I fucking hate how our society is so status and money oriented!!

[LWolf]

1. This teacher thanks you.

Studies have found that by age four, children in middle and upper class families hear 15 million more words than children in working-class families, and 30 million more words than children in families on welfare. THINK ABOUT THAT. And the U.S. has by far the highest level of childhood poverty in the developed world. The playing field is NOT level or fair. We don't have an equality of opportunity. You can't just expect a marginalized black kid growing up in poverty in downtown Los Angeles to suddenly be able to keep up with a South Asian or East Asian kid in Orange County, California whose parents are engineers from India or China, and who provide a lot of institutional support to the kid as they grow up and move through the education process. You can't expect a poor african-american kid or cambodian kid who grew up in poverty without computers to suddenly have the same level passion for programming and coding that someone else would, and expect that marginalized person to just do as well in a rigorous computer programming class as everyone else.

I've always known that the first step to increased academic "achievement" happens outside the school building, before children ever start school. Narrow the socio-economic gaps, and we narrow the achievement gaps.