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The backbone of a healthy Democracy is an educated citizenry, and these days it seems like every conversation about any policy topic comes down to "What is wrong with our education system and what can we do to fix it?" It does seem like an intractable problem, where those on the Right exclaim that throwing more money at the problem won't fix it while those on the Left say that we just need to pay teachers the same as we pay doctors and lawyers.

Paul Tough recently wrote a fascinating article in the NY Times Magazine where he traces the newest developments in education, in particular detailing research which tries to explain discrepancies between success rates of middle-class students compared with that of the poor and minority segments of our population, in particular the inner cities.

He begins by discussing Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program:

But the evidence is becoming difficult to ignore: when educators do succeed at educating poor minority students up to national standards of proficiency, they invariably use methods that are radically different and more intensive than those employed in most American public schools. So as the No Child Left Behind law comes up for reauthorization next year, Americans are facing an increasingly stark choice: is the nation really committed to guaranteeing that all of the country’s students will succeed to the same high level? And if so, how hard are we willing to work, and what resources are we willing to commit, to achieve that goal?

He continues detailing recent research attempting to quantify the differences between children raised in middle-class families vs. those in more poor households:

Vocabulary growth differed sharply by class and that the gap between the classes opened early. By age 3, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1,100 words, and children whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words. The children’s I.Q.’s correlated closely to their vocabularies. The average I.Q. among the professional children was 117, and the welfare children had an average I.Q. of 79.

By comparing the vocabulary scores with their observations of each child’s home life, the researchers were able to conclude that the size of each child’s vocabulary correlated most closely to one simple factor: the number of words the parents spoke to the child. That varied greatly across the homes they visited, and again, it varied by class. In the professional homes, parents directed an average of 487 “utterances” — anything from a one-word command to a full soliloquy — to their children each hour. In welfare homes, the children heard 178 utterances per hour.

It's a long article, but fascinating, as he documents one particularly successful approach by a Charter school organization called KIPP (for Knowledge is Power Program), run by two alumni of the Teach for America program.

Tough concludes:

Although the failure of No Child Left Behind now seems more likely than not, it is not too late for it to succeed. We know now, in a way that we did not when the law was passed, what it would take to make it work. And if the law does, in the end, fail — if in 2014 only 20 or 30 or 40 percent of the country’s poor and minority students are proficient, then we will need to accept that its failure was not an accident and was not inevitable, but was the outcome we chose.

Make sure you read every word of it...it's totally worth it!

In fact, it's so important, we've turned it into an essay posted on our site.

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