On December 15, 2014, Ralph Smith, managing director of the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, participated in a panel discussion at the White House Summit on Early Education. The conversation focused on the expansion of private investment in early learning. Below is a summary of Smith’s remarks:

Delighted to be here. Earlier today, presidential advisor Valerie Jarrett applauded the “coalition of the willing.” And I agree. When I look out at this gathering, I see the army of the persistent.

Within the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading network, what some of us knew, others suspected and all of us have learned: Success in the early grades requires investing in the early years.

That is why “Invest in early learning early” has become a mantra of the GLR Campaign.

The Campaign counts among its members 150-plus communities in 39 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

All those folks have one thing in common: They have come together to put a stake in the ground around third-grade reading proficiency.

We need a generation of high school graduates prepared for college and a career, for military service and to become a workforce that can compete in the global economy. With that in mind, the first thing we must do is teach our children to read.

We know we need to prevent the summer slide, so low-income kids don’t return to school in the fall further behind in their learning than they were in the spring.

We know we’ve got to get more kids in the classroom to improve attendance and end chronic absence.

But, more than anything else, we know we will not succeed in attaining the goal of third-grade reading proficiency unless we invest in getting kids ready for school.

Those investments come, initially, as investments to help parents and caregivers get the information, tools and supports they need to help their children succeed.

Today, in communities across the country, we are seeing evidence that efforts to engage parents and to provide access to early learning pay off:

• In South Seattle, the Bezos Family Foundation is piloting an app called “Vroom,” which translates what the best science tells us into tools parents can use.
• In Oakland and Tulsa, Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Too Small to Fail “Talk, Sing, Read” campaign is taking root and helping low-income parents grow their child’s early literacy through everyday activities.
• In Providence, Mayor Angel Taveras’s Providence Talks program has been recognized by Bloomberg Philanthropies for its innovative use of technology to close the word gap.
• In Colorado, the David & Laura Merage Foundation’s Early Learning Ventures is expanding access to child care that’s both affordable and highquality. By providing online, cost-effective business management tools, such as billing and accounting, ELV allows providers to reinvest their time and resources where it matters most — delivering care to kids.
• In San Antonio, where then mayor, now Secretary Julián Castro supported Scholastic’s Read and Rise and successfully championed a sales tax increase to support preschool programs.

In many respects, this work is a response to the challenge Valerie Jarrett posed when she met with more than 200 philanthropic leaders six years ago, almost to the day. She asked leaders to support cross-sector collaborations and public-private partnerships that make a difference in the lives of kids.

And as Valerie and I both recall, the challenge went the other way as well. The philanthropic leaders encouraged the new administration to keep faith with the President-elect’s promise to find new solutions to longstanding problems.

When you look at the work happening today, there’s good reason to be proud.

The President has stepped up and stepped up in a really big way.

President Obama understands that public-private partnerships can produce proof points — they can provide evidence about what works. But we also need deep public investments to provide access to high-quality home visiting, Early Head Start, Head Start and preschool programs.

Recognition of that fact creates a level of excitement that I feel rippling throughout the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading.

There are thousands of people around the country today that believe they are going to succeed in achieving third-grade reading success because of the work that folks in this room are doing. On their behalf, I want to say thank you to the army of the persistent.

———-

Responding to moderator Kris Perry’s last question about communities that had inspired the panelists, Smith said the following:  

I want to go to Stockton, California, now because we visited Stockton shortly after the city had declared bankruptcy. And this was a visit that had been long planned. You’re going in and you see that the city has declared bankruptcy and you think: “This is going to be a morose meeting.”

And we walked into the room and the business community was there, the United Way was there, institutions of higher learning … Everyone was there, and it was simply the most moving meeting of the hundreds of meetings on this that I have attended … Because here was a city that was in bankruptcy, and everybody came into the room because they understood that the future of the city was dependent upon what happens with its youngest kids.

They were determined no matter what happens that they were going to invest in their youngest children. We all say our future is our children as a mantra, almost a cliché. But I had a chance to see that in real life. And I think Stockton is far more representative of the nation’s cities than many of us believe.

There are communities out there that don’t believe in paralysis and gridlock; they truly believe if they’re going to excel, it’s about investing in their youngest children.

I remember Stockton, and it has made a difference in the way I do my work and why I do my work.