Pensacola Today – Shannon Nickinson
“Thirty million words. That’s the difference between poor children and their better-off classmates. It boils down to that number in programs from the South Side of Chicago to the Pensacola Metro. It comes from a 1995 study by child psychologists that found by age 4, poor children hear 30 million fewer words than children from better-off families. This leads to poor children lagging academically, being weaker readers and falling behind in school. Dana Suskind founded Thirty Million Words at the University of Chicago Medical School to drive awareness of the achievement gap and promote strategies to close it. The Hart and Risely study is what everybody talks about, Suskind says, because it is the study that revealed the 30-million-word gap.”(more)