Picture a nine-year-old boy—we’ll call him Brian—sitting down one day during the spring semester with his No. 2 pencil to take the National Assessment for Educational Progress, the test best known as the Nation’s Report Card. If he’s like two-thirds of students in the United States, he won’t fully understand what he is reading. He will have been so unprepared in literacy that he cannot hit the proficient mark on this fourth-grade material. This will not bode well for his hypothetical future, or for two-thirds of American students’ real ones.
There is no single reason why so many children are unable to read proficiently; similarly, there is no silver-bullet solution. But here is a single fact we do know: The first eight years of children’s lives, from when they are born up through the third grade, lay the critical foundation of knowledge and social and emotional skills on which the entirety of their future learning rests.
[For more of this story, written by Laura Bornfreud, go to http://www.psmag.com/books-and...ly-education-program]
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