Betty Hart

Betty Hart (born Bettie Mackenzie Farnsworth, July 15 1927 – September 28 2012) was an American education researcher, known for her work on the relation between vocabulary learning and social inequality. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, went on to do graduate work in psychology at Washington University, and later received her PhD from Kansas University where she also became a professor at the Lifespan Institute.

In 1995 she and her former graduate adviser Todd Risley published the book Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children in which they argued that educational outcomes were significantly affected by parenting practices, particularly the daily time parents spend talking to their children in early childhood. The book argued that parents from low-income families spoke less to their children than high income parents, leading to a disparity in which, at age three, low income children had heard 32 million words fewer than their high income peers. This inequality of exposure to vocabulary was argued to be the cause of lower educational achievement and the cause of the perpetuation of socio-economic disparities between generations. The study was widely influential and inspired the establishment of many government programs aimed at changing the linguistic practices of low income parents. Subsequent scholars have thrown doubt on Hart and Risley's findings, arguing that Hart and Risley's study was methodologically unsound and that the language disparity proposed by Hart and Risley does not in fact exist and cannot be considered causal for the disparity of education outcomes.

Hart married Dr. John Hart in 1949, and divorced in 1961. She died in 2012, in Tucson Arizona due to lung cancer.