November 12, 2009 | Read Time: 3 minutes
In Dallas, a dozen private and community foundations are saturating a Hispanic neighborhood with educational programs for parents and very young children. The goal: to increase the vocabulary of kids entering kindergarten.
The effort is unusual for its focus on a single neighborhood — Bachman Lake — and for basing success on the sole measure of increasing the number of words that kindergartners know.
National experts in early-childhood education hope that projects like the one in Dallas can play an important role in documenting the effectiveness of such efforts for legislators and policy makers.
“If the collaborative in Dallas can demonstrate success, it can become a model for public investment,” says W. Steven Barnett, an education professor at Rutgers University, and co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research.
The Dallas project, known as the Zero to Five Funders’ Collaborative, began in 2007 when the Dallas Foundation, a community fund, and the Meadows Foundation — one of the city’s largest private foundations — agreed to collaborate to improve early-childhood education.
They persuaded 10 other foundations to provide between $25,000 and $200,000 per year.
Few Social Services
The group decided to focus on Bachman Lake because the Hispanic neighborhood has relatively few social services and a high level of need. More than 95 percent of students in the neighborhood’s four elementary schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunches based on their family’s income.
Hispanic students, particularly those whose parents do not speak English, enter Dallas schools lagging behind other kindergarteners on readiness tests. The gap widens over time — studies indicate that as many as half of Hispanic students in Dallas do not graduate from high school.
Researchers have shown that children of professional working parents enter kindergarten knowing twice as many words as children whose parents receive welfare. “Vocabulary is not just about word knowledge,” Mr. Barnett says. “It’s also your conceptual tool for understanding the world. Poor vocabulary can get you into trouble in science and math.”
Testing Approaches
The collaborative will spend more than $1.3-million this year, supporting four charities that use different approaches to enhancing kids’ vocabulary. Catholic Charities of Dallas will work with both parents and children at the San Juan Diego Church. East Dallas Community School, an early-childhood learning center, will provide Montessori-style instruction in apartment complexes.
Another charity, AvanceDallas, will teach parents how to stimulate vocabulary development starting at birth, and will train volunteers to go into neighborhoods to provide lessons on child development.
The fourth charity, Dallas Concilio, received $130,000 from the collaborative, and is already teaching parents in the neighborhood how to best prepare their children for kindergarten. Florencia Velasco Fortner, the charity’s CEO, says that many immigrant parents, including her own (who immigrated to California from Mexico when she was 6), received little education before they moved to the United States, and as a result use fewer words in conversations with their children than do other American families.
“The parents might say, ‘Bring me that over there,’” Ms. Fortner says. “We teach parents to be more descriptive: ‘Can you please bring me the red ceramic cup on top of the brown wooden table.’ We’re helping parents introduce the richness of vocabulary into day-to-day mundane stuff.”
Mary M. Jalonick, the Dallas Foundation’s president, says the collaborative expects to stay with the project for five years, at a total cost of $6.7-million. By that time, the foundations hope to see kindergartners in Bachman Lake spewing as many words as other 5-year-olds throughout the city.
“It’s concrete,” Ms. Jalonick says. “We’ll know whether we’ve been successful.”
