The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading
The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading is a determined effort to mobilize philanthropic leadership around moving the needle on third grade reading over the next decade.
The excitement around the All-America City Grade-Level Reading Awards has surpassed our wildest expectations as mayors, county officials, and other civic leaders from more than 150 U.S. communities pledged this month to make early literacy an urgent priority. We all recognize that children who don’t learn to read well by the end of third grade are more likely to struggle academically and less likely to finish high school. But now there is overwhelming commitment across the country to tackle this problem more aggressively.
Cities and counties representing 36 states and millions of school children have signaled their intent to apply for the 2012 All-America City Awards. The awards will go to those that develop the most comprehensive, realistic, and sustainable plans to deal with these three significant barriers to reading achievement: the school readiness gap, chronic absence, and summer learning loss.
The communities – ranging from big cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and Baltimore to smaller places like El Dorado, Kansas – are addressing what is clearly a national crisis: A full two thirds of U.S. students fail to become proficient readers in the early grades, and schools cannot fix this problem without community support.
The concerted local action (read the full list of cities here) comes at a time when states and the federal government are paying particular attention to early education through legislation and grant programs. The All-America City Award is given annually to 10 communities recognized for outstanding civic accomplishment, with an emphasis on innovation, inclusiveness, and collaboration among community leaders. It does not come with a cash prize, but cities have touted it to attract new businesses and seek higher credit ratings. The Campaign will provide assistance to cities to develop their final applications, which are due in March. Finalists will be selected by April, and the winners will be announced in June.
Miami is one of the cities joining the award program after launching its own local grade-level reading campaign last month. One in three third graders read below grade level in the Miami-Dade county school district; in the city of Miami it’s nearly half of third graders. The Read to Learn campaign, spearheaded by The Children’s Trust and the Miami-Dade County government, public schools, library system, the local United Way, and others, seeks to reduce by half the number of third grades who fail to read at grade level and improve reading proficiency overall by 2020.
All these developments have drawn considerable interest in the media as well.
Molly McGrath Tierney, director of Baltimore City Department of Social Services, gave a dynamic overview of the importance of grade-level reading on this cable news program recently.
The Washington Post, Education Week, the Miami Herald, and other major news outlets have also been covering the Campaign in recent weeks. You can see some of the best coverage of the Campaign in our online Newsroom.
Stay on top of all that is new with the Campaign and with the progress of grade-level reading by making a regular visit to website: www.gradelevelreading.net. The site offers a comprehensive news source on issues related to early childhood, reading development, and achievement. Get the latest updates on federal initiatives or state campaigns and read recent studies on child development and literacy.
Thirty five states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico submitted applications for the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge, according to the U.S. Department of Education. The $500 million competitive program will issue grants for states to improve early learning and development. Grants will range from $50 million to $100 million based on the proposals and the population served.
The program is jointly administered by the Education Department and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Head Start and other childhood programs.
The applicants are: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
Sterling Speirn, CEO and President of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, answered questions about the importance of early childhood development and education in this recent Washington Post online chat. The featured discussion, “Make Our Kids Great by 8!,” was a Q and A with Speirn and Post readers about the critical birth to third grade connection.
“Education starts at birth, not on the first day of kindergarten. Everything we know about brain development and children’s relationships with people spotlights that the first three years are the most critical,” Speirn wrote. “Secondly, connecting those first three years to the pre-school years and then the first four years of elementary school assures the ongoing positive development of children’s social, emotional, cognitive and physical strengths.”
The Washington Post has been featuring early education as part of its new endeavor into live events. On Oct. 5, the Post hosted a symposium with experts and policymakers titled: “Investing in the Future Through Early Childhood Education.”
“We know that if a child is not reading by end of third they likely will not graduate high school,” Mark Shriver, the senior vice president of U.S. programs for Save the Children, said during a discussion with Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.). “We need to start early.”
You can watch videos of the panel discussions from the event here.
Education experts and foundation leaders tackled the connection between poverty and educational opportunity at NBC’s Education Nation Summit last month. Ralph Smith, a senior vice president at the Annie E. Casey Foundation and managing director of the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, participated in a panel moderated by Brian Williams entitled: “What’s in a ZIP Code? A Look at Inequality Across Our Public Schools.”
“Poverty and educational outcomes are deeply intertwined,” Smith said. “We’re not going to be able to achieve our highest aspirations for education if we continue to allow so many children [to languish] because of a level of intergenerational poverty that ought to be an embarrassment in the richest country in the world.”
View the entire discussion here.
The Pre-K Now campaign, a project of the Pew Center on the States, released its final report, challenging the nation’s policy makers to transform our public education system from the current K-12 structure to a Pre-K-12 structure. The Pre-K Coalition, representing leading education organizations and teachers unions, emphasizes the same point in its new report, calling on Congress to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act with a strong early education component. Read more from Education Week and
TIME.
A recent study by Applied Survey Research and Attendance Works shows that students who arrive at kindergarten ready for school, but then miss too many days in kindergarten and first grade, generally do not read proficiently by the end of third grade.
At the same time, children who arrive at school unprepared for kindergarten are less likely to read proficiently, regardless of their attendance records. Good attendance by itself does not make as much of a difference.
Together with summer learning – shown by several studies to be crucial to educational success, especially for low-income children – these elements work in concert to drive academic achievement.