To lift children’s score and prospects, teaching must start earlier.

Many of us — teachers, parents, policymakers, business leaders — have been wringing our hands at the Oct. 30th release of the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores —also known as “the nation’s report card.” And rightfully so.

The NAEP report reveals not only a stagnation in average reading and math scores over the past decade, but “a growing divergence in achievement between the highest and lowest achieving students.” The children who most bear the brunt of of this divergence — those who live in poverty — are the very children who most need a strong education so that the poverty of their childhood does not become the poverty of their adulthood, and is not passed on to their next generation. This is really bad news for all of us.

An educated populace is the necessary precondition for our collective prosperity, for our future workforce needs, for our ability to keep up in a global economy. But staring us right in the face is the reality: we are failing our children — and ourselves. Like evidence of our failings, a solution is right in front of us. Fully 90% of the human brain develops during the first five years of life. But we wait until kindergarten to invest in a child’s education.

We must invest in every child’s cognitive development from day one. Not doing so is to showing up to a marathon with no training. It simply does not work. So what to do? Let’s focus on the first five years of life for every child.

Here are the essential steps.

• Start at birth. We must move the starting line for preparing for school to birth. Science tells us that brain development begins in the earliest days of life. Parents, caregivers, practitioners: we must all seize this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Stay the course for five years, with parents as our guides. Young brains need constant nourishment. Parents are their child’s first and best brain builder, and when they are given access to plenty of tools — books to read to their children, information about their children’s development, resources for education — they step up in extraordinary ways. They are the catalysts for rewriting school readiness — and academic success.

•Stay invested: We must stop saying that this work is too expensive. The adage “if you think education is expensive, try ignorance” applies here. Nobel Prize winner Dr. James Heckman has demonstrated with his Heckman Equation that there is no time in life that provides a greater return on investment than the first five years: every dollar spent in that period reaps a return of $13, according to Heckman. It’s a bargain we can’t afford to ignore. It is time to make the upfront investments — strategically, and unapologetically — to get there.

Here in Durham, we are witnessing this transformation — with a suite of interventions that deliver on these three imperatives. Family Connects Durham, Book Babies, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, and others: together, they are providing a continuum of support and tools for parents over the critical first five years. Programs that meet parents and families where they are over five years: this is the work to be done. Robust and sustained attention to the earliest years may be the only thing we haven’t yet tried in our quest to rewrite the abysmal outcomes we are seeing for our country’s children. Isn’t it time we all turned our attention to the preparation that every child needs to be truly ready on the first day of kindergarten, when the marathon begins?

This story was originally published November 25, 2019 at 12:00 AM with the headline "To lift children’s score and prospects, teaching must start earlier.."