Dinner in DC

Uncle Jay visited in DC yesterday. Thus, I invited several of my friends to have dinner together with him. :) I decided to go to Georgetown for this romantic Friday night event. The restaurant I picked was Miss Saigon which had authentic Vietnamese dishes with good prices. (Too bad we did not drill a hole in Uncle Jay's wallet, as Aunt Shichin told me to :p)
Here's the issue we discussed during the dinner: (cited from New York Times Magazine)

A new and growing movement of researchers and advocates has begun to argue that the longstanding and sharp conceptual divide b/w school and not-school is out of date. It ignores overwhelming evidence of the impact of family and community environment s on children's achievement. At the most basic level it ignores the fact that poor children, on average, arrive in kindergarten far behind their middle-class peers. There is evidence that schools can do lot or erase that divide but the reality is that most schools do not. If we truly want to counter the effects of poverty on the achievement of children, these advocates argue, we need to start a whole lot earlier and do a whole lot more.

This is closely related to "Summer Loss", one of the issue that Irene's adviser, whom Uncle Jay admires a lot, had researched on. During the summer vacation, Children from middle-class (or upper) family gained a lot of knowledge and different trainings from all the summer camps and classes while the poor just stay at home watching TV; Thus when the school starts again, the performance of the poor children is lower. This effect actually accumulates as time follows. Specific interventions in the children's lives might diminish the gap - as long as they begin early (the earliest the better) .



Major thanks to Bryce, Irene, Lu for accompanying me to DC/ Georgetown. My uncle is indeed a cool and fun guy to talk to right? Georgetown at night was so pretty. How nice it was to stroll along the street while watching all the glimmering shop window displaying and showing off. :)