Why Poor Children Score So Poorly - The Achievement Gap

The CT Mastery Test results are sortable by many subgroups. One of the most predictive indicators of how a child will perform is whether they qualify for free or reduced price meals at school. Why is this? Why do poor children score so poorly.

In her book At a Loss for WordsBetty Bardridge argues that, "The Achievement Gap is really a vocabulary gap and it is evident at age 3." Research done by Hart and Risley (1995) found that 3 year old children of professional parents had vocabularies twice as large as those of 3 year olds being raised in poverty. As they examined possible causes for this finding they discovered that children in highly educated (professional) families heard many more words. By age 4 children in professional families had heard an average of 50 million words. Working class children had heard 30 million, while the children in poverty had heard only 15 million words. Most shocking was that when the researchers counted the number of words spoken by the three groups of children and their parents, they realized that the 3 year olds in the professional households used more different words than the parents in the poverty families.