Pre-K Now newsclips never disappoint me. My gratitude to Pre-K Now’s Liz Snyder. Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to read Patrick Riccards’ piece, "Requiring Quality for Our Pre-K Programs." Mr. Riccards details the current struggle with universal Pre-K in our nation in a very interesting and detailed fashion. But what caught my eye was the discussion of, “What does quality look like?” He features what is happening in Washington DC and Texas as places who are providing real insight into high-quality, effective Pre-K instruction. Riccards writes, “In Washington, the Apple Tree Institute for Education Innovation, through the DC Partnership for Early Literacy, is working in some of our nation’s capitals lowest-income communities. He continues to outline the results to define “is working.” The Apple Tree children are showing gains of 21 percentile points in vocabulary proficiency outscoring their Head Start counterparts in DC Head Start who have the same demographics.
In Texas, through the Texas Early Education Model (TEEM), which started services only five years ago is now serving more than 61,000 young children in Title 1, Head Start and child care settings, “children are achieving and demonstrating progress in key literacy skills, including phonological awareness, rapid letter naming, and vocabulary.” Please remember the National Early Literacy Panel report which determined these skill areas are key to later reading success.
The blog ends with this statement, “Our early childhood education programs should be focused on providing the academic framework that empowers even the most disadvantaged of students to achieve in a school setting.” I could not have said it any better.
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