Learning to Be Free

Mario enters kindergarten and within the first few months the school tells his parents he is “behind” and “not on grade level.” Mario comes from a working class family of loving parents with very limited resources. Like many children entering school in the NCLB era, Mario is behind before he starts. What’s wrong with this picture?

In early December several news sources published excerpts from The Family: America’s Smallest School written by Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley of Education Testing Service’s Policy Information Center. The report analyzes the family and home experiences and conditions that impact children’s learning. The study identified four factors that strongly affect student achievement and which together “account for about two-thirds of the large differences among states in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) eighth-grade reading scores.” They are: “single parent families, time spent reading to children, time watching TV, and the frequency of school absences.”

One of the report’s main conclusions is that “the resources available at home — books, magazines, newspapers, a home computer, a quiet place to study — can have a lasting influence on a child’s ability to achieve academically.” Perhaps this is revelatory for ETS, but it shouldn’t be news for any family or teacher with struggling learners. And it is a pinhole view of a much larger landscape of challenges.

We keep studying a fact that we already know, but ignore repeatedly: the family and community resources (money, time, people, learning opportunities and daily conditions) to which learners have access outside of school determine much of what is possible for learners in school. This is why Mario, no matter how hard he works, is statistically likely to fall further behind his more privileged peers the longer he stays in school.

Countless studies have affirmed the positive outcomes for children when families involve themselves actively in their children’s education inside and outside of schools. Yet our system — the social contract for education — has not been able to address the changing nature of families and communities, economic opportunities, and generally higher expectations for learning in the world we now live in.

The real resource gap is not so much about what schools don’t have, but what families and children can’t provide or create for themselves because they lack the time, the knowledge, the resources or the community of support. Our education system today was designed to complement a traditional, two-parent family-based social structure within an industrial economy and homogeneous communities, none of which exist today, an era of global economies, new technologies and dramatic demographic changes. Unless we get beyond the four walls of the classroom and realize that education is happening all the time, we will not see clearly what we need to do to address this challenge.

That is why are proposing — as part of a new social contract for education — to reframe equity as addressing the resource gap for families and individual learners.

To learn more this download Podcast 2 from the right column of our home page.