A Crisis Is Brewing: Learning Gaps and How to Avert Them

Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours?

Audre Lorde

Some time ago, I read an unusual report from the Canterbury region of New Zealand. It told, in the subdued tone of an academic journal article, the story of an urgent rescue mission. On September 4, 2010, a massive earthquake rocked the city of Christchurch (population: 350,000). The seismic event measured 7.1 in magnitude. It tripped circuit breakers at substations and knocked out power. Building facades collapsed, crushed cars, and jammed roads. 

And that was just the warmup. For the next year and a half, the devastation continued, with ten thousand aftershocks and three more full-blown earthquakes. A violent quake in February of the following year killed 185 people and leveled the central business district.

But the report that caught my attention wasn’t about the first responders who rushed in to tend to the injured, restore power, provide water, and reopen transport. It wasn’t about the elaborate emergency-management structures that launched within hours. It was about an unheralded cadre working to address another type of fallout from the earthquakes, one a lot less visible than liquefied soil sending buried pipes floating to the surface.

The rescuers I read about were psychologists, health advisors, and educators, all collaborating to pilot a program aimed at preventing a crisis they foresaw for children affected by the earthquakes. They knew that life in extreme instability, whether wrought by war or famine or natural disaster, breeds developmental difficulties and reinforces inequities, with lasting consequences. 

They had seen data, collected 6,000 miles away in Santiago, Chile, that suggested that an earthquake can create educational aftershocks, too. Preschool kids who took early-language and early-literacy assessments shortly after the earthquake performed worse on letter-word identification and text comprehension than comparable kids who took the same assessments one year before the earthquake.

The study provided evidence that their performance had been hurt by their parents’ disaster-wrought stress and their own. Plus, school-entry data back in New Zealand revealed that many kids living in earthquake-affected communities struggled with expressive language and awareness of sound structure in words. 

The researchers who ran the pilot program summed up the nature of the challenge with characteristic understatement: “These results suggest that such experiences may impact families, with potential developmental sequelae for children.”

But before vulnerable kids’ development can be protected and bolstered, parents, teachers, and other concerned parties must notice the learning crises, which aren’t glaring like abandoned buildings with missing windows and walls. Next, we have to sustain interest and intentional action through a yearslong recovery, without the benefit of construction clamor to herald our progress.

The fact is, on any given day in any given community—natural disaster or not—there are learning crises brewing. There are children who aren’t getting the language they need, due to household disorder and chaos, parent disposition, and a range of other circumstances. 

And although poverty creates the kind of stress and instability that lessen child-focused conversation and responsiveness in homes, many well-educated and advantaged families struggle with talk, too, for any number of reasons. 

Across demographics, differences in language skills are associated with differences in healthcare outcomes, high school graduation rates, job placement results, earning levels, and more.

The central truth every parent must grasp is this: oral-language skills are required for reading. Just as kids crawl before they walk, they talk before they read. And before they talk, babies listen, grunt, and coo. We must facilitate and encourage it all.

Psychologists Anne E. Cunningham and Jamie Zibulsky describe the delayed strong influence of early oral-language skills and reading development as a kind of “sleeper effect.” 

The importance of early oral-language skills should not be underestimated, they say, because “no matter how accurately a middle school student can sound out new and difficult words like omniscient or prejudice, his ability to understand these words in context will depend on how often he has talked about these words and the concepts related to them. Each new word that a child acquires verbally becomes a word that he will eventually be able to recognize and make sense of when he sees it in print, so early vocabulary development is an essential skill for later reading success.”

Language and learning processes are overlapping and interrelated. They are like one of those elaborate domino creations that garner millions of views on YouTube. A creator devotes weeks to meticulously placing domino after domino into an elaborate design, just to engineer a few minutes of excitement when the first block sets off a chain reaction that topples thousands more. Some tumble in a straight line. Others, placed at a slight angle, bend the pattern into curves and turns. Still others are positioned to hit two dominos at once, sending branches of the design off in different directions.

Early parent talk is the first domino. It pings (through years of back-and-forth conversation) straight into an infant’s grunts, coos, babbles, and eventually words. At the same time, those early conversations knock down other dominos and create a new branch at the split that builds momentum toward a toddler’s vocabulary, which affects school readiness, which predicts third-grade reading, which correlates with high school graduation rates, and so on.

The influence that frequent, quality parent talk has on eventual literacy is so strong and begins so early in life that many experts now rank it above the once be-all, end-all practice of reading aloud. In fact, some argue that talking with your child from infancy may be “the single strongest action you can take to increase your child’s educational opportunities.” 

Words matter. Timing matters. You matter.

Edited and reprinted with permission from Reading for Our Lives by Maya Payne Smart, published by AVERY, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Copyright © 2022 by Maya Payne Smart.