Literacy and Reading

Today we feature a guest post by David L. Kirp, professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, and the author of The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics. His next book is Healthy, Wealthy and Wise: Five Big Ideas for Transforming Children’s Lives, to be published next winter. He served on the education policy team during the 2008-09 presidential transition.

Kids’ advocates stood on the sidelines last March, watching helplessly as the Early Learning Challenge Fund, a $1 billion-a-year initiative to strengthen the quality of early education and child care, was stricken from the health care reform bill. The fact that early education wasn’t important enough to merit an up-or-down vote, instead becoming ensnared in the debates over health care and the restructuring of the college loan program, says a lot about what has happened—more precisely, what hasn’t happened—on the early education front. Despite the widespread recognition that good early education can alter the arc of children’s lives, the conventional wisdom, that children don’t matter because they don’t vote, endures. In national politics, children come last.

Join the Early Education Initiative on June 22 at 5:30 p.m. for a lively and celebratory event to highlight the latest research on child development and the science of learning. Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute in New York City, will talk about her latest book, Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs and show video clips from recent experiments conducted with young children.

A new report from Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland shows that children who spend a full school day in a pre-kindergarten program do better on tests of reading skills by the end of kindergarten than their counterparts who attend for half the day.

More than 25 years ago, A Nation at Risk raised the issue. High-level research summits on children’s achievement have flagged the problem for decades. Last year, even military leaders expressed their concern. We here at New America have tried to drive the point home too: It is beyond time to address the literacy problem in this country. More than two-thirds of fourth-graders are not reading at grade level.

Will this be the year for reauthorization of the law once known as No Child Left Behind? Could some of the law's policies be changed to improve the odds for high-quality early learning programs and the children they serve? Will new attention be paid to pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, first, second and third grades?

The Obama administration is proposing an increase in funding – and some significant changes – to federal literacy programs in the 2011 fiscal year, which begins October 1, 2010. The changes are part of proposals submitted by President Obama in his budget request in February, and they could have a significant impact on literacy groups that depend on federal grants. They also signal a renewed interest in funding programs that offer literacy instruction -- though it's unclear yet whether that will translate into more or better programs for children in their earliest years.

"Don't dismiss early education as just cute; it's critical." That's the headline for our op-ed that USA Today published today, and I'm grateful to the headline writer for making the point so succinctly. The piece calls for more inclusion of early learning when we talk about how to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (which most people know as No Child Left Behind).