Photo: Kate Samp for Strategies for Children

There’s been a lot of talk lately about closing the achievement gap. New York Times columnist David Brooks looks instead with alarm at a growing opportunity gap in a recent column about research from Robert Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard University.

“Putnam’s data verifies what many of us have seen anecdotally, that the children of the more affluent and less affluent are raised in starkly different ways and have different opportunities,” Brooks writes. “Decades ago, college-graduate parents and high-school-graduate parents invested similarly in their children. Recently, more affluent parents have invested much more in their children’s futures while less affluent parents have not. They’ve invested more time. Over the past decades, college-educated parents have quadrupled the amount of time they spend reading ‘Goodnight Moon,’ talking to their kids about their day and cheering them on from the sidelines. High-school-educated parents have increased child-care time, but only slightly. A generation ago, working-class parents spent slightly more time with their kids than college-educated parents. Now college-educated parents spend an hour more every day. This attention gap is largest in the first three years of life when it is most important.” (more…)

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Photo; Alessandra Hartkopf for Strategies for Children

The Boston City Council recently held a hearing on the achievement gap, and Brenda Powers, president of the Boston Association for the Education of Young Children, was among those who testified. Powers, who also directs the Nazareth Child Care Center in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood, gave powerful testimony about the role that high-quality early education — delivered through a mix of public and private providers –- plays in preparing children to enter kindergarten ready to succeed. Here is her testimony:

“Thank you, council members, for being here tonight and listening to my professional opinion of what will help us close the achievement gap.  I wish it were as simple as waving a magic wand and giving everyone the same opportunities, the same privileges. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

“As we have been able to determine from studies, children who are not successful by the third grade MCAS [Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System] exams are not likely to be successful in school. They are more likely to drop out. Ultimately they will cost the state money, lots of money, for services they will need as they get older, perhaps well into adulthood.

“Knowing the third grade [reading] scores are indicators, we can’t just wait and see what happens once the children are tested. We need to be proactive and make sure all children have access to quality early education programs. In early education programs, children will have vocabulary-rich environments. (more…)

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