For long time early educators like myself, the national, state, and community conversations people are having about the critically important first 5 years of a child’s life could not be more welcome.  While much of the conversation focuses on enhanced opportunities for high quality center-based care – which I agree is a critical weapon against the academic achievement gap – I am concerned about our youngest children, birth – four, and those who will not have slots in these preschool classrooms.  Are we to leave them behind, faced with a downward trajectory we’ve seen far too many times? Who will speak for them…and who will call out the critical role parents play in reversing this trend?

The New Yorker recently published an article titled “The Talking Cure” which makes the case for enhanced support and educational opportunities for parents of young children so they can learn how best to support all of their children to be successful in school and beyond. All parents have dreams for their children and all parents have the capacity to support their children’s learning. However as the article states, “Changing how low-income parents interact with their children is a delicate matter, and not especially easy.”

Raising A Reader is a family engagement program that has been on the front line of these efforts for 15 years. In addition to our rotating red book bags which put hundreds of books in the hands of children, we provide easily accessible, multilingual and culturally appropriate parent education that increases parental awareness of the crucial role they play in supporting their children’s future success, starting from birth. This is significant as we now know that the achievement gap is first evident at 18 months, and once these children enter school the gap continues to widen making it extremely difficult to close.  Raising A Reader partners with home visiting programs as described in the New Yorker article, but also with public schools, Head Start, childcare centers, adult education programs, faith based and other community programs which allows us to scale easily, reaching thousands of low-income parents across the state.  We teach simple strategies that help parents, many of whom were raised in low-literacy households, develop, practice, and maintain the habit of sharing books with their young children for a cost of only $150/year.

I hope you will take a few minutes to read this article and join us in our efforts to give all children – and their parents – an equal chance to succeed. While changing parental behavior may not be easy, it is a critical first step in changing the academic trajectories of low-income children. Time is of the essence here…we cannot afford to wait.