For $60 a month, they tutor
their pre-K children in a program to boost skills. by Lori Higgins, Detroit Free Press, July 12, 2004
Christian Morrow is 5 years old and of course that means he knows his
letters and sounds.
"I got a big brain in my head," he declared one summer Saturday as he was
being tested to see how prepared he is to learn to read.
Christian was part of an experimental program designed to involve parents
in helping their kids and, as a result, fight abysmal reading scores of
black children in Detroit Public Schools.
The lure: Parents are paid to come to monthly classes and work with their
child.
The man behind it: Dr. Charles Whitten, a retired distinguished professor
and associate dean in Wayne State University's School of Medicine,
well-known nationally for his efforts as a sickle-cell disease specialist
and for recruiting minorities into medicine.
Whitten acknowledges that some may question paying parents to teach their
children, but he is adamant that it works.
"We've tried everything else," Whitten said. "We found a way to get
parents to prepare their children by paying them."
On that Saturday, a bunch of flash cards were placed on the table in front
of Christian and he was asked to identify the letters that were on each
one.
"K. D. R. B," Christian fired off. When the tester was clearly surprised,
Christian reminded her why she shouldn't have been.
"I told you -- I'm 5 now," he said.
Veronica Morrow, Christian's mother, said she would have signed up for the
program regardless of the cash incentive, which was $60 a month for
working with the child 15 minutes a day, six days a week.
"Anything that helps me help him -- I'm all for it. This brings something
else to the table," said Morrow, whose son attends the Southeast Head
Start program in Detroit.
Whitten said he firmly believes that if parents knew how to teach their
children -- and were committed to it -- their kids wouldn't enter
kindergarten so far behind.
"Many children start out unprepared and they never catch up," Whitten
said.
So, with the help of a Wayne State education professor, Whitten created
the curriculum.
Whitten isn't an early childhood educator, but that doesn't matter, said
Alan Simpson, spokesman for the National Association for the Education of
Young Children, based in Washington. "You don't need a background in
education to recognize that the early years are learning years and that
research shows we need to give all children a better start on learning,"
Simpson said.
Simpson wasn't aware of any programs like Whitten's that provide specific
instruction to parents on how to help prepare their children to read.
"There are a lot of parents and families that can use some help and
guidance," Simpson said.
And many unprepared children are coming from homes where there are few
books, few adults reading and few adults reading to their children,
Simpson said.
"That puts them at a definite disadvantage," Simpson said.
The experiment
What Whitten lacks in early-childhood expertise, he makes up for in
vision. At 82, he still isn't ready "to be put out to pasture," as he put
it.
So when he was replaced several years ago as director of a
post-baccalaureate program at Wayne State, he decided to try something
else.
"I still had a lot of time, energy and creativity," Whitten said.
That creativity led to the Whitten Project, which began in January and
ended in May.
He identified two groups of Head Start students and provided the cash
incentives and lessons to one group, but nothing to the control group.
The parents attended monthly sessions, where they got detailed lessons on
what to teach their children daily. They read to their children and worked
on tasks such as story comprehension, letter sounds and number
recognition.
Also part of the lesson plan was an emphasis on key steps on the road to
reading: rhyming, blending letter sounds into words and identifying the
sounds in words.
Whitten even used popular nursery rhymes and fairy tales, such as "Mother
Goose" and "Beauty and the Beast," in special books that featured black
characters.
And the parents had to keep meticulous records of their work in order to
get the cash.
The kids whose parents got the lessons -- and the cash -- performed better
than the control group in four out of eight areas tested. There was no
difference between the groups in three areas. Both groups performed poorly
in segmenting -- the ability to take a word like "big" and identify the
sounds "buh," " ehh" and "guh" in the word.
Whitten said he is pleased with the results, though he's already thinking
of ways to improve the program, such as choosing kids next time who aren't
enrolled in Head Start, a federal program begun in 1965 to help prepare
children for kindergarten.
Whitten wants to see whether he can replicate the results with children
who aren't getting a preschool experience and thus more likely to be
unprepared for kindergarten.
The $45,000 it took to run the program came from the Eloise Culmer and
Charles Whitten Fund of the Southeast Michigan Community Foundation, a
fund Whitten and his wife established.
He has enough money left in that fund to conduct a second phase with
different groups of children. But he would need additional funding to
significantly expand the project.
The program may have been designed to prepare kids to learn to read, but
it had side benefits for parents like Malinda Williams, whose daughter
Tae'shon Williams will enter kindergarten in September.
Tae'shon doesn't mind having other family members around when she does her
preschool homework. But when her mom would pull out the book for the
Whitten lessons, "she knew it was our time," Malinda Williams said.
Now, after the two spent so much time together, "I can't shake her. It
definitely has brought us closer," Williams said.
Veronica Morrow, mother of the precocious Christian, said she always felt
her son was bright.
"This definitely has given him an edge."
For information about the Whitten Project, or to donate, call
313-864-8209.
