Tot talking

Is conversation the new child development alchemy? Tulsa aims to find out.

“The disparity was staggering. Children whose families were on welfare heard about 600 words per hour. Working-class children heard 1,200 words per hour, and children from professional families heard 2,100 words. By age 3, a poor child would have heard 30 million fewer words in his(her) home environment than a child from a professional family. And the disparity mattered: the greater the number of words children heard from their parents or caregivers before they were 3, the higher their IQ and the better they did in school. TV talk not only didn’t help, it was detrimental.”
— Tina Rosenberg in The New York Times, April 10, 2013

I did a lot of talking as a child (and received a lot of it in return). Fortunately, my mother tolerated, even abetted it. I remember asking her at age 5 or 6 why people rode horses. “People don’t ride cats or dogs,” I said. She listened while I told her that it didn’t look like horses enjoyed being ridden much, if some of the cowboy movies we watched were on the mark – and, by the way, did people get the horses’ OK to ride them? Rather than calling me silly or insisting that I pipe down, she took the time to tell me that she didn’t know if horses had the brains, the smarts, to be part of any Q & A, let alone give permission to be ridden. She listened, and she wasn’t passive about it. 

A striking passel of new research and early results from an array of field studies involving kids and their families suggests that talking to kids – talking to them a whole lot, and with outsized intentionality – can spawn dramatic verbal and communications gains, especially in stressed out, low-income black and Hispanic families. Having a parent, a relative or an adult caregiver who is a big “talkie” and who intensely engages kids and, ideally, has some training on how to organize verbal entanglements with kids, especially disadvantaged children, looks to be the new big thing in child development.

The genesis for the “Talking Project” came from work conducted by Betty Hart and Todd Risley at the University of Kansas in the mid ‘90s. The researchers studied how parents with different socioeconomic backgrounds conversed with their children, especially younger children. They conducted a multi-year study group of 42 families and recorded an hour each day of parent-child engagement. Then Hart and Risley waited until the kids in the study were nine years of age and then examined how they were doing in school. The duo discovered how incredibly important the amount and shape of talking was to the cognitive scores downstream, as well as to the vocabularies and IQ scores of the children who were involved in the study.

Oklahoma doesn’t have a lot of stellar stuff to offer on the education front. That’s why Oklahoma’s education establishment and our inventive philanthropic sector’s nearly decades-old, front-line work on preschool and early-childhood development is so amazing.

Here is what David Leonhardt of The New York Times said in 2007: “The school is called Tulsa Educare, and it is the showpiece for the finest state preschool system in the country. And, yes, that state is Oklahoma, a bastion of small-government conservatism that hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon B. Johnson. Almost a decade ago, thanks to a low-key push by a small group of state legislators, business executives and educators, Oklahoma agreed to pay for one year of prekindergarten. The program is voluntary, but 70 percent of 4-year-olds here now attend public preschool, more than in any other state. In every classroom, the head teacher must have a bachelor’s degree – nationwide, most preschool teachers don’t – and there must be a teacher for every 10 students.”

Oklahoma is still a front-runner in this arena. Early childhood is still one of the few things we do well as far as education goes. The George Kaiser Family Foundation has been a leading player. The foundation’s efforts were cited by President Barack Obama some months ago as a bright spot on the early childhood development and services frontier. He cited Tulsa’s Educare specifically.

For more than 40 years Hillary Clinton has been a passionate advocate for almost everything connected to early-childhood development, innovation in the kid-cognitive realm, and aggressive research on children and brain development. She began her career as a defense attorney for the Children’s Defense Fund, a children’s advocacy and lobbying organization that has been deeply influential for decades on children’s issues, family policy, and development and early education. Clinton was here late last month to help George Kaiser and company launch the “Talking is Teaching” program, a new initiative jointly sponsored by Kaiser’s Family Foundation, CAP Tulsa, Tulsa Educare and Too Small to Fail, a joint intitiative of Next Generation (a non-partisan strategic policy and communications organization) and the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

There is a whole slew of follow-up studies across the country that more or less confirm the findings of the Hart/Risley “talkie” work. These confirming studies were part of the logic that Bloomberg Foundation used to select “Providence Talks” from thousands of submissions: Providence used its $5 million award to craft some reproducible execution mechanics – how can parents, nannies, preschool operators, early childhood development teachers, and others be outfitted with the tools needed to amplify talking and the number of words they spoke to kids in the normal course of a day?

Tulsa’s “Talking is Teaching” project is one of several exciting second-wave demonstration projects that embraces notions from the Chicago project. The new Tulsa project and efforts to mount similar work elsewhere benefits enormously from a couple of technology gambits – a wearable recorder and a powerful new speech recognition software and server system: “The only thing researchers could do was to ask the parent if they were talking a lot,” said Jill Gilkerson, the language research director of the Lena Research Foundation, as reported by the New York Times. “But you need an objective evaluation. Asking anyone to observe their own behavior with no reference point is completely useless.” 

“Without measurement, parents who did try new things couldn’t know whether they were helpful. Hart and Risley’s research languished. ...What has revived it is the technology and measurement practices developed by Lena, which stands for Language Environment Analysis. A child wears clothing with a special pocket for a voice recorder that can unobtrusively record 16 continuous hours – plenty of time for the family to forget it’s there and converse normally. The analysis is done by speech-recognition software, which can count and source words uttered, count conversational turns (one party says something and the other responds) and weed out background noise and TV. For privacy, the recorder can encrypt the actual speech and delete the speech after it is counted. And a family can hit the ‘erase’ button whenever it wants...”

Finally, we have a university component that David Boren has carefully and successfully constructed over the course of the last decade or so. A grand element here is the next generation medical-education machine that Dr. Gerard Clancy, OU-Tulsa president, has been constructing for the last half-decade or so with The University of Tulsa and a big bucket of social-venture capitalists from the George Kaiser Family Foundation. The OU/TU School of Community Medicine will heroically reanimate medical education with a new kind of doc shop that will yield skilled practitioners in community and behavioral medicine, an arena that could radically improve health outcomes in Oklahoma and deeply influence medical education across the country. 

Tulsa is ready for “Talking is Teaching.” Maybe it can be part of a process by which we earnestly and rigorously construct a series of audacious, superior standards for the education of our kids. This is, of course, what a key Oklahoma legislature committee said it wanted to construct when it rejected the national Common Core standards some days ago. The arch-conservative leadership in the legislature is now telling us that, well, that Common Core stuff was simply another attempt to nationalize what should be a local thing – that is, schooling in Oklahoma.

Why not ask our lawmakers to actually belly up to the bar? Why not use the new Kaiser “talkie” project as one element of a truly novel strategy to create a superior educational framework in Oklahoma – a brand-new one (yes, with some big costs) and a whole new, even radical dynamic?