RI city wins $5M Bloomberg prize with word gap fix
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) Rhode Island's capital city has won a $5 million contest created by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg with a high-tech plan to overcome a language skills problem known as the word gap that puts low-income children at a profound disadvantage in the classroom.
Providence was one of 305 cities that pitched an idea to Bloomberg Philanthropies' Mayors Challenge, a contest designed to spur innovation in America's cities. Houston, Philadelphia, Chicago and Santa Monica, Calif., were selected for $1 million runner-up prizes. The winners are set to be announced Wednesday in New York.
Providence's winning proposal will equip low-income children with recording devices that count the words and conversations they are exposed to. Combined with coaching lessons for parents,, the plan is designed to help poor children overcome a language skills deficit that develops before they even start kindergarten.
A landmark 1995 study found that children in families receiving welfare hear less than one-third as many words per hour as their more affluent peers and will reach age four having heard 32 million fewer words than children from professional families. Research shows the word deficit is tied to later academic performance and employment opportunities.
"Education is the path out of poverty; I know, because I have followed it," Providence Mayor Angel Taveras told The Associated Press. "We need to make sure that path is available to more kids. The first teacher in a child's life is a child's parent. We can do something to help them."
The selection committee at Bloomberg Philanthropies selected Providence's proposal because it takes a new approach to a systemic problem and could be replicated in other cities.
"Mayor Taveras found an evidence-based solution to a major challenge the word gap for low-income children that has potential to move us forward in a cost effective, scalable, and sustainable way," Bloomberg said in a statement. "The Mayors Challenge aimed to find the most powerful ideas that have the greatest potential to spread and each of these five mayors knocked it out of the ballpark."
Called "Providence Talks," Taveras' plan will make use of a pager-sized recorder put in a child's pocket that acts as a language pedometer, recording every conversation and word spoken to them through the course of their day. The city intends to offer the voluntary program to children in low-income families, as determined by newborn screening assessments. Their parents will receive monthly coaching sessions from social workers in which they learn ways to boost a child's vocabulary, and social work agencies will be given bonuses if a child's language skills improve.
The recording devices work in English, Spanish and other languages and automatically screen out conversations from television and radio. The recordings will be kept confidential and once the devices' data are analyzed, any conversations on the recordings will be deleted. To prevent a 3year-old from losing or damaging the recorders, the devices come with specially designed clothing to hold them in place.
Providence Talks would begin with a small number of children participating and gradually expand the program to 2,850 families by 2018.
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RI city wins $5M Bloomberg prize with word gap fix