How THE BASICS
can help close the achievement gap Dr. Ronald Ferguson has spent decades researching, writing and working to find ways to engage families and communities to help reduce the achievement gap in education. An MIT-trained economist, Dr. Ferguson has made a career of intentional change through his work as an author, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University, founder of The Basics Inc. and more than 30 years of teaching at the Harvard Kennedy School. In this interview, Dr. Ferguson details the scientific research, as well as his own familial experiences, that fuel his passion for spreading the five yet powerful Basics of early childhood caregiving. Q. Thirty years ago, you recognized a relationship between academic and growing wage disparities, which is what got you started working on education. Which specific academic skill disparities did you notice? A. Initially, it was reading and math scores. In 1979, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) administered the Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT) to more than 12,000 14-to-21 year-olds.
20 2021
The NLSY interviewed the same young people every year, so 10 years later, at the end of the 1980s, we looked to see how their skills measured at the end of the 1970s (when the test-takers were teenagers) predicted their earnings and employment status when they were young adults. As it turned out, the scores from 1979 predicted most of the black-white and Latinx-white hourly earnings gaps in 1989 and ’90. It was stark evidence that reading and math skills really mattered. The racial gap in academic skills seemed to be narrowing, but technology and other factors were making academic skills more valuable to employers, increasing economic inequality. That’s when I and a lot of other economists started working on education. Q. You developed the Tripod Project in 2001 (which later became Tripod Education Partners) to reduce the academic opportunity gap in elementary and secondary schools. What prompted the shift to early childhood through The Basics in recent years? A. I didn’t switch. My work still focuses
BUILDING BLOCKS, A PARENT MAGAZINE
on cradle to career. I added the preschool and early childhood period because I saw in nationally representative data that the cognitive skill gap was evident by the age of 1, and pretty stark by the age of 2, less than half the way to kindergarten. So the gaps that we care about, the disparities that predict later life outcomes, were already fairly well developed by the time children hit kindergarten. We really needed to back up and start focusing on families prenatally. Q. Can you say more about these cognitive skill gaps? A. By cognitive skill, we're talking about a child’s mental agility, the ability to respond well to intellectual stimuli. And for little kids, it’s really a lot about the quantity and quality of adult-child interactions. For example, a scholar named Ann Fernald, with some of her colleagues, studies how rapidly children 2-year-olds and younger associate words with objects. In one study, children from more advantaged backgrounds were already six months ahead in language processing speed,
