The Lottery of Opportunity

For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. Matthew 25, verse 29.

"We didn't have any bank account, and we had few possessions. But we had faith, shared interests, our family, and in our weather-beaten shack we felt rich enough." Miriam Lind

And they had an abundance of language. Both were avid readers and writers, fresh out of college and surrounded by literate friends and a large extended family all who valued the pursuit of knowledge and education.

So I entered into life lucky, having won the most important lottery of all--birth into a family rich in ideas and literacy, and to a father and mother who brought their own luck and language expertise into their children's lives.

How many adult language interactions did I have with my parents and with the constant stream of their adult friends who swirled and eddied around me for the first five years of my life? Nearly all of these adults spoke in extended speech, in the language of books and written language. Like all children I learned the language I was surrounded by effortlessly. I spent hours listening to my parents read books to me--novels, poetry, fairy tales.

I was awake about 25,000 hours the first five years of life. Cognitive scientists estimate that it takes 10,000 hours of expert instruction and practice to gain expertise in a domain or skill. The amount of direct verbal interaction between parents and their children fluctuate hugely in families, but in my case it was likely very high--perhaps a total of 3000 hours of direct verbal interaction (including being read to) with my parents and other incidental or intentional encounters with other verbal experts over the first five years. This contrasts with the approximately 100 hours of verbal interaction teachers engage in with an individual child over a child's six years of elementary school.

So when I entered school in my sixth year of life I was well on my way to expertise in spoken language and, being immersed in print culture and having been read to frequently, I already had a jump on beginning reading.

This year I have taught kindergartners to read. I have entered into their young lives for a single moment, a snapshot of their lives, and I am overwhelmed how arbitrary fate is, how capricious is the way opportunity opens to all of us, and how ineffective formal education is in ameliorating the Matthew Effect. The irony is that not only does formal education not ameliorate the effect, but it augments it, and the gap between the haves and have nots in educational capital expands throughout the school years.

Nathaniel walks into kindergarten with deep and flexible knowledge of extended language. He speaks in complete sentences and has broad general knowledge of the world. He has already begun to read, and by the end of kindergarten his reading ability has nearly caught up to his rich language experience and knowledge and he reads and comprehends at a sixth grade level. He is a jackpot winner in the educational lottery before he barely begins schooling.

Roberta walks into kindergarten with several words of English. Her parents are illiterate in their own language and she speaks haltingly in her native language. If Roberta receives the same amount of instruction Nathaniel receives, the large gap between the two will increase dramatically. To significantly narrow the gap would take more instructional minutes than are available in the school day and would be beyond both Roberta's ability to absorb and her teacher's ability to provide.

This in the unsavory truth about public education. It does not provide the early interventions necessary to change the circumstances most children are born into. It crystallizes differences and rewards those already rich in educational capital. We should embrace this truth and use it to guide us out of these dark ages of public education. Doing so will take a seismic shift in our ideas about education and about how we can effect educational change.