What is the single cause of poor student performance in school?

I was surprised to learn in today’s issue of the New York Times Magazine (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/magazine/26tough.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1) fantastic article on why poor children consistently underperform middle class or wealthy children. Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, child psychologists at the University of Kansas, in 1995 published the results of an intensive research project on language acquisition. Accordint to Paul Tough’s excellent article, by “comparing the vocabulary scores with their observations of each child’s home life, they were able to conclude that the size of each child’s vocabulary correlated most closely to one simple factor: the number of words the parents spoke to the child.”

But that’s not all! This is startling:

What’s more, the kinds of words and statements that children heard varied by class. The most basic difference was in the number of “discouragements” a child heard — prohibitions and words of disapproval — compared with the number of encouragements, or words of praise and approval. By age 3, the average child of a professional heard about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. For the welfare children, the situation was reversed: they heard, on average, about 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. Hart and Risley found that as the number of words a child heard increased, the complexity of that language increased as well. As conversation moved beyond simple instructions, it blossomed into discussions of the past and future, of feelings, of abstractions, of the way one thing causes another — all of which stimulated intellectual development.

The power of a parents KIND of words is closely correlated to IQ! I was shopping at Wal Mart yesterday and overheard a busy mom use the F word with her preschooler as in, “just put it in the f****** cart”! My wife and I were astonished at the carelessness and poor sense of both proportion and boundaries.