One of the nation’s biggest public forums on education kicks off Monday, and for the first time it will tackle early learning thanks to some help from Washington state.
This will be the second year of the Education Nation Summit, an ambitious effort by NBC News to improve the dialogue about education in America and come up with solutions. But it's the first year early learning will be meaningfully included in the conversation.
We know an achievement gap can be spotted in children as young as 18 months old. And we know that by kindergarten, wealthier children have heard 30 million more words than their peers in poverty.
If efforts like Education Nation are serious about closing the achievement gap and building better schools, their conversations need to focus on the impact of children’s early experiences and learning on children's success in school and life. That’s what Seattle-based Bezos Family Foundation, a sponsor of this year’s event, and Thrive by Five Washington told organizers.
“We need more people to understand that the first five years of life really do matter,” said Molly O’Connor, director of communications for Thrive by Five Washington. “If we want to solve many of the challenges in our schools, we need to look at what’s happening for children before they even enter school.”
Organizers agreed, and, this year, the Summit will start with presentations on what’s been learned about the brain in those first few years and what it means for learning. Leading up to the event, The Bezos Family Foundation and Thrive by Five Washington helped Education Nation shape its early learning work by suggesting content and experts, such as world-renowned brain researchers Drs. Patricia Kuhl and Andy Meltzoff, co-directors of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS). Kuhl and Meltzoff along with Alison Gopnik of UC Berkeley and Jack Shonkoff of Harvard will help get the meeting rolling Monday with presentations on “Brain Power: Why Early Learning Matters.” (Check out Kuhl’s guest blog and a video of her talking about the “linguistic genius of babies”)
NBC has pulled me in, too, to help with the Summit. You can ask me questions about early learning and education at Education Nation’s “Ask an Expert” site.
To help summit organizers broaden their education debate, The Bezos Foundation and Thrive by Five Washington explained why early learning matters, highlighting that every dollar spent on early ed returns at least $7 to society in the form of fewer students in special education, lower incarceration rates, less money spent on social services and other reduced costs.
They walked Education Nation leaders through what it means to be ready for school, the critical role parents play during those first years, and that early learning is far more than preschool and pre-kindergarten, it’s everything that happens until kindergarten, and in some ways through third grade.
It is not a surprise Washington leaders helped. Since 2004, the state has emerged as a leader in key areas of early education, with a pilot child care quality rating and improvement system, development of model schools that integrate pre-kindergarten with the first grades of elementary school and a comprehensive plan to build a better early learning system over the next 10 years.
Tune in Monday morning and join the conversation over at Education Nation.