To Help Kids Thrive, Coach Their Parents

[groovedaddy]

N 1986, in a few of the poorest neighborhoods in Kingston, Jamaica, a team of researchers from the University of the West Indies embarked on an experiment that has done a great deal, over time, to change our thinking about how to help children succeed, especially those living in poverty. Its message: Help children by supporting and coaching their parents.

The researchers divided the families of 129 infants and toddlers into groups. The first group received hourlong home visits once a week from a trained researcher who encouraged the parents to spend more time playing actively with their children: reading picture books, singing songs, playing peekaboo. A second group of children received a kilogram of a milk-based nutritional supplement each week. A control group received nothing. The interventions themselves ended after two years, but the researchers have followed the children ever since.

The intervention that made the big difference in the children’s lives, as it turned out, wasn’t the added nutrition; it was the encouragement to the parents to play. The children whose parents were counseled to play more with them did better, throughout childhood, on tests of I.Q., aggressive behavior and self-control. Today, as adults, they earn an average of 25 percent more per year than the subjects whose parents didn’t receive home visits.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/opinion/sunday/to-help-kids-thrive-coach-their-parents.html?emc=edit_th_20160522&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=38945174&_r=0

[Igel]

1. Somebody can point to the real problem.

In American education. In education everywhere, actually.

Over 50% of the educational outcome is unrelated to the school's physical plant, administration, teachers, "learning styles."

Over 50% of what remains is unrelated to teachers and what teachers have control over. That leaves rather less than 25% of the outcome under the control of teachers, spread out over a couple dozen teachers over 12 or 13 years.

Yet what do we focus on? That less than 25%. Teachers take credit for the whole enchilada, they get blamed for the entire enchilada. Yet if you track kids from 6th and 7th grades through to graduation, how good or bad a given teacher is in each new grade level makes at best a small difference, even the really good teachers, to how much their students progress in that grade.