We have to offer more alternatives and teach our youngsters to get along with other people. Just as Japan is trying to be more like the United States, we're trying to imitate Japan. Not every school can afford small classes, but this is a system worth imitating as much as possible. Many youngsters are raised in single-parent families, and many of those families are poor. Only one household in four even has a child in a public school, which may account, in part, for the lack of support for those schools.
Homework is one good example.
The poverty rates are as high in the rural areas as they are in the cities, and many disadvantaged youngsters in both areas have no quiet place to study or to spread out books or paper. Hodgkinson and many other demographers and researchers are aware of the value of the preschool years for children of poverty. President Clinton's early years in Hope, Arkansas, were spent in a very modest home with a widowed, albeit attentive and ambitious, mother. My guess is that Clinton, although poor, probably had a pretty good first five years. However, many poor children do not get the background at home that they need in order to be ready for school.