The following piece is an excerpt from an article published in the Spring, 2007, issue of American Educator. It was written by Antonia Cortese, Executive Vice President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Core Knowledge is not mentioned by name in the article, but our readership will recognize some popular CK themes.
For the complete article, please visit http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/spring07/GetReal.htm.
Reprinted by permission of American Educator.
By the time children from low-income homes enter school, they are, on average, already far behind their middle-class peers. At the beginning of kindergarten, disadvantaged children are three times more likely than other children to score in the bottom quartile on assessments of reading, math, and general knowledge. In terms of specific skills, they are much less likely than their more advantaged peers to be able to identify the letters of the alphabet or to count beyond 10.1
But the actual challenge they face is even greater: The same home and community factors that lead to the school-entry achievement gap are at work over the summer. Middle- and upper-class children not only enter kindergarten knowing more, they continue learning more every summer.2 As a result, although the evidence indicates that in school, poor, middle-class, and wealthy children actually learn at about the same pace, by fourth grade, students from low-income families are nearly three grade levels below their peers in reading and about two grade levels below their peers in math.3
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