Running head: ADVOCACY PROPOSAL: CLOSING THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP1

[Type text][Type text][Type text]

ADVOCACY PROPOSAL: CLOSING THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP2

Advocacy Proposal: Closing the Achievement GapFarris JonesThe University of South Carolina

AbstractThis project is a proposal that will attempt to advocate for equal opportunities for children to succeed in school despite socioeconomic backgrounds. The overall social justice issues at hand are the cycle of poverty and the ineffectiveness of breaking out of poverty through education. The American dream illustrates the idea that anyone has a shot at social mobility and determining your own success in life through hard work and education, but recent studies reveal that children from low income families has a significantly lower chance of success in school due to the fact that children aged 0-5 are not properly stimulated before starting school and are not starting school as prepared as children from wealthier families. The advocacy solution proposed is a statewide Summit that will serve as an addition to the grant funded work that EdVenture Childrens Museum already conducts for the young child despite family income level. The Summit will provide community leaders with the necessary knowledge and skills to enhance the interaction between young children and care givers in their own communities. Ongoing evaluation, research and monitoring are crucial parts at the end of this, and at the end of any advocacy effort.

I. IntroductionSpecific societal problem: Children born into low-income families or families of poverty have a significantly lower chance of academic success when compared to children of high-income families. This gap in educational achievement contributes to the perpetuation of a life of poverty or lower class for those born into it. This academic achievement gap is also growing Reardon (2011, p.1) states the achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families is roughly 30 to 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born twenty-five years earlier. In fact, it appears that the income achievement gap has been growing for at least fifty years. This academic achievement gap perpetuates the cycle of poverty in our culture. This academic achievement gap perpetuates the cycle of poverty in our culture and eliminates the notion of social mobility through education.Root cause: There are numerous causes that could be contributing to this widening achievement gap among wealthy and poor students. A primary cause that has been identified by Reardon (2013) is rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school. So why are wealthy children starting school much better prepared than everyone else? Magnuson (2013, p. 1) states What we are now learning from brain science and developmental psychology is that the negative effects of early childhood poverty, from prenatal to age 5, might be especially harmful and enduring. This is likely because a childs brain grows and changes rapidly during the first few years of life, making young children especially sensitive to environmental influences. Early childhood may be critical also because that is when the family context dominates childrens everyday lives, a context that differs dramatically by socioeconomic status. A key in early childhood development that properly readies a child for school and later success in life has been identified as the number of words a child hears per hour. Hart & Risely (2003) conducted a study on the differences in the vocabulary exposure among children (ages 0-3) from low socioeconomic status, children from middle socioeconomic status, and children from high socioeconomic status and the effect that this vocabulary exposure can have on a childs later academic readiness and success. The results of the study were drastic on average, children from families on welfare were provided half as much experience as children from working class families, and less than a third of the experience given to children from high-income families. In other words, children from families on welfare heard about 616 words per hour, while those from working class families heard around 1,251 words per hour, and those from professional families heard roughly 2,153 words per hour (p. 8). Not only does this study identify the number of words children are exposed to as a factor for school success, but the type of words heard plays a huge role. Hart & Risely (2003, p.8) state we can extrapolate similarly the relative differences the data showed in children's hourly experience with parent affirmatives (encouraging words) and prohibitions. Through this study, it was revealed that in a year the average child in a professional family is exposed to 166,000 encouragements and 26,000 discouragements while children from working class families are exposed to 62,000 encouragements and 26,000 discouragements, and children from low income families are exposed to 26,000 encouragements and 57,000 discouragements. By being exposed to such a high imbalance of positive and negative language, children of low-income families internalize a more negative culture, which in turn affects their subconscious outlook on education. In a separate study Carter (2005) identifies the effects that a life of poverty on a students view of themselves later in life. Small, Harding & Lamont (2010) comment on this study by stating over the past decade, sociologists, demographers, and even economists have begun asking questions about the role of culture in many aspects of poverty and even explicitly explaining the behavior of the low-income population in reference to cultural factors. An example is Prudence Carter (2005, p.1), who, based on interviews with poor minority students, argues that whether poor children will work hard at school depends in part on their cultural beliefs about the differences between minorities and the majority. Overall, childrens belief about themselves which is formed at a very early age and developmental stage can determine how successful they will be for the rest of their lives. Early childhood is a make or break point for success in life; what is happening is that the wealthy families sustain environments that prepare children for success and children of low-income families do not receive the same internalized beliefs about themselves due to a lack of vocabulary exposure and enough positive affirmation from their parents and environment. This leads to low success rates for children in low-income families, which perpetuates a cycle of poverty.Perpetuation in institutions: By identifying the root cause of the achievement gap as children of low income families not being adequately prepared to start school, thus affecting their success later in life, the family institution, surrounding community and early childhood caretakers and educators represent areas where this oppression is perpetuated. This paper focuses on expanding enriching opportunities the family and environment institutions, since they play a key role in determining a childs future from a very young age. Many other institutions also perpetuate income inequality and poverty, primarily the government institution. For the purposes of this paper, the main institution addressed is the family and early environment institutions.Type of oppression: This type of oppression would be labeled as classism since children born into low-income families do not have the same resources to prepare them for school and life that children born into upper class families do. The cycle of poverty is perpetuated by the academic achievement gap; the academic achievement gap can be attributed to the lack of positive word exposure within the environment that low-income children are raised in. By not working to disrupt the cycle of poverty in any way possible, institutions are allowing for classism to deepen. South Carolina, in particular, struggles to adequately prepare children and families in low-income areas for academic success. How this impacts public policy: Public policy rewards those who achieve through academic scholarships and grants, and provides an upper hand for those who are successful from the early stages of education. Policy rewards those who dont really need scholarships and grants since they are already well off and does not equally distribute funds to those who do not succeed as much from a young age who are in the most need of financial assistance. Class Action (2010) states that classism is systems of policies and practices that are set up to benefit the upper classes at the expense of the lower classes, resulting in drastic income and wealth inequality. Ones level of education and achievement will further benefit them through policy, and when the opportunity to achieve is inherently unequal from the start, the political system unequally benefits those who are already wealthy. Leveling the playing field from day one will provide an equal opportunity for all students to benefit from policy incentive through academic success. II. Overview:Organization: EdVenture Childrens Museum is a non-profit organization in Columbia, South Carolina that seeks to provide enriching educational experiences to children across the state. As a museum, Edventure advocates for the power of learning and for equal access to educational stimulation and opportunity despite a number of social barriers including income level, environment, race, etc. A current grant funded program existing at Edventure is Yes, Every Child. The Museum states that Yes, Every Child is an initiative to provide accessibility to educational programming for underserved children and families through targeted community outreach and reduced museum admission (EdVenture Childrens Museum, 2015). Through afterschool programs for high risk elementary schools, reduced museum admission for those receiving benefits, and community engagement events target at low-income areas, EdVenture seeks to enhance the educational accessibility for the young child, despite the multiple barriers. The project described in this paper relates to the activities completed through the museum that address closing the academic achievement gap by equalizing the opportunities of the young child; and the proposed advocacy project plan would be an extension to this community engagement initiative. The proposed project is to hold a statewide summit, one that gathers key stakeholders in addressing child care and environmental outcomes, specifically in low income areas, and educating these community leaders about how to help better prepare the young child for kindergarten, brainstorming ways to better each existing community for childrens academic growth, and equipping these leaders with ways of influencing the family institution to engage more positively with their young children in the hopes of exposing them to a much higher rate of positive vocabulary, thus better preparing them for long term success. Issue Addressed: The issue addressed through this initiative would be the barriers to success young children of low-income families experience due to their lack of exposure to positive vocabulary and skills in their neighborhood and home environment. This project would focus on closing the academic achievement gap in South Carolina, and thus attacking the cycle of poverty within South Carolina.Approach to Advocacy: This project approaches advocacy specifically by advocating for the children of low-income families, who do not know that they will be given less opportunity to succeed, and who suffer from barriers to academic success in life. Hoeffer (2012, p.5) defines advocacy as advance the cause of one or more clients at the individual, group, organizational, or community level in order to promote social justice. The current project and proposed expansions seek to advocate for the young child of low-income backgrounds that suffers from a lower likelihood of success through different levels in order to promote equal opportunity and social justice for every child in South Carolina. Hoeffer (2012, p. 5) defines case advocacy as being related to individuals or families, such as in assisting them to receive benefits or services to which they are entitles and cause advocacy as being related to larger groups or social movements, such as an effort to expand the range of benefits and services available to a segment of the population. The approach to advocacy in this project would be a mix of both, as the implementation seeks to help families with young children interact in a more enriching manner in order for all young children to receive necessary services, while at the same time the overall goal is to improve academic preparedness for all financially disadvantaged young children. Desired Outcome: The desired outcome of this initiative is to attempt to disrupt the cycle of poverty by working to close the achievement gap in South Carolina by specifically focusing on the early childs readiness for school through community outreach and family engagement by raising awareness and knowledge through a summit of community leaders. A primary goal of this project is to promote positive parent-child interaction and communication since this has been identified as a root cause of a childs readiness to begin school. How this Impacts Social Justice: Since Hoeffer (2012) often defines advocacy as working towards overall social justice in the text, this project seeks to promote justice for those born into poverty that have little control over their future. This project assumes that children do not have equal resources to succeed academically due to the environment and stimulation they experience during ages 0-5. In order to work towards social justice there must be advocacy efforts on behalf of children from low-income families to have equal opportunities to succeed as all other children. (See Appendix see for a logic model of this project).III. Project Activities:Activities Overview: Steps of this project have been completed so far through the existing outreach initiative (Yes, Every Child) at EdVenture Childrens museum that targets children in low income families in order to better prepare them for academic success, the additional portion of this project that is being proposed in this paper are to conduct a Closing the Achievement Gap through the Young Child Summit at the Museum that will be modeled after the Safe Schools Summit that was conducted through the EdVenture in February of 2015 in hopes of raising awareness, advocating for social justice, and educating advocates that can go out and influence their own individual communities in order to address this problem.Steps that have already been taken: See Appendix A for time logs of participation in the Yes, Every Child initiative at EdVenture Childrens Museum through planning programs and attendance at the Safe Schools Summit that the proposed summit will be modeled after.Further steps that have been taken by the outreach team at the museum is extensive research of low income communities/zip codes in the state that would benefit from educational programming, secured grant funding that is designated for benefitting the young child for academic success, lowered museum admission rates ($1.00) for families receiving SNAP, Medicaid, or WIC, ongoing surveys and research on how the museum can improve it programs to benefit families and their children, community engagement events that are designed to provide educational enrichment for families in all areas, and statewide partnerships with organizations that work to benefit less fortunate or oppressed children and their families. Future plans: Conducting and hosting an advocacy summit at the museum: This summit would be modeled after the Safe Schools Summit (see Appendix B) that was intended to gather community stakeholders and educators in the hopes of addressing bullying and engaging LGBTQ students in the state. The Safe Schools Summit was very effective in raising awareness of this issue for community leaders across the state, building a team of people that can advocate for this issue and educate and inform others, and gathering individuals from all different communities across the state in order to initiate statewide awareness and change. The Summit for young children would be held and executed the same way, but the focus would be shifted to how to better children ages 0-5 for starting school so that social mobility through education is equally possible for every child. This summit would raise awareness of the issue in South Carolina, spark ideas on how to advocate and address it, and to try and promote meaningful interactions between communities/caregivers and their young children. IV. Project Evaluation:Project evaluation can be measured through the effectiveness of similar evidence based practices. Reynolds, Temple, Robertson & Mann (2001, pp. 1-2) conducted a 15 year follow up of a large scale early childhood educational intervention program conducted at 25 low income sites in Chicago in 1980. The long-term educational effects of this program were cited as children who participated in the preschool intervention for 1 or 2 years had a higher rate of high school completion (49.7 % vs 38.5%; P = .01); more years of completed education (10.6 vs 10.2; P = .03); and lower rates of juvenile arrest (16.9% vs 25.1%; P = .003), violent arrests (9.0% vs 15.3%; P = .002), and school dropout (46.7% vs 55.0%; P = .047). In summary the authors of this long-term study state participation in an established early childhood intervention for low-income children was associated with better educational and social outcomes up to age 20 years. These findings are among the strongest evidence that established programs can promote children's long-term success. In terms of attempting to address the family institution, a study was done by Lunkenheimer, Dishion, Shaw, Connell, Gardner, Wilson, and Skuban (2012, p.1) on the long term of effects of supporting parent-child interaction when addressing school readiness and later success. The project in this study was called Family Check Ups a similar method in addressing young children of high-risk families and later school success. The article states findings suggest that a brief, ecological preventive intervention supporting positive parenting practices can indirectly foster key facets of school readiness in children at risk. The intervention described by this study that has proved effective is very similar to the outreach programs proposed in this advocacy project. In order to effectively evaluate this project, effective and consistent monitoring must be done. This is in line with the Unified Model for Advocacy in the Hoeffer (2012) text and in line with the NASW Code of Ethics for the social work profession (2008). For both disciplines, it is crucial to continually research and document everything in order to continually evaluate and improve. Research on the academic achievement gap and poverty in South Carolina should be conducted in relation to the individual efforts that are made by those who attended the Summit. It is also important to hold the same summit around the same time every year and try to expand and get more important players to attend. Community leaders can also share what has and hasnt worked in the past year in order to improve advocacy efforts. V. Personal and Process Evaluation:I believe that through this project I have learned how to be an effective advocate for different populations. My biggest struggle for this project was trying to understand the project itself, I had to reformulate my topic after careful discernment in order to fit the advocacy work I was already doing at EdVenture (my field placement). I knew that I wanted to address income inequality, but since it is such a huge topic that encompasses many different forms of oppression, I struggled with narrowing down my focus. However, through the struggle of trying to fit my interest in advocating for a specific population into the formal methods we have learned in class and from the Hoeffer (2012) textbook, I believe that my knowledge and ability to advocate has greatly improved and that I have grown in this respect. In terms of the Unified Model of Advocacy approach described by Hoeffer (2012, p. 7), I became interested in this topic (or got involved) through the work I have been doing at my field placement over the past year and a half. By engaging in the study and participation of advocating for this topic, I began to understand the issue (I also had to help write and secure grants for the work we do for equality for all young children, so that kind of forced me to understand better). Through much scrutiny, I planned out this summit by working with the people at EdVenture that worked so hard to make the Safe Schools Summit possible and learning from their methods. I did not actually advocate how I planned in this paper, but we often participate in similar advocating, evaluating and ongoing monitoring for different social justice issues, so I was able to visualize how the rest of the process would work in this specific project.

ReferencesCarter, Prudence. 2005. Keepin it real: School success beyond black and white. New York: Oxford University Press.Hart, B. & Risley, T.R. The Early Catastrophe:The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3 (2003, spring). American Educator, pp.4-9.. http://www.aft.org//sites/default/files/periodicals/TheEarlyCatastrophe.pdfHoefer, R. (2012). Advocacy practice for social justice (2nd ed.). Chicago, Ill.: Lyceum Books.Lunkenheimer, Erika S.; Dishion, Thomas J.; Shaw, Daniel S.; Connell, Arin M.; Gardner, Frances; Wilson, Melvin N.; Skuban, Emily M. (2012). Collateral benefits of the family check-up on early childhood school readiness: Indirect effects of parents' positive behavior support. Developmental Psychology, Vol 44(6), 1737-http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0013858Magnuson, K. (2013). Reducing the effects of poverty through early childhood interventions. Fast Focus, (17), 1-6. Retrieved from http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/fastfocus/pdfs/FF17-2013.pdfNational Association of Social Workers. (2008). Code of Ethics of the National Association of Social Workers. Washington DC: NASW Press. Reardon, S.F. (2011). The widening academic achievement gap between the rich and the poor: New evidence and possible explanations. In R. Murnane & G. Duncan (Eds.), Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality and the Uncertain Life Chances of Low-Income Children. New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press.Reardon, S.F. (2013). The Widening Income Achievement Gap. Educational Leadership, 70(8), 10-16.Reynolds AJ, Temple JA, Robertson DL, Mann EA. Long-term Effects of an Early Childhood Intervention on Educational Achievement and Juvenile Arrest: A 15-Year Follow-up of Low-Income Children in Public Schools. JAMA. 2001;285(18):2339-2346. doi:10.1001/jama.285.18.2339.Small, M., Harding, D., & Lamont, M. (2010). Reconsidering Culture and Poverty. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 629(1), 6-27.What Is Classism. (2010, May 22). Retrieved April 9, 2015, from http://www.classism.org/about-class/what-is-classism/

Appendix A: Time Logs of Individual ParticipationThe following document is one of my time tracking sheets at Edventure. In an effort to save space, I only included this one since it shows participation in program planning, attendance at the Safe Schools Summit, and the discussion of this project with my field instructor.

Appendix B: Safe Schools Summit Artifacts

Appendix C: Logic ModelResourcesTasksShort-Term OutcomesMedium-Term OutcomesLong-Term OutcomesUltimate Social Justice Outcomes For Society

Closing the Achievement Gap with the Young Child Summit-Research, invite, and gather community leaders and stake holders from across the state-Come up with a day long agenda that includes education, inspiration, personal stories, and community based break out groups that brainstorm new ways to enhance the family and environment institutions to benefit young children-Provide community leaders with a model for engaging young children in their area and equipping them for school-Raising awareness in the state-Creating allies that are educated on the issue and better prepared to address it-Planting seeds for advocacy that will expand-Community engagement by the members who attended the summit-The initiation of programs based on what the Museum is doing in Columbia around the state-Improvement of parent-child interactions -Young Children and their caregivers participate in more enrichment at the home through being equipped with the knowledge and activities the stakeholders brought to the community-Children of low income families are starting school better prepared for success-Barriers to social mobility are broken-Children from different socioeconomic backgrounds have equal opportunities for success in school and in life-The cycle of poverty is disrupted