WATCH: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton Both Used Joe Biden 'Millions Fewer Words' Talking Point

[highplainsdem]

I wish it weren't necessary to post this, but it is because Biden's being called racist, or at least racially insensitive, for saying things that HRC and Obama also said.

New article at Mediate, with video:


https://www.mediaite.com/news/watch-barack-obama-and-hillary-clinton-both-used-joe-biden-millions-fewer-words-talking-point/

In July of 2014, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute about a campaign to encourage parents to “talk read and sing to their kids, and close an education gap.”

Clinton said that “By the age of four, children in lower income families have heard 30 million fewer words than children in more affluent families,” and that “scientists can literally watch the synapses and neurons firing when parents read and talk with their children from the very earliest days.”

The campaign was part of a Clinton Foundation initiative called “Too Small to Fail.”

And then-future President Barack Obama campaigned on, then delivered, funding for “voluntary programs that provide nurses, social workers, and other professionals to meet with at-risk families in their homes and connect them to assistance that impacts a child’s health, development, and ability to learn.”

President Obama also cited the vocabulary gap frequently, as he did in this February 27, 2014 speech that also referenced resources like those Biden spoke about.

[W]e know that during the first three years of life, a child born into a low-income family hears 30 million fewer words than a child born into a well-off family. And everybody knows babies are sponges, they just soak that up. A 30-million-word deficit is hard to make up. And if a black or Latino kid isn’t ready for kindergarten, he’s half as likely to finish middle school with strong academic and social skills. So by giving more of our kids access to high-quality early education — and by helping parents get the tools they need to help their children succeed — we can give more kids a better shot at the career they’re capable of, and the life that will make us all better off.

-snip-

[bluewater]

1. You left out the part where the OP says the "science" is shakey and maybe racially biased.

As it turns out, the science behind the vocabulary gap — revised down to 4 million words from 30 million — is shaky, and maybe racially biased.

The point isn’t that Biden’s comments are the same as Clinton’s or Obama’s — they aren’t, and Obama and Clinton each took their fair share of criticism on issues of race.

[Garrett78]

17. And they weren't responding to a question about how to repair the legacy of slavery.

Minor details, I guess.

[floppyboo]

2. Total obfusification of the issue at hand

True or not, he DID suggest social services should go to homes to tell people how to parent.
If it were just about literacy and the value of 'words' that should be a public service announcement, not a private invasion.

[Skittles]

11. yup

strange how often it has to be explained what Joe meant

[Mr.Bill]

13. Who said anything about a "private invasion"?

Besides you, I mean.

[bluewater]

3. Biden's word gap rambling answer: new study fails to replicate its central finding.

The Long, Contentious History of the ‘Word Gap’ Study
A 1995 study which suggested that kids from richer families are exposed to more spoken words than those from poorer families has long been the subject of controversy. Now, a new study fails to replicate its central finding.

Back in the 1990s, a team of researchers spent two and a half years visiting the homes of close to four dozen families with young children, starting when the kids were 7 months old. Equipped with tape recorders and notebooks, the researchers—led by two Kansas psychologists named Betty Hart and Todd Risley—spent an hour per week in each home, recording every word a child’s primary caregiver said to the child during the sessions. After transcribing each conversation and then analyzing the exchanges as a whole, the researchers (who have both since passed away) discovered major differences in the number of words spoken in middle-class families and in lower-income ones.

The result of their research was a landmark study published in 1995, which maintained that a typical child whose parents are highly educated and working professionals is exposed to roughly 1,540 more spoken words per hour than a typical child on welfare. Over time, they concluded, this word gap snowballs so much that by age 4, children in rich families have been exposed to 32 million more words than children in poorer ones.

The study was a sensation, with the media and policymakers fixating on the so-called “word gap” as a key source of longer-term academic disparities between poor and rich kids. It was immediately embraced by academic researchers, and was cited in more than 7,000 academic publications. It influenced welfare initiatives, government pilot programs, and grant campaigns. The Obama administration championed efforts to close the “word gap,” organizing a campaign to raise awareness of the issue and to encourage parents to talk more to their children.

Now, a new study has failed to replicate Hart and Risley’s findings, further complicating the legacy of this body of research and renewing a long-standing debate among researchers about just how large disparities of language and vocabulary are among different social classes—and how much those differences matter, if at all.

The new study, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Child Development, reflects the findings of a group of researchers who over the course of two decades studied nearly four dozen families across five different geographic locations in the United States. Three of the communities studied were urban while one was rural; two communities were poor, one was middle class, and two were working class. (One was African American, and the rest were European American.) As with the 1995 study, the researchers recorded conversations between parents and their children, counting the number of words and conducting other linguistic assessments. But they also analyzed the words spoken by all of a given child’s caregivers to that child, as well as those spoken between other people within earshot, even if not directed at the child—an exchange between a parent and older sibling while the child was in the room, for example.

Douglas Sperry—the lead researcher and a psychology professor at Indiana’s Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College—and his colleagues didn’t find a correlation between the socioeconomic status of a child’s family and the number of words that child hears. “There is a lot more language going on in the homes of [low-income] people ... than the Hart-Risley study suggests,” Sperry said. The results were all over the map, with lots of variation within each socioeconomic level.
Other scholars and activists have also critiqued the original word-gap study’s methodology and the way its findings have been interpreted by policymakers. Critics say that policies that grew out of simplistic interpretations of this study were racist, classist, and simply ineffective. Some policymakers and education reformers, they said, blamed parents for the academic gap, instead of acknowledging the other forces at play.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/06/the-long-contentious-history-of-the-word-gap-study/562850/

So, why is Joe Biden STILL pushing a racially biased study that new research has failed to replicate?

Sorry, but trying to hide Biden's actions pushing a debunked study THIS WEEK based on what other people said in good faith years ago, is inexcusable.

This is the problem when Biden insists on retelling and retelling old stories. He really needs to stay more current on such a sensitive issue before insinuating minority and poor parents are the problem.

[Loki Liesmith]

4. Lol

Can’t wait to see what people post after he’s nominated.

[Thekaspervote]

8. Me too!!

[HeartlandProgressive]

10. A 24 year old study that could not be replicated?

Why would anyone bring that up in 2019?

[samnsara]

5. When I was a medical social worker, many of my clients were young single moms..

I noticed some babies talking at a very advanced age... these were always babies of the very young moms...14-16 yrs. When observing these moms at home with their babies, the younger moms tended to read to their babies and talk to them a LOT more compared to older mothers. This held across race and income levels....(altho about 95% of the families I saw were impoverished to some extent...I did have a few families who were professionals with adequate resources).

Now, altho I have no imperial data to back it up and just my observations to base this on...it seemed to me at the time, the very young teen moms had all their needs being met because they are basically children yet. They still had at least one parent who was responsible for the family, who cooked, cleaned and paid the bills...all of lifes daily struggles.. (regardless of family income levels)...allowing the very young mom the freedom to always talk to her newborn, to read to her newborn to play house with her newborn and just be a mom. ....(and what 14 yr old doesnt like being waited on?). The babes of these young teen moms seemed to reach other developmental milestones earlier as well.

It really does take a Village....

[Thekaspervote]

9. Thank you for sharing your professional opinion. Which is actually worth something. Not just a

Biased, unprofessional rambling

[wellst0nev0ter]

16. Cool, now apply that logic to the entire "African-American Community"

and you can see how that is offensive.

[elleng]

6. Thanks.

No 'news' here, really, for those paying attention, but I guess bashers gotta bash.

[rogue emissary]

7. I've given up on commenting on Biden but you are

Twisting Hillary's statement. The example you provide has nothing to do with her talking about the inequality in our country's educational system. It also doesn't address
disparities between different racial communities.

[Cha]

12. Thanks, highplainsdem.

[Hortensis]

14. Good point for itself, the need to help small children develop.

NOT necessary to counter ugly lies absolutely everyone knows are lies.

Those who pounded and filed this decent and caring discussion into a shiv are contemptible, but they got their satisfaction from exercise of malice. Can't undo that.

[IronLionZion]

15. It's more to do with income and opportunity than race

While most liberals agree it's important for early childhood education and building their vocabulary, it can be done without talking down to POC as if some races don't know how to raise their kids.

The original question was:

At Thursday night’s ABC News Democratic presidential debate, Biden was asked by moderator Linsey Davis, “What responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?”

We know Biden means well, but these comments are not helping. And the people who don't know what's wrong with these types of comments don't look like the people who these comments are about.

[Gothmog]

18. Thank you for posting this