To give you some context before I begin, I’m sharing a snapshot of my equity journey. I lived in my own bubble of privilege for many years. I grew up as an Indian kid in mostly white North County, San Diego (circa 2000). I had socioeconomic privilege (courtesy of my parents) which shielded me from learning the realities of blatant racism for a bit. And being Indian, I also had the protection of being a “model minority”. I was also heterosexual and my neurodivergence didn’t truly kick in until college. I was an averagely awkward middle schooler and teenager who walked through the world with relative ease.
I tried to forget that my parents spoke another language and tried to forget the Hindi that traced my tongue – oh, I can barely understand Hindi now, English is all I know. I argued with my parents that racism didn’t still exist. Why couldn’t she calm down? No, Mom, our server didn’t walk by us on purpose to serve the other family who just got seated even though we’ve been waiting for a while now – it was an accident.
No, it was okay that I had to be Jasmine or Pocahontas – even though Belle is my favorite.
No, it’s okay that there aren’t more foundation colors available – even though this one makes me look orange, and the others make me look as pale as a ghost.
No, I don't have an accent. Why would I?
No, I don’t think our new neighbors are cranky that we moved in. I’m sure they’ve met other Indian families before. They’re having a bad day, that’s all.
No, my family does not own a 7-11. Why would they?
No. No. No.
When I got my first teaching job at 25 in 2015, I was required to take an equity workshop. And that workshop rocked me to my core. We were asked to unpack Peggy McIntosh’s invisible knapsack of white privilege.
Bubble. Burst.
I might’ve had many other kinds of privilege, but the invisible ramifications of white privilege had just gone and smacked me upside the head. As a brand new teacher, I wasn’t sure how to do the equity work, but at least I wouldn’t make the fatal error of pretending like racism didn’t exist.
Travyon Martin was murdered in 2012. When I first heard of Black Lives Matter, I scoffed. Yes. Scoffed. Why don’t brown lives matter, too? I was ignorant – there is no other word for it – ignorant. I didn’t yet understand that our liberation is intertwined. I didn’t yet understand that none of us are free until we are all free.
Then, Michael Brown was murdered. The Ferguson protests happened. I still didn’t quite understand Black Lives Matter. Finally, when I took the equity workshop and learned about white privilege, pieces began to click into place.
Now, not only were my eyes open, but I had a reason. 25 reasons, beyond myself, to better myself for – my students. Now, I wasn’t accountable only for myself. I had the privilege of loving, teaching, and honoring 25 tiny humans.
I will never forget when one of the students in my class, a beautiful brown-skinned boy full of magic and life, came up to me and said - “Ms. Bhanot, I always wanted to be a police officer. But they kill people who look like me.”
I didn’t know how to respond to him. I didn’t have the knowledge. My equity journey had just started. It was all so new. All I could do was hug him and say, “I know, honey, I know. I love you. We’ll figure it out.”
It wasn’t enough.
It also wasn’t a denial of his fears or pain. It wasn’t a false promise that everything would be okay. It wasn’t a brush under the rug, we don’t talk about that at school.
It wasn’t enough, but it was something.
As you keep reading, I hope you’ll remember my own equity journey. I hope what I say will shock you and anger you into beginning your journey if you haven’t yet, and the courage to say – it’s okay that I didn’t know, but I know now, and must do better. And I also hope it will allow you to practice forgiveness – the same way I had to practice for myself – if your equity journey begins later than it should have.
30 million word gap.
Wealthy families speak more to their kids and use more complex language.
“Poor kids start school at a disadvantage because their parents don’t read or speak to them as much.”
Educators I deeply admire and respect have said it. Perhaps you’ve said it.
I know I've certainly said it, even as an educator who has been doing equity work for years now. I foolishly assumed that the 30 million word gap study was at least rooted in the fact that our “poor kids” are from systematically underserved communities.
Betty Hart and Tom Risley, researchers at the University of Kansas, conducted a study in 1995 to learn how we can improve the “poor academic achievement” of poor kids. As teachers, we’ve heard this research-based study touted over and over again as a way to explain the “achievement gap” between poor kids and other kids.
Hart and Risley observed 42 families of varying socioeconomic status (SES) over the course of 2 ½ years to examine how families influence children’s language development. Observers spent one hour each month with each family. 13 high-income SES, 10 middle-income SES, 13 low-SES, and 6 families on welfare. Hart and Risley concluded that children with more privileged SES homes heard approximately 30 million more words than less privileged SES homes.
I am flummoxed. Flabbergasted. Perplexed. All the words. At my own inclination to blindly trust a study because I assumed good intent. And at the fact that we aren’t explicitly taught in our credential programs (or at least I wasn’t in 2014), or work professional developments, about the limitations of the Hart and Risley study – a study that has been cited 8000 times.
This study gave us important findings to reflect on and attend to – speaking to children supports their development and that early language development is linked to future academic success. However, the Hart and Risley study generalizes and reduces entire groups of people to racial stereotypes on a dismally small sample size of 42 families.
In their article, “Pathologizing the Language of Poor Children”, Curt Dudley-Marling and Krista Luca present a critique of the extremely limited and reductive, yet famed study, by Hart and Risley. Dudley-Marling and Luca critique that the Hart and Risley study suffers from methodological limitations, ethnocentric bias, and fails to ground their findings in a theoretical framework.
NPR spoke to 8 different researchers who also offered critiques of the Hart and Risley study. First, 42 families does not a sample size make. Most statisticians agree that 100 is the minimum sample size needed for meaningful results. Second, all 6 of the welfare families were Black, as were a majority of the low-SES families, while 12 of the 13 “professional” families were white – reinforcing harmful prejudices that “conflate poverty and race” (Dudley-Marling, Luca, 2009).
The Hart and Risley study sets the high-SES and middle-SES families as the standard to judge all families, turning language differences into language deficiencies, and perpetuating deficit thinking (Dudley-Marling, Luca, 2009). Critics of the Hart and Risley study argue that their findings reflect their own values and biases, because the high-SES and middle-SES families mirrored the researchers' own experiences (such as having parents who were college professors). Hart and Risley argue that welfare families use more direct language versus a language of “politeness” that exists in wealthy families. Apparently “Can you pick up your toys?” versus “Did you remember to pick up your toys?” impacts future analytical problem-solving.
Hart and Risley also use their study to claim a “culture of poverty”, completely disregarding the meaningful language that is embedded in all cultures. Linguistic researchers have shown that non-dominant groups (i.e. not white) have their own rule-governed and rich language, including the art and value of storytelling, or the immense skills it takes to learn and breathe as a multilingual individual.
Finally, Hart and Risley offer no theoretical framework, language or cultural, to ground their findings. They offer no proof! Instead, as Dudley-Marling and Luca write, the 30 million word gap study conflates correlation with causation. Didn’t Hart and Risley break the cardinal rule of ethical research – correlation is not causation – right off the bat?
Hart and Risley try to redeem themselves by arguing that whatever we’ve been doing so far (federal initiatives such as No Child Left Behind) haven’t mitigated the long-standing impact of intergenerational poverty.
Are we really surprised?
Hart and Risley’s findings, and all subsequent NCLB-esque initiatives aim to fix the child, versus fixing our fragmented education system. Our children don’t need fixing – we do. If we forget that our aim as educators is to serve and honor our children, we’ve lost sight of why we’re in a classroom in the first place.
We live in a country where states ban schools from teaching about our country’s sordid history of being born from violent enslavement. A country where the president lives in a house built from the bricks of oppression. A country wrought with the fear of equity and equality, because equality feels like oppression to the oppressor.
Equality feels like oppression to the oppressor.
And we’re still wondering how to fix the “achievement gap” (opportunity gap) between poor kids and rich kids? Give me a break. We may not know how to remedy the achievement gap 100%, but there are critical steps we can take.
The first is having the courageous audacity to say, maybe we’ve been wrong.
Maybe we’ve been parading around research that has some accurate calls to action (the importance of early language development in academic success), but is ultimately founded upon racial stereotypes. Founded upon a sample size too small and narrow to meaningfully reflect every student – of every color, of every socioeconomic status, of every culture – in our classrooms.
Maybe we’ve been consistently underpaid, overworked, and undervalued, and we’re simply struggling to stay afloat in a tsunami of state testing, class sizes entirely too big for one adult to manage, new curriculum, changing pedagogy, and simply trying to self-regulate in the classroom every day. All of it is hard. Teaching is hard. I understand. I empathize. I’m right there with you.
How can there not be an “achievement gap” when our penal system is rooted in the echoes of enslavement? When the Sheriff’s star-shaped badge has the same gleam as the slave catcher’s?
How can there not be an “achievement gap” when Black folks are given harsher sentences for the same crimes as white folks? When marijuana possession is demonized for some, but an endearing “hippie” characteristic for others.
How can there not be an “achievement gap” when meritocracy and pull yourself up by the bootstraps is our capitalistic answer to success? When families have been systematically prevented from acquiring generational wealth? When the redlining of neighborhoods mirrors the rivulets of blood in the streets from lynch mobs?
Are “poor” parents really just not talking to their kids enough? And not in the right ways? Is it that simple?
Or do we need to recognize that certain neighborhoods, communities, and populations have been strategically ignored and underserved.
30 million word gap? Or 30 million prejudices?
There is no fixing an “achievement gap” in an education system that isn’t broken.
We’re cogs in an oppressive education machine that’s functioning exactly the way it was intended. To preserve and sustain harmful historical ideologies – that some races, some economic classes, some languages, some cultures – are “better”.
Do we have the courageous audacity, and the silent humility, to admit - maybe we’ve been wrong.