Freakonomics Podcast: Does Early Education Come Way too Late?

SUSKIND: Researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley started off during the War on Poverty in Kansas City working with pre-school students, trying to sort of improve their vocabulary, trying to impact the achievement gap.

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SUSKIND: And they followed them for about two-and-a-half years ‘til the age of three, going into the homes every month, recording, trying to understand what the language environment looked like. And what they found, in a nutshell, was that by the end of the age of three, children born into poverty will have heard 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers.

DUBNER: Wow, by the age of three?

SUSKIND: By the end of the age of three. So right before they were turning four.

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SUSKIND: But frankly, quality is even more important. And Hart and Risley demonstrated differences in the quality of input, as well as many others, with children from poor language homes, hearing more prohibitions and less affirmations: “Don’t do that. Get down.” Less verbal back-and-forth, less complex vocabulary.

That combination – less vocabulary and less-complex vocabulary – creates a major detriment.

SUSKIND: By 18 months, the children from language-poor homes are processing language at six months behind those from language-rich homes. So what I always like to say — and it’s quite tragic — is that it’s not just about language, vocabulary being poured into a baby’s brain. It’s really building a fundamentally different machine.

So if a language-rich environment is really helpful in building kids’ brains, what’s to be done about it? That is what Suskind and TMW, the Thirty Million Words Initiative, are trying to figure out.

SUSKIND: We’re developing programs, evidence-based programs, that reach parents where they are to get this message out. So, we have something in the maternity wards, pediatricians’ offices. Our best-developed program is this home-visiting program where — over a six-month period of time, one-on-one with a home visitor — we go in and explain the science.

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The TMW home-visit program is being run as an RCT, a randomized control trial, to test its efficacy. It’ll take a few years. Each family will get 12 visits during a six-month period, and then the researchers will do follow-up assessments for another three-and-a-half years. They’re hoping to enroll 200 families and have all the data by 2019. One tool the researchers use is a little device called a LENA, or Language Environment Analysis System. It’s basically a pedometer for language — it counts words.

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And what we’ve done in our research program is we’ve culled it down to what we call the three T’s: tune in, talk more, and take turns.“Tune in” is sort of the most nuanced of the T’s. It’s really seeing what your child’s interested in, following your child’s lead, using that child-directed speech, that sing-songy voice.

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Hart, B., & T.R. Risley. 2003. “The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3.” American Educator 27 (1): 4–9. www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/spring2003/TheEarlyCatastrophe.pdf.