Too Many Children Left Behind from the Start

A few days ago Charlie Rose interviewed four recent winners of the National Teacher of the Year Award. One of those outstanding individuals, Kimberly Oliver, teaches kindergarten. When asked what education policy she would most like to see from the next President she did not hesitate-- universal access to pre-kindergarten would be her top priority. She observed that by the time children enter her kindergarten classroom, many are already behind because they have missed out on learning opportunities during the critical ages of three, four and five. Research supports Kimberly’s experience. Vocabulary development begins as soon as children are learning to talk. A much-cited study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley reported that children aged 0-3 from low socio-economic backgrounds hear an average of 250,000 words each day, while those from middle income backgrounds hear as many as 4 million words. Even at the age of 3, therefore, some children are much farther along the path to literacy than others. High-quality preschool programs can prepare children from all backgrounds to do well in kindergarten and beyond. Unfortunately, today most children do not have access to high-quality preschools, and many of them will enter kindergarten without the requisite social and cognitive foundation to succeed. A recent RAND Corporation study entitled Who is Ahead and Who is Behind underscored the challenge by pointing out that those children who most need pre-k programs are also the least likely to attend them. The widest gap is between children whose mothers did not complete high school and those whose mothers have earned at least a college degree. Moreover, children who start school behind their peers rarely catch up. Again, vocabulary acquisition is a useful marker. Harvard professor Catherine Snow explains that kids should know 80,000 words by the time they graduate from high school. Vocabulary acquisition is cumulative, which means that if a child is learning words at a rate that is only 75 percent as fast as other children, huge differences can quickly accumulate. A key objective of The No Child Left Behind Act is that every American child will be performing at grade level by the year 2014. By the end of the 2006-7 school year, however, just 32% of American fourth graders were proficient in reading and only 39% were proficient in math. The children who will be in fourth grade in 2014 are currently three or four years old. Unless we immediately make high-quality preschool accessible to more of them, particularly those from low-income backgrounds, we should not be surprised when NCLB falls well short of its grade proficiency objectives. Learning not only starts at an early age, but it comes much more easily when we are young—as any adult trying to take up a sport, musical instrument, or other new skill will tell you. We must encourage learning and the love of learning in our youngest children, or expect only marginal results from efforts to improve educational results for the older children and teens they will become.