Are these children just gifted differently, or is the culture in which they are raised in the determining factor?
The goal should be to raise them ALL.
What’s a “racial gap”? Is that the gap between blacks that drop out and whites that graduate??
Nobody wants to talk about the real problem, even conservatives. I have heard many sad stories about inner city schools where the kids are running wild — working their phones rather than paying attention in class, assaulting other students, using the F-word to teachers, and bringing false allegations against them. If a teacher tries discipline that was accepted decades ago, the teacher is discharged, reamed-out by the parents, or led away in handcuffs. For their part, republicans tend to blame it all on the teachers.
Research shows that brain development between birth and age 5 is crucial for long term educational achievement. Unless Trump plans to take a significant portion of the population’s offspring from them at birth and put them with different parents, then it will be difficult to bridge the gap.
The current approach to teaching preschoolers needs to trickle up (play-based learning. Heavy on imagination and hands-on activities.) What I have observed going on in kindergarten through third grade is not going to bridge any gaps. The same folks who learned before will still learn because parents will make up for the deficits left by common core.
Trump can always look to success stories in Africa for ideas.
Parents? No big government fixes.
School choice — vouchers, charter schools, etc. CAN help those who are not afraid to ‘’act white’’.
The schools are lousy. Teaching kids gender propaganda instead of math.
It’s worldwide
The facts are simple, the more a child is in contact with academic English the quicker they gain the required command of their native tongue (academic English) and become literate and fluent.
The American educational model requires students to be fluent in their native language by the end of the third grade with additional support in the fourth grade. American students are expected to be self initiated learners by the fifth grade and are expected to take responsibility for their own learning, goals, achievement, and their career choices from then on.
Students from at risk socioeconomic levels (poverty level) are exposed to a very limited sample of academic English words per day (< 750 words daily). Students from middle class backgrounds = @ 1500-3000 words per day. Students from upper middle/ upper class families = > 5000 words per day. Also, the higher the educational level in the home, the more formal the language sample a student hears ( less slang) and the more likely critical thought is encountered within the conversation.
This is why there is a direct association between socioeconomic levels and student performance as well as the direct relation between Academic English in the home vs Slang or English as a second language. One has only to see the percentage of free and reduced lunch students in a school to know the percentage of students in a district that are below basic in reading and math skills in any district in the nation within the MOE ( prior to testing each years students).
The solution them becomes crystal clear, America must return to the Melting Pot it has been until the last thirty years of “diversity”. Make American English the official language of the United States of America. Do away with the misguided use of ESL teaching and learning. By drawing a line in the sand of national expectations in language and learning, end bi-lingual education, and demand assimilation or deportation for those desirous of citizenship, the plying field becomes level, the standards straightforward and clear, the citizenship requirements and performance standards clearly evident.
Studies show that families that immigrate and assimilate are fully integrated within societies within two generations.
You can’t have change without change. It’s time to go back to the future and learn to be and raise American citizens worth of the name citizen.