‘The New Yorker’ Spotlights a Bloomberg-Financed Effort to Close the ‘Word Gap’

In Providence, R.I., a tightly focused experiment in early childhood education that Bloomberg Philanthropies has praised as “direct, simple, and revolutionary,” and has supported through its high-profile Mayors Challenge, is showing promising preliminary results, says an article in The New Yorker (January 12).

The city’s mayor, Angel Taveras, won $5-million from Bloomberg in 2013 for Providence Talks, a program of coaching low-income parents to speak more with their young children in an effort to close the “word gap.” Studies have shown that kids from more affluent families hear millions more words than poor children do by age 4, a difference that affects vocabulary and other language skills.

Mayor Taveras has sent caseworkers into homes to offer tips on how to build on toddlers’ chatter. The program’s key innovation is a recording device parents wear one day a month. The digital recorder, based on a technology known as LENA (for Language Environment Analysis), produces data showing how much talk occurs at various points during the day and who is speaking, information that the caseworkers share with parents.

Though some critics, notably the American Civil Liberties Union, have raised privacy concerns, LENA and the reports it generates have proved popular with an initial pilot group of 58 families. “Crucially, parents found the gadgets fun: They were like Fitbits for conversation,” the magazine reports. Andrea Riquetti, the program’s director, says, “The fact that we have this report, in a graph form, makes it nonjudgmental,” opening the door for discussion about how to build on the numbers.

The program is now expanding beyond the pilot group, and awaiting the results of a study by a Brown University researcher. Preliminary data shows promise, the magazine reports: “Families that started with low word counts are showing increases of 50 percent in daily word counts and 30 percent in conversational turns,” incidents in which a speaker says something and another replies.

While limited in scope, Providence Talks organizers defend the effort as a way to empower low-income families. The goal, according to Ms. Riquetti, is for parents to “feel they can make a difference when everything else kind of sucks.”