basis of much policy in this area and highlights the importance of critical evaluation of the discourses surrounding teenage motherhood. A critical examination of the literature suggests that teenage mothers are vilified, not because the evidence of poor outcomes for teen mothers and their children is particularly compelling, but because these young women resist the typical life trajectory of their middle-class peers which conforms to the current governmental objectives of economic growth through higher education and increased female workforce participation.

The Impact of Junior Kindergarten on Math Skills in Elementary School

Using data from the first cycle of the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, this study examines the impact of junior kindergarten on children's later skills in math, above and beyond regional differences and individual/ household factors. It was hypothesized that earlier schooling would better prepare children for first formal learning of arithmetic, resulting in a more developed knowledge-base for optimal performance at the middle and end of elementary school. We also hypothesized that junior kindergarten attendance would reduce the performance gap between children from economically disadvantaged and those from advantaged families. Our results suggest that earlier schooling did not provide the cognitive boost that would lead to better performance in arithmetic, especially for girls. These results are above and beyond a number of controls (sex, age, region, SES, family functioning, family configuration, education, and family size). Junior kindergarten attendance did not help bridge the performance gap based on economic advantage/disadvantage. Primary school children from poor families who attended junior kindergarten did not perform on a par with their middle-class peers. This study makes an important case for enrichment in the central conceptual structures related to intuitive and informal mathematical knowledge through games and activities potentially featured in the junior kindergarten curriculum.

Home-education

This article reports on the performance of reception-aged, home-educated children. Media reports tend to focus on older home-educated children withdrawing from school but very little is known about younger children many of whom have never been to school. This research sought insight into the learning experience of these young children. The study involved 35 home-educated children aged between four and five years of age, from diverse socio-economic backgrounds. The children were assessed using the Performance Indicators in Primary Schools (Start and End of Reception). Whilst the home-educated children outscored their school counterparts, those from lower socio-economic groups outperformed their middle class peers. It appeared that a flexible approach to education, and a high level of parental attention and commitment, regardless of their socioeconomic group and level of education, seemed the most important factors in the children’s development and progress.

Enhancing young children’s mathematical knowledge through a pre-kindergarten mathematics intervention

There is growing evidence that socioeconomic (SES)-related differences in mathematical knowledge begin in early childhood, because young children from economically disadvantaged families receive less support for mathematical development than their middle-class peers receive. A pre-kindergarten mathematics intervention, including a pre-kindergarten mathematics curriculum, was developed and implemented in public and private preschools serving low- and middle-income families. Mathematical knowledge of intervention and comparison children was comprehensively assessed. A significant SES-related gap in mathematical knowledge was found at the beginning of the pre-kindergarten year. The intervention significantly enhanced the mathematical knowledge of children at both levels of SES. Low-income children acquired more knowledge, relative to their starting point, than middle-income children. The extent of mathematical knowledge was similar in low-income intervention children and middle-income comparison children. Implications of this research for early childhood education curricula and educational policy are discussed.

Young People's Higher Education Choices: The role of family and friends

Previous studies of higher education (HE) choice have tended to draw a strong contrast between the decisions made by young people from working-class backgrounds and those of their middle-class peers. This paper draws on a qualitative, longitudinal study to argue that such assumptions about social class homogeneity overlook the very different ways in which students from a similar (middle class) location come to understand the HE sector. It also suggests that while families have a strong influence on young people's conceptualisation of the sector, friends and peers play an important role in informing decisions about what constitutes a 'feasible' choice. Indeed, this paper shows how rankings within friendship groups were, in many cases, transposed directly onto a hierarchy of HE institutions and courses. On the basis of this evidence, it concludes that a two-step interaction between family and friends best explains the decision-making processes in which these young people were engaged.

Summer Loss: The Phenomenon No One Wants to Deal with

AS I REPORTED in March Research column, poor students lose academic ground over summer, while their middle-class and affluent peers gain in reading and hold their own in math. This strikes me as an important finding, but it seems to have had little impact. Between 1996 and 2000, just a few articles in Education Week mentioned it, but always as a small part of a larger article that focused on something else. Interest in phenomenon of seems to have been largely limited to researchers, but it is certainly long-standing. Twenty years ago, Donald Hayes and Judith Grether reported that a seven-month difference in reading achievement between poor and middle-class students in second grade had widened to two years and seven months by end of sixth grade. in research reported in March column, gap grew in spite of fact that two groups made similar progress during school year. Hayes and Grether concluded that the differential progress made during four summers between second and sixth grade accounts for upwards of 80% of achievement difference between economically advantaged and ghetto schools. Eighty percent! Just that finding should have been sufficient to make people sit up and take notice, but now there's more. The phenomenon of summer loss has major implications for measurement of Adequate Yearly Progress that is required of states accepting federal money through reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), otherwise known as No Child Left Behind Act. (In my opinion, states ought to decline funds, allowing them to ignore ESEA's outrageous requirements.) Most states and districts do not test twice yearly, but without twice-a-year testing, differential summer loss cannot be detected. Schools whose poor children are learning over year will suffer because summer loss will cause them to fall farther and farther behind their middle-class peers and to fail to show much growth in reading and math. It will thus appear that schools are failing, and they will be blamed for what is happening - or, more accurately, is not happening - in family and community. That said, I must also immediately add that there is a lot more to schools than test scores (hard as that might be to believe these days). In May 2001 Research column, I reported on a study that showed enormous differences in beginning reading instruction in wealthy and poor classrooms. Freelance writer Michael Sokolove has now captured essential differences nicely in 24 February 2002 issue of Washington Post Sunday Magazine. As I observed them [poor students receiving Direct Instruction], it occurred to me that high-stakes tests are imposing a kind of instructional divide. The wealthy kids get full package - instruction that is not rote, books that are rich in content. And poor kids get stripped-down model - only what they are perceived to need. I think operative word in preceding sentence is perceived. In a review of research on summer loss, Richard Allington and Anne McGill-Franzen of University of Florida take note of a meta- analysis of research conducted on 13 studies. The report of meta- analysis also provided a narrative analysis of 24 other studies that were available but failed to provide sufficient data for meta- analytic procedures. The conclusion of meta-analysis is stark: one summer equals a three-month loss. Over course of grades 1 through 6, this adds up to 11/2 years. A study that did not directly examine summer loss found that, in I programs, gains measured by spring-to-spring testing were much smaller than those measured by fall-to-spring testing. This finding implies summer loss and led researchers to conclude: Title I interventions during regular school year alone may not sustain their relatively large Fall/Spring achievement improvements. …

Fostering Parental Support for Children's Mathematical Development: An Intervention with Head Start Families

The first national education goal, school readiness, recognizes a need for young children to be better prepared for entry into elementary school. Many low-income children exhibit a pattern of underachievement in school mathematics. Research has revealed a developmental gap between low-income preschool children and their middle-class peers with respect to the extent of their numerical knowledge. Research has also found that many low-income children do not receive a broad base of support for mathematical development at home or in preschool. In each of two studies, we conducted a bi-generation (parent and child) mathematics intervention with Head Start families. The intervention was designed to enhance parental support for pre-kindergarten children's mathematical development. It was found that low-income parents were willing and able to support this area of their children's development once they were provided with the training to do so. The support that parents provided to their children through the intervention was clearly effective in enhancing the development of children's informal mathematical knowledge. Intervention children developed more extensive mathematical knowledge than a comparison group of low-income children. Thus, an important step toward achieving the school readiness goal can be taken by fostering low- income parents' support for young children's mathematical development.

Community-Based Support for Preschool Readiness Among Children in Poverty

This study tested the feasibility of an intervention designed to increase the frequency and quality of shared reading among low-income parents and their young, 2- and 3-year-old children. The program was based on an interactive reading method known to facilitate children's receptive and expressive language skills. Study participants were 61 children and their parents; they resided in 1 of 2 socioeconomically disadvantaged communities. Prior to the intervention, few parents reported frequent home reading, and most children's language skills were at or below that of others' their age. After the intervention, the frequency of home reading more than doubled, and significantly more parents reported their children enjoyed shared reading. This study demonstrates that relatively simple, inexpensive, community-based programs can change the home language and literacy activities of families with young children, including those most likely to begin school less "ready" than their middle-class peers.

Reflections on St. Francis at the New Millennium

REFLECTIONS ON ST. FRANCIS AT THE NEW MILLENNIUM Let me start by telling the story of the first twenty years or so of the life of a young man born perhaps around 1980 from well-to-do parents. They are what we call "good Catholics"—that is, devout in their ways and generous enough to the church. The young man's father is a successful businessman. The boom economy of the last decade of the twentieth century has allowed him to prosper beyond his dreams. He plans that his son will inherit and expand the family wealth. The young man grows up in affluent circumstances. Of course, his family is not from "old money," but in our changing culture social stratifications are not as strong as they once were. He is a lively and intelligent child, receiving an education equal to his middle-class peers, though he is no scholar. His parents are particularly pleased with his leadership qualities—from an early age everybody likes him; many accept him as a natural leader. He is voted "Most likely to Succeed" in his High School class. After college, he will be ready to be launched. Then something happens to our promising youth. We're not sure whether the golden boy's life started to change when he went to college or after he got out—accounts differ and the family isn't saying. In any case, not long after the new millennium kicks in, it becomes clear that this "twenty-something" starts to become a problem to himself and his family. Rather than take up the role in society that is his due, he drops out and begins to devote himself to kooky forms of religion. His self-made father is soon beside himself with worry about what to do with his son. He might have acquiesced with his drift toward religion, if the young man had decided to enter the priesthood, but instead the boy (let's call him Frank) begins to talk about having visions and a special calling from God. Huge family rows erupt. Frank's mother tries to be understanding, but many of his family and friends think that Frank needs help. Maybe he should get a therapist. How could somebody who has been given so much be so ungrateful? What is his problem? As the new millennium lurches forward, the outlook for poor Frank is not a promising one. Franciscan Studies 58 (2000) 2 Bernard McGinn I'm sure that by now you have caught on to my little game. About 1181 or 1182 another Frank was born in the small city of Assisi. Italy in the late twelfth century was a rapidly changing society, and one of growing affluence, at least for some. The dawn of the thirteenth century marked the beginning of a new era of prosperity, as well as intellectual and cultural achievement. Change, of course, always brings challenge and controversy. Francis of Assisi's father was one of those who accepted the challenge of the growing market economy and prospered. An older contemporary of Francis, born about 1160, had accepted the challenges of the changing church of the time and emerged as an even greater success story. Young Lothario Segni entered the service of the church, received the best education possible at Paris, joined the papal court, and rose so rapidly that in 1198 he was made pope while still in his thirties. In 1200 Innocent III was "Lord of the World," while young Frank/Francis was a dropout and a failure. My brief thought experiment is designed to suggest how hard it would probably be for us at the dawn of the new millennium to be any more astute than Francis's contemporaries in the early thirteenth century at recognizing the kind of miracle of grace that he represented to his age, as well as to ours. It is possible, of course, that providence has another Francis waiting in the wings as we move forward into Christianity's third millennium. We cannot know. We might not even recognize him. What we do have, though, is Francis himself—his life, his writings, the writings about him, and the many images of Francis...

Low Socio-Economic Status Children are Disadvantaged in the Provision of School-Based Child Protection Programmes

Although child sexual abuse affects all social classes, there is evidence to show that the risk of abuse is higher in lower socio-economic status (SES) groups. Data from a research project to evaluate the school-based child protection programme taught in New Zealand show that, prior to exposure to the programme, children from the lower SES group were potentially at greater risk of sexual abuse due to their lower knowledge and skill base. After the programme, the low SES children were found to have gained less than their middle class peers and these differences persisted when children were retested 12 months later. The observed SES differences in benefits obtained from the child protection programme can be at least partially attributed to differences in the degree of parental involvement across social class. Children from low income families were the ones least likely to have parent representatives at meetings relating to the programme. Their parents were the least likely to reinforce safety concepts at home and low SES children were the ones least likely to trust their parents to provide protection. The low level of parental involvement was associated with lower levels of teacher commitment to child protection in low SES areas. The effectiveness of child protection programmes is likely to be enhanced if parents can be enticed to attend information sessions where the benefits of their involvement can be emphasized. The particular challenges remaining are how to interest the lower SES parents in education for child protection, ensure their cooperation with school-based teachings and raise the interest and commitment levels of child protection educators in low SES environments.

A Descriptive Study of African-American Mother-Child Communication about Drugs and Health

A Descriptive Study of African-American Mother-Child Communication about Drugs and Health Parents' teaching styles and values about health shape children's health behaviors and attitudes. Parental influence is particularly salient with their children's use of illegal and addictive drugs. Children from families with open and positive communication are less likely to become involved with drugs than are children form families in which this kind of dialogue is absent (Block, Block and Keyes, 1988; Coombs, 1988). Comparisons of adolescents who use illegal drugs versus adolescents who do not document the importance of fathers who provide praise and encouragement and mothers who provide advice and guidance to drug abstaining youth (Coombs and Landsverk, 1988). While some patterns of drug use have changed for the better in the past decade, statistics on children's and adolescent's involvement with illegal and addictive drugs confirm the necessity of continuing to assess factors in the family environment which mitigate against drug use (Johnston and O'Malley, 1988; U.S Department of Health and Human Services, 1993). More information on the role of parents as related to children's health behavior and health status is especially important for low income African-American children. National health statistics over the past few decades document the serious health risks for low income African-American as compared to children from middle class families (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1992; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1993). Indicators of health problems begin before birth with higher rates of low birth weight and infant mortality for African-Americans and extend throughout childhood with elevated rates of chronic and acute diseases. African-American adolescents are often medically underserved and are more likely than their middle class peers to become pregnant during adolescence and to become involved in drug use (Office of Maternal and Child Health, 1990; Office of Technology Assessment, 1991). Although the circumstances of African-American children demand further study in order to identity ways to improve their health and well being, little attention has been given to date of the role of African - American parents teaching about health or drugs. With the exception of the three studies summarized below, research on aspects of family functioning contributing to or ameliorating against child and adolescent drug use has focused on white or Hispanic lower and middle class samples (Brook and Whiteman, 1981; Brook, Whiteman, Brook and Gordon, 1981; Coombs and Landsverk, 1988; Mercer and Kohn, 1980; Protinsky and Shilts, 1990; Sorosiak and Thomas, 1976; Stoker and Swadi, 1990). In the first study involving African-American families, inner city African-American caretakers were interviewed in the mid 1960s and again in the mid 1970s about their children's behavior in a longitudinal study of developmental trends in psychiatric symptoms and substance abuse (Kellam, Brown, Rubin and Ensminger, 1983). Children are used as the unit of analysis in reporting the results with little description of the family context provided as a potential predictor of adolescent substance abuse. Marked gender differences were observed in personality traits of shyness and aggressiveness as predictors of drug use in adolescence. A major longitudinal sample of adolescents from Los Angeles County included nine percent Black youth; race has not been separated out in the analyses of family or adolescent functioning related to drug use (Newcomb and Bentler, 1988a; Newcomb and Bentler, 1988b; Stein, Newcomb and Bentler, 1987). Another milestone longitudinal study included 25 Blacks in a sample of 105 but again family circumstances and parenting behavior potentially related to race was not treated as potential mediating factor (Block, Block and Keyes, 1988). For the sample overall in this last study, the interaction between mothers and daughters but not mothers and sons was predictive of subsequent involvement with drugs. …

Literacy Concepts of Low- and Middle-Class Four-Year-Olds Entering Preschool

Abstract In this study, the literacy knowledge that 4-year-olds from low- and middle-socioeconomic status homes bring to preschool was compared. Sixty-four children drawn from six separate preschools participated in the study; 33 were from low-in-come backgrounds and 31 from middle-class backgrounds. All preschoolers were assessed within the first 4 weeks of school. In addition, questionnaires were administered to parents to examine the frequency and quality of the literacy activities in which parents and children interact. Results indicated that even as early as 48 months of age, many children from low-income homes are at a distinct disadvantage when compared with their middle-class peers in understanding written language. Nonetheless, limited knowledge of literacy was not confined to preschoolers from impoverished homes. The combined findings suggest that the operative factor in literacy development is not economic instability but, rather, a paucity in early experiences with print.

Effect of Incentives on Learning in Middle-and Lower-Class Children

ABSTRACT Classified by Warner's Index of Status Characteristics as either middle class (MC) or lower class (LC), 10- and 15-year-old children learned a list of five low association nonsense syllables by the anticipation method to a criterion of one perfect recitation under one of three incentive conditions: material, social approval, or no incentive. As predicted, 10-year-old LC children performed better when offered a material incentive, whereas their MC peers performed best under social approval. There were no significant differences in learning between 15-year-old MC and LC children, suggesting that with age older LC children become more responsive to nonmaterial reinforcers as they become increasingly exposed to MC norms.