Raspberry column

[Ronald Kephart]

[Please note: I'm cross-posting this to both Linganth and Anthro-L.]

I encountered this column by William Raspberry in the Florida
Time-Union this morning; apparently it appeared in the Washington
Post a few days ago (we're always behind in Florida).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40302-2003Aug24.html

The column reports on a book, *Meaningful Differences in the Everyday
Experience of Young American Children*, by Hart and Risley, published
in 1995. The principle findings, as reported by Raspberry, are:

* Verbal stimulation (roughly the number of words a young child hears
at home) may be the most important predictor of the child's future
academic, economic and social success.

* The difference in the amount of verbal stimulation received by
children of poor families and those of the middle class is so huge as
to be essentially unbridgeable.

It seems that these differences are being invoked as a main factor in
the poor school performance of children from lower class and working
class homes. My initial gut-level reaction (without having read the
book) is one of cynicism: that this *sounds like* another round of
blaming the victims for being part of a system that is not prepared
to deal with the (normal?) diversity that one expects in a society of
this size. But I wonder what others might have to say about this, if
anything?

(I'm tempted to write a letter to the editor, but the Times-Union
never published my last one on the bilingual ed/official English
thing, so it's probably not worth the effort.)

--
Ronald Kephart
Associate Professor
Sociology, Anthropology, & Criminal Justice
University of North Florida
http://www.unf.edu/~rkephart
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