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According to a study out earlier this week, disparities in cognitive development begin to show up among children from different socioeconomic backgrounds as young as nine months of age.
Even before babies begin to walk or toddlers enter preschool, this research shows, children from poor families are trailing behind their more-advantaged peers on measures rating their behavior and cognitive abilities. The same pattern holds for minority children vis-a-vis white children, children of mothers with a high school diploma or less compared to those whose mothers are more educated, and children growing up in Spanish-speaking homes vs. those from English-speaking households.<b> And those differences, the report adds, only grow over time.</b></blockquote>
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<a href="http://www.childtrends.org/_docdisp_page.cfm?LID=618162B0-DA82-4333-9E2D9A1681B0F58A">Child Trends put together this study for the Council of Chief State School Officers.</a> The researchers based the findings on data from a federal study that is tracking a nationally representative set of infants born in 2001.
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They say the results speak to the need to intervene even earlier in children development. Forget universal preschool, these findings seem to suggest. Zero-to-five programs and efforts aimed at engaging and supporting parents could be an even better starting point for closing those persistent achievement gaps that bedevil K-12 educators.</b>
Posted by Debra Viadero on July 17, 2009 1:53 PM
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Bring this home to Texas and you don't need me to stretch out the consequences. Let me simply report form the most recent report from State Senator Shapleigh, Texas on the Brink
I always find it funny when some business type Republican lectures on the wastefulness of public expenditures aimed at young children and poor families. Any good businessman knows that solving a problem is so much more cost efficient than continually dealing with the often escalating expense of dealing with the consequences , piecemeal.
Even funnier are the Bible-beaters who quote not the New Testament, but some bastardized Puritan variation to this effect:
[ From : Chapter 4 of Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision by George Lakoff ]
[To conservatives, ] Discipline: Self-control is an essential quality. Moral authority requires internal discipline, which is learned through punishment when one does wrong. The failure of an authority to punish for wrongdoing is a moral failure.
There are political consequences of such a view. Getting something one hasn't
earned weakens one's discipline and hence one's capacity to be moral. Thus, if you are
not prosperous, you are not disciplined enough to be prosperous and therefore deserve your poverty. Social programs, which give people things they haven't earned, lessen people's incentive to be disciplined and, hence, to be moral. Social programs thus serve immorality and should be abandoned.
For some reason the fear that some unworthy person may get public aid leads to the conclusion that NO one should be aided, NOT EVEN CHILDREN!
There is , of course, the old beam in the eye problem of corporate abuses and assistance which perpetually escapes the same analysis and censure.
Why this posting now? California just announced its budget and in spite of all we know its cuts fly in the face of what we know about children and justice and fairness. Unfortunately, California is all too often the Bell Weather State. What happens there, ripples in some form throughout the other states as well. Texas fixed its financial mess by using the one time stimulus package to side step its structural budget weakness. That won't be possible next time.
So, ask anyone who you are thinking of voting into the state legislature this simple question : what ideas do you have for fixing the state budget for the long term? How will you improve the chances of Texas children and the poor in the next budget?
Less anybody think this is an exercise in pie-in-the-sky beast beating, think again. Texas is ,as of 2005, a state in which Anglos are the largest minority, with Hispanics and Blacks making up the next largest groups.
Economics, Demography and the Future of Higher Education Policy
About two-thirds of this growth in college-age young people will be concentrated in California, Florida, Georgia, New York, and Texas (see Table 3). These five states could experience an increase of 2.9 million youth by 2015.
Except for Georgia, these are also the states with the highest proportion of immigrants and the greatest burgeoning of the Hispanic population. Meanwhile, the potential student population is projected to decline in 13 states in the north
central and northeast regions of the country. Most youth attend college in their home state; individual governors will have to plan for very different higher education scenarios.
If we don't think about the future of all Texans, especially those now neglected we are in danger of becoming an economic backwater at worst, a third world economy consisting of 2 classes at best. Neither of these two outcomes is good for us or for our democracy.
