I think we can all put aside “Common Core”.  I think we can all put aside “Race To The Top”.  I think we can all put aside “College and Career Ready”….

They’ve all been proven to only be platitudes.  In actuality, they accomplish nothing.

True.  We may have to fight more battles to make that point emphatically clear to those who are smitten by fists of money shoved into their faces, but logic, science, and knowledge, are on the parent’s side that Common Core is nothing more than a Mao Tse Tung slogan, made up for promoting someone’s career further up the bureaucratic ladder.

The problem is poverty.  The numbers are very stark….

At entrance into preschool,….

  • youngsters from well-to-do families have a working vocabulary of 1,116 words.
  • youngsters from working class families have a working vocabulary of 749 words.
  • youngsters from welfare families have a working vocabulary of 525 words.

The Corporate philosophy being mostly generated by Bill Gate’s money is based upon the supposition that firing teachers for not equaling out those word levels will garner significant results.   The teachers have been saying “no” to this ever since it was rolled out.  Thinking such could ever work is ridiculous….

How does one make up a gap of 50%?

It it time for America to stand up and insist that every American citizen has a right to a good education.   That means that starting early with remedial classes is essential if we are going to create a non-dumb society.  The numbers today are staggering!  The top one percent owns 50% of the nation’s assets.  The rest of the top 20% owns everything else, leaving the bottom 80% of the population to fight over 3% of everything that is left….   Last year, Christina School District had 61.7% of its students listed on low income.

This forebodes that 61.7% of our future population will be dumb….  And until the current tax structures are changed, further income equality will make things much worse.

If we truly want to do something about education, and do something realistic that has a possible shot of working,  we need to directly address the problem of how to get children of welfare and working class parents to learn more words….

  • In professional families, children at home heard an average of 2,153 words per hour
  • In working class families, children at home heard an average of 1,251 words per hour
  • In welfare families, children at home heard an average of 616 words per hour

Extrapolated out across their development at age three….

  • Children in professional families heard an average of 11 million words
  • Children in working class families heard an average of 6 million words
  • Children in welfare families heard an average of 3 million words

How can a school system close a gap of 8 million words… particularly if classes are mixed, as they are in American classrooms?

The answer is to break the cycle.  Just giving money to working class families and to welfare families will not cause an increased use of vocabulary in their homes.

Increased vocabulary exposure is the answer.  To do that, children need to be put in a rich vocabulary environment as soon as possible.

There should be a way to evolve into making a vocabulary rich childcare part of the welfare experience.  The cost of providing early childhood childcare across the state, is small compared to the cost exacted by those who have no recourse but live off state handouts for the rest of their lives.

Childhood daycare is usually considered a need and is offered by our social services today.  It would take little effort to insist that books get read  full time in those establishments while they are open.  Instead of the current practice of putting children in pens where they are allowed one plaything each…. reading books, then letting children flip through them afterwards, and then reading them again, would be far more effective in building a child’s vocabulary….

It is time to stop pursuing a misguided policy of giving high bonuses to teachers on the top-end,  to those teachers who are being given the problem child years after the damage has been done. It is time to stop giving grants to teacher development colleges who then will be expected to send their charges in to teach these very students possessing one fourth the vocabulary exposure of those children fortunate enough to have professional parents.  It makes better since to prevent the problem from occurring at all…

Because all research shows that at birth, … provided sufficient nutrition was available during their period of gestation, … there is no difference between a child of professional parents and a child on welfare.  All that vocabulary difference is a result of different environments each child is brought up under….

Maybe one day we can eliminate poverty.  I’m doubtful that will happen.

But we can do something cheap and easy to make sure that all children who came into this world without the protection of the blankets of affluence,  have a decent vocabulary at age 3, age 4, age 5 and beyond…  That is easy, simple, cheap, and a sin if, knowing what we now know, it does not get enacted immediately…..

Common Core is dead.  Let’s do something that will really make a difference.