Address by Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst
Assistant Secretary of Education for Research and Improvement
U.S. Department of Education
July 26, 2001

Good day. I am very pleased to be able to talk with you about cognitive development in the preschool period. I am very appreciative of the First Lady's and the President's commitment to this issue.

My task is to provide a brief introduction to the science that relates to this topic and that undergirds many of the presentations you will hear at this conference. I was asked to do this before I became Assistant Secretary, and will be speaking in the guise of a researcher who has worked on this general topic for 31 years. This is my last gasp in that role. If I have to sing a swan song, I guess this isn't a bad setting in which to do it.

One of my early mentors told me that in giving a speech I should tell the audience what I'm going to say, say it, and then tell them what I said. I'll follow that advice today.

I'm going to focus on pre-reading skills that children acquire in the preschool period, and how these skills, or the absence of them, affect a child's later ability to learn to read. In introducing this topic, I'm going to tell you why learning to read is important and why this task is difficult for children. Then I'll describe important pre-reading abilities. Next I'll describe the influence of economic poverty on the development of pre-reading abilities. Then I'll describe some research that demonstrates the predictive power of pre-reading abilities for later reading outcomes. And finally, I will describe three interventions that enhance pre-reading skills, each targeted for a different time span during the preschool period.

Why is reading important?

Millions of adults in the U.S. have such low levels of literacy that they cannot read a newspaper. 38% of 4th graders nationally cannot read at the basic level, which means they cannot read and understand a simple paragraph from an age-appropriate children's book. In some school districts in this country this figure rises to over 70%. Very few children with serious reading difficulties ever graduate from college. They suffer disproportionately from social ills such as delinquency and drug abuse. Their job prospects are limited.

Beyond these economic and social factors, people who cannot read or cannot read well are unable to experience the joys of learning, the opportunities for self-reflection, or the simple pleasures of being lost in a book. As that great philosopher, Groucho Marx, put it:

"Outside of a dog, a book is Man's best friend.
And inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."

We will hear a lot about early cognitive development and pre-reading skills at this gathering. As we think about these topics, let's keep in mind that reading difficulties are not abstractions. They are very real, intensely frustrating experiences in the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of children who struggle to learn to read.

What can we do to prepare children to learn to read so that they will not experience these frustrations?

What's so hard about learning to read?

We need to understand that reading is not natural. Writing was invented only about 5000 years ago, and the phenomenon of mass literacy is so recent that it occurred in the last tick of the clock of human history. Given a normal brain and somebody else to converse with, humans will develop a language. It is natural. Reading and writing are not. They are recent cultural inventions that have to be taught.

Reading is not easy for a lot of children. It seems easy to those of us who do it well, just as riding a bike seems effortless after you know how to do it.

One reason that reading isn't easy is that it is based on a code called the alphabetic principle. That code maps minimal units of written language, in the case of English these are letters of the alphabet, onto minimal units of spoken language, called phonemes. You know what alphabet letters are. What word would we have if we took the /b/ sound away from bat? That /b/ sound is a phoneme.

To take you back to those days before you knew how to read and give some sense of the difficulty of the alphabetic principle, consider the following example of print:

This is a pre-roman Celtic writing called Ogham. Very strange looking, isn't it.

Now listen to this:

How does this writing map onto those sounds? How are these marks to be divided up into units? And, how is that stream of sound to be divided up into units? What are the phonemes, if you will? Once the writing and the sounds are parsed into individual pieces, the graphemes and phonemes, how do they link up? Which unit of writing corresponds to which unit of sound?

Very mysterious, isn't it? What you need to realize is that the connections between the English alphabet and the sounds of spoken English are just as mysterious for a young child.

Not only is the code not transparent, but in English we throw children the curve of what is called "deep orthography." Our language has a commitment to spelling the roots of words the same, even when the pronunciation changes. Thus, say this word:

CHILD

Now say this word:

CHILDREN

Why isn't it CHILD-REN instead of CHILL-DREN?

To make it harder for children to break the code, I guess.

Now add to the arbitrary code, and irregular spellings, a considerable demand on phonological memory. I recently looked at a videotape of a little second grade girl, Jennifer, laboriously trying to read an 8-page picture book. It took her over 31 minutes, with her mother's help. By the time Jennifer got to the end of a sentence in which she'd flubbed and stumbled over most of the words, to the point at which she could potentially comprehend what she'd read, a minute or two may have passed, and she wasn't able to remember what she sounded out at the beginning of the sentence. Some children have a lot more trouble remembering sounds than others, and these children are particularly prone to reading problems. We actually have brain imaging results on children that demonstrate the location of these difficulties.

Notice that the pre-reading area is found just above the storage area for germ finding, and next to the wiggling center.

More seriously, we do have clear neurological evidence from real imaging studies that some poor readers have problems in the left temporal lobe of the brain.

To the mix of an arbitrary code, irregular spellings, and demands on phonological memory, let's add a fourth element of difficulty - instructional confusion. This is a polite euphemism for the teacher not knowing what she's doing. Far too few teachers in elementary schools in this country, much less preschools, have received any training in how children learn to read and how to teach them. So, struggling children may not only not get the help they need, but in many cases they may be misdirected by their teacher. For example, we know that children need to break the alphabetic code in order to be able to read, yet many teachers still ask children who are struggling with a word to guess what it might be from context. They believe that good readers often guess at words. Yet, we know that good readers read nearly every word on the page. It is struggling readers who guess.

To sum up, learning to read is hard for at least 4 reasons: arbitrary code, irregular code, demands on phonological memory, and instructional confusion. For these reasons, many children don't learn to read well, with dire consequences. Is there anything we can do to help?

The answer, of course, is yes. The roots of reading difficulties lie in the preschool period, and that is where prevention must begin.

Pre-reading skills, a classification system

The pre-reading domain includes the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that are precursors to children's ability to read and write, and the environments that support those abilities. Thirty years ago, people interested in this topic would have called it reading readiness and would have focused on those skills that children need to be taught in kindergarten, such as names of letters of the alphabet. Today, we know that the precursors to literacy start at a much earlier age than kindergarten. Thus we approach literacy as a developmental continuum that starts early in life and merges into conventional reading and writing. Learning the names of letters of the alphabet is still important, very important, but it is but one step in a process that begins much earlier in a child's life.

As illustrated in this figure, children's attitudes about print, for example, whether they enjoy being read to, and their pre-reading skills, for example, whether they have good vocabularies and know something about how print works, affect their later reading. And both their skills and their attitudes are affected by their environment -- for example, being read to frequently by a loving parent.

A few years ago, I and my colleague Christopher Lonigan proposed a broad division of pre-reading and conventional literacy into two interrelated domains: outside-in and inside-out. This distinction proved useful to many people as a way of thinking about pre-reading, and it has subsequently been validated by research.

The outside-in domain represents children's understanding of information outside of the particular printed words they are trying to read. It depends on knowing the meanings of words, having conceptual knowledge of the subject of the written text, and understanding the print that has come before the word being read. The inside-out units represent children's knowledge of the rules for translating the particular writing they are trying to read into spoken words.

Imagine a child trying to read the sentence, "She sent off to the very best seed house for five bushels of lupine seed," from the award winning children's picture book, Miss Rumphius. Being able to say the sentence from the print on the page depends on knowing letters, sounds, and links between letters and sounds. These are inside-out processes, which is to say that they are based on and keyed to the elements of the sentence itself. However, a child could have the requisite inside-out skills to read the sentence aloud and still not read it successfully. What does the sentence mean?

Comprehension of all but the simplest of writing depends on knowledge that cannot be found in the word or sentence itself. Who is the "she" referred to in the sentence above? Why is she sending away for seed? Why does she need five bushels? What is lupine? In short what is the narrative, conceptual, and semantic context in which this sentence is found, and how does the sentence make sense within that context? Answering these questions depends on outside-in processes, which is to say that the child must bring to bear knowledge of the world, semantic knowledge, and knowledge of the written context in which this particular sentence occurred.

A child who cannot translate a sequence of graphemes into sounds cannot understand a written sentence, but neither can a child who does not understand anything about the concepts referred to in the sentence and the context in which the sentence occurs. Outside-in and inside-out processes are both essential to reading, and work simultaneously in readers who are reading well.

Let's unpack both the outside-in and inside-out domains into some of the component skills that we know to be important precursors of learning to read.

Outside-in domain

Narrative and story structure

Children who have listened to adults tell stories, have been read pictures books, and have overheard and participated in oral descriptions of events come to understand the general script for that type of language use. In a typical picture book story, for example, characters are introduced, e.g., a bus, a bus driver, and children. Next some goal or motive is set up, e.g., the children are going to school. Next, something happens to the characters, e.g., the bus breaks down. Finally, there is a resolution to the problem, e.g., the children help the driver fix the bus and everyone gets to school on time. Children learn these scripts, sometimes called story grammars, and it helps them remember a story the next time they hear one or read one.

Conceptual and semantic knowledge

Children who know something about the world are much better able to understand what they read once they get to the age of formal instruction in reading. Development of language, vocabulary, conceptual knowledge, and domain knowledge is a life-long process. It begins early in life and needs to continue throughout the preschool period, and beyond. By first grade, linguistically advantaged children are likely to have vocabularies that are four times the size of their linguistically disadvantaged peers. These differences widen over the elementary school years, and result in children who have great difficulty in understanding what they are reading, who cannot write well-formed coherent compositions, and who have trouble in oral expression. How is a second grader who defines the word "shock" as a "big fish" or "jail" as "that stuff you put in your hair" going to make sense of written stories that include these words?

Inside-out domain

Phonological sensitivity

Phonological sensitivity refers to the ability to detect and manipulate the sound structure of oral language. Phonological sensitivity might be revealed by a such things as child's ability to identify words that rhyme ("What rhymes with cat?"), or to delete words from compound words to form a new word (What word would we have if we took 'cow' away from 'cowboy'?). It is very important to understand that phonological sensitivity is an oral language skill that can develop without any exposure to print or letters. It is NOT phonics, which is a teaching method that emphasizes the relationship between letters and corresponding sounds. Thus phonological sensitivity is something that can and should develop in the preschool period.

Phonological sensitivity promotes the development of reading skills because letters in written language correspond to speech sounds at the level of phonemes. If children cannot perceive the individual sounds in spoken words, they will have difficulty identifying the correspondence between print and the language it represents.

Here is a question that four-year-olds will answer correctly if they are developing phonological awareness at an appropriate level for their age:

This is a zebra, a shoe, a wall, and a leaf. Point to the one that rhymes with ball.

Print knowledge

Print knowledge refers to a child's developing understand of the writing system. It progresses from very simple understanding of things like how to hold a book, to understanding that print in English runs from top to bottom and left to right across a page, to functions of written language such as what a menu is for, to the ability to name letters of the alphabet. Knowledge of print is half the equation of the writing code. Children need to know how print works if they are going to be able to link units of sound to units of print.

Here is an example of a question that four-year-olds would be able to answer correctly if they were developing print knowledge at an age-appropriate level:

Find the picture that has a word in it.

Emergent writing

Another route to print awareness and letter knowledge is through writing. Emergent writing includes pretending to write and learning to write one's name. Similar to phonological awareness and print knowledge, it too goes through a developmental progression over the preschool years for children who are raised in literate homes. At the earliest stage young children learn to hold and use crayons and other writing instruments to draw. Later they will begin to write letters.

Here is an example of a question that four-year-olds with age-appropriate levels of emergent writing would be able to answer:

Some children wrote their name. Find the one that is written the best.

Poverty and pre-reading skills

By one estimate, 35% of children in the United States enter public schools with such low levels of the skills and motivation that are needed as starting points in our current educational system that they are at substantial risk of early academic difficulties. This problem is strongly linked to family income. When schools are ranked by the median socioeconomic status of their students' families, socioeconomic status correlates .68 with academic achievement. Socioeconomic status is also one of the strongest predictors of performance differences in children at the beginning of first grade.

Children from low-income families are substantially behind their more affluent peers in both the outside-in and inside-out components of pre-reading. For instance, the typical child in some urban public schools enters kindergarten at the 5th percentile in vocabulary knowledge, and does not know words such as chicken, leaf, and triangle.

Children raised in poverty are also substantially behind on inside-out skills such as letter naming and phonological awareness. For instance, the typical child enters Head Start as a four-year-old being able to name no more than a single letter of the alphabet. How many letters do you think this typical child can name on exit from preschool a year later? One. By way of comparison, a typical middle-class child would be able to name all the letters on entry into kindergarten. Is this important? Reading scores in 10th grade can be predicted with surprising accuracy from knowledge of the alphabet in kindergarten.

Pre-reading experiences and poverty

Not surprisingly, the delays and gaps in pre-reading skills evidenced by preschoolers from low-income backgrounds are mirrored in their exposure to experiences that might support the development of pre-reading skills. Numerous studies have documented differences between low-income and other children in availability of children's books, frequency of shared book reading, and the quality of language interactions between children and parents. These are all experiences that have strong effects on outside-in skills. I am reminded of some of the remarkable findings of the ground-breaking Meaningful Differences study by Hart and Risley, mentioned earlier by Mrs. Bush. Over a 2.5 year period, these investigators recorded naturally occurring conversations in the homes of professional, working class, and welfare families with young children. There was a difference of almost 300 words spoken per hour between professional and welfare parents. The professional families' children at age 3 actually had a larger recorded vocabulary than the welfare families' parents. I will say that again. The 3-year-olds from the affluent families had larger spoken vocabularies than the parents from the welfare families. Children who aren't talked to, who aren't engaged in rich language interactions with their parents, are going to have low levels of vocabulary and conceptual development, and this will affect their later reading and academic achievement.

These differences extend to experiences that could support development of inside-out skills. For instance, Jana Mason found that there were no alphabet materials available for preschoolers in the homes of about half of the welfare families she studied. These materials were found in the homes of nearly all children of professional parents. We know that a child does not learn the name of the letter A or what sound it makes or how to print it through osmosis. Children learn these things because adults encourage them to do so.

Children who don't have the environmental supports for learning outside-in and inside-out skills fall way behind those that do. Preschoolers from low-income homes are particularly likely to be bereft of these supporting experiences, but the problem is not confined to a single social strata, and many low-income parents do an excellent job in this area.

We need to be very concerned about children who enter school way behind their peers on pre-reading skills because the relation between the skills with which children enter school and their later academic performance is strikingly stable. For instance, the probability that a child will remain a poor reader at the end of the fourth grade if he or she is a poor reader at the end of the first grade is .88.

The prediction of reading skills from pre-reading skills

My colleagues at Stony Brook have recently completed a multi-year longitudinal study aimed in part at determining how reading skills in elementary school were determined by preschool cognitive abilities. We followed the literacy outcomes of children attending Head Start, the federal preschool program for children in poverty. The study involved about 600 children who were first encountered as they entered Head Start as four-year-olds. We followed these children annually through the end of elementary school. Each year we assessed the children on a large number of measures of pre-reading, and later, literacy skills.

We used a fancy statistical technique called structural equation modeling to understand the data we collected. I won't bore you with the details of it here, but it is a powerful way of examining causal influences in development.

The most important finding from our study was that inside-out skills in the pre-K and kindergarten period such a letter knowledge and phonological sensitivity were much stronger influences on reading achievement in Grades 1 and 2 than were outside-in abilities such as vocabulary. Conceptual and vocabulary skills come to be important in later elementary grades once children have cracked the alphabetic code and are reading for understanding, but early on its inside-out pre-reading skills that determine reading outcomes. One way to illustrate this statistically is that we could predict which kids in our sample would be poor readers in 2nd grade with above 80% accuracy from their inside-out skills at exit from Head Start.

What does this mean? It means that children need to develop phonological sensitivity, need to know their letters, how to write their names, and how print works before they start school. Children who have acquired these inside-out skills are going to have many fewer reading problems in elementary school than children who do not have these abilities.

It is important to note that the ability of this model to predict outcomes for these children, who are all from low-income families, means that there are very substantial differences among these children and their families. Some do well. Some don't. The positive message is that having a low family income does not in and of itself mean that children will have low levels of pre-reading ability, or low levels of language interaction, or poor reading outcomes. None of the experiences that are important in developing reading abilities are exclusive to the middle class. They occur in many low-income families, and should occur more frequently in a lot of families across the socio-economic spectrum.

A Developmental Continuum of Pre-reading Goals

To sum up my points so far: Reading is important. Learning to read is difficult for many children. Reading outcomes in elementary school for low-income children can be predicted strongly from their pre-reading abilities. It follows that we should consider ways to enhance children's pre-reading skills. In doing so, it will be important to consider the vast developmental differences that exist among children of different ages within the preschool period. The needs of a toddler are quite different from those of a four-year-old, and thus successful programs and interventions will have to differ for different ages and stages of growth and development.

Here is a preliminary breakdown of the appropriate goals or targets for intervention at different ages.

Infants and toddlers:
     Emotional bonding
     Pleasure in book interactions
     Sound of parents' voice

Two- and three-year-olds
     Vocabulary and concepts
     Book knowledge
     Narrative understanding

Four- and five-year-olds
     Print knowledge
     Phonological sensitivity
     Letter-sound correspondence
     Emergent writing

The arrows on the figure mean that the goals of one developmental period don't cease when the next developmental task begins. Thus positive emotional experiences around books, which should begin for infants and toddlers, shouldn't stop when children reach two or three years of age and need to start learning acquiring vocabulary and concepts.

Example programs

In the subsequent presentations at this conference you will hear about several programs that have been shown to enhance children's pre-reading skills. Let me briefly describe three programs I've been involved in that illustrate the developmental goals I've outlined.

Bonding with Baby intervention

Focusing on the youngest preschoolers, my colleagues and I have recently completed an evaluation of a program to enhance the frequency of shared book reading in low-income parents, and in particular the pleasure associated with shared book reading. We know from a variety of research that the earlier the better when it comes to parent-child shared book reading, and that establishing a positive emotional bond around shared reading can provide a lifetime of motivation for children to read.

The program was for infants from 6 to 12 months of age. The intervention was very simple, consisting of a 15-minute video that extolled the virtues of sharing books and a series of picture books designed to be attractive to infants. We sent the materials through the mail to 50 families in the intervention condition. Another 50 families, randomly assigned, did not receive the materials. All families completed daily logs of the frequency and pleasure of a variety of infant activities such as bathing, feeding, shared play, and reading books with infant.

Here you see some of the differences between families in the two conditions. Mothers in the intervention condition reported spending much more time in shared book reading with their infants than mothers in the control group.

They reported that they enjoyed shared book reading more than mothers in the comparison condition.

They reported that their baby enjoyed shared book reading more than mothers in the comparison condition.

Dialogic reading intervention

Focusing on two- and three-year-olds, my colleagues and I have been working for 15 years on a technique of sharing picture books with children called dialogic reading. The intent of dialogic reading is to use book sharing as an opportunity to enhance children's vocabulary and cognitive growth. This is a very important developmental goal for two- and three-year-olds.

The essence of dialogic reading is a shift in roles. Instead of the adult being the person who tells the story while the child listens, the child becomes the person who talks about the book, with the adult asking questions, expanding the child's answers, and in general serving as an audience and conversational partner for the child.

We help parents and teachers learn how to engage in dialogic reading through brief tutorial videos. The videos model how adults can ask questions. An example of an open-ended question, one of the question types we teach parents, is "What's going on this page?" OR "I read the last page. Now it's your turn; you tell me about this page."

Dialogic reading is one of the best-validated interventions in the whole arena of preschool cognitive development. It has been used with gifted children, with children who have disabilities, with children from low-income families, with children in homes, in preschools, and all over the United States and other countries.

It also works with Spanish speaking children, as well as those from English speaking homes. Here are some results from a study we did a number of years ago in Mexico. Two- and three-year-old children in the intervention condition got a couple of weeks of daily sessions of dialogic reading in their daycare center. Children in the control condition, randomly assigned, received an equal amount of one-on-one time in toy play with an adult. The posttest results for expressive language, e.g., being shown a ball and asked to describe it, showed an 11-month language advantage for children in the intervention group. Remember that this was a result of only a few weeks of interactive reading.

Classroom activities and dynamic assessment intervention

Focusing now on the oldest preschoolers, four- and five-year-olds, my colleagues and I have been working on an intervention to develop inside-out skills for four-year-olds in the pre-K year. This does not mean that the emotional bonding outcomes that are targets for infants, or the vocabulary and conceptual skills that are targets for two- and three-year-olds cease to be important. Children should continue to have experiences that affect these outcomes. At the same time they need to begin to learn about print, and letters, and sounds.

We recently completed a year-long intervention in Head Start centers that involved introducing 20 simple classroom exercises that focused on inside-out skills and asking teachers to keep track of how individual children in the class were doing in mastering the skills that were the focus of each exercise.

For instance, a rhyming exercise had children sit in a circle. The teacher said a word, such as zip, then rolled the ball to a child in the circle. That child's task was to say a word that rhymed with zip (dip) then roll the ball to another child, who produced another rhyming word (lip). The teacher would note on a record form each child's success in accomplishing this task.

Classrooms were randomly assigned to engage in the intervention or to continue with the regular Head Start curriculum. At the end of the year, we assessed children on a variety of inside-out pre-reading skills.

Here are the results for one of those skills, rhyming. In general, we saw large and significant differences between the intervention and control classrooms in children's acquisition of pre-reading skills. The intervention program was not particularly intrusive and did not require extensive training and support of teachers. The local Head Start agency was enthusiastic and has asked to extend the program to all of their classrooms this next year.

Summary and Policy Recommendations

I told you what I was going to tell you. I told it. Now let me tell you what I told you and what I think it means for policy.

Reading is the keystone for academic and life success. Learning to read is difficult for many children. Children who fall behind in reading early in elementary school are unlikely to catch up. Children from low-income backgrounds are particularly at risk of early reading difficulties. Children know a lot about reading before they begin formal reading instruction, and this pre-reading knowledge provides the building blocks for learning to read and write. As is the case for reading itself, children from low-income homes often are disadvantaged in terms of their pre-reading abilities.

The developmental precursors of reading are already organized into outside-in and inside-out domains during the preschool period. The strong, direct correlates of reading success in early elementary school are inside-out skills from the kindergarten and pre-k periods.

Given the strong predictive relationship between pre-reading skills and later reading outcomes, screening children for pre-reading knowledge should become as routine as screening for problems in hearing and vision.

Efforts to prevent reading problems need to be sensitive to developmental differences over the preschool period. Interventions to enhance emotional experiences around books should begin early in life. Older children who are talking can be engaged in interactive book reading experiences that enhance their vocabulary and conceptual knowledge. By the time children are four years of age, the pre-K programs they attend should provide instruction in the inside-out skill components of pre-reading such as letters, sounds, print principles, and emergent writing.

Acknowledging the value of pre-academic content in preschools does not mean that should be the only goal of preschool education. Both social-emotional competences such as the ability to interact well with peers and general approaches toward learning such as task persistence are important to later school success, over and above the effects of specific pre-academic skills. However, social-emotional skills and approaches to learning have to be acquired in the context of more cognitive activities. Arguably, a child can acquire the ability to share and persist as well while learning about letters as while working with Playdoe. Or, as we will see in a later presentation today, children can learn about sharing while making letters from Playdoe.

Acknowledging the value of pre-academic content in preschools also does not mean that four-year-olds should be taught using the same methods and materials as a employed for seven-year-olds. A push-down to pre-K of the pedagogy and materials used in elementary school will likely fail and could actually harm young children. The challenge for preschool education is to develop classroom activities that teach while engaging and developing children's interests -- activities that are both fun and educational. Preschoolers are demonstrably eager to learn about all manner of topics, including reading, math, and science, so a little ingenuity, time, and money ought to accomplish this task.

An effort to provide more academic content in preschools will likely generate disappointment among policy makers and taxpayers unless it is accompanied by educational policies that link preschool curricula with pedagogy and content in kindergarten and elementary school. Preschool needs to get children ready for school, not just in a generic sense, but ready for something specific that will be provided at the next educational step and then built on thereafter. We would expect any run-of-the-mill piano teacher to start students with the basics and move them through a sequence of lessons that are hierarchically organized and cumulative in their effects. Shouldn't we expect as much of the connections between the lessons of preschool and school?

Teachers will need new teaching materials and curricula that are based on the science of reading and pre-reading. Where those materials already exist, they need to be disseminated. Teachers will need training in how to incorporate instruction in cognitive skills to preschoolers in ways that engage children's interest and encourage their motivation to learn.

On the home front, we need to let parents, grandparents, and other adults who are involved with young children know how very important it is for children to interact with print, to be talked to, and to play with speech sounds. Getting the word out need not be expensive. It could be a flyer on the door, or a billboard, or, as we will hear later today, a program at the library. If most parents knew the importance of these activities, and how to do them, they would do their part.

Finally, although we know that pre-reading skills are strong predictors of later reading outcomes, weaknesses in pre-reading are not a reason to quit on any child. If children aren't ready for what the school has to offer, then the school will have to change to meet those children's needs. We cannot leave children mired in calamity of reading failure simply because their families or preschools did not do their job in getting them ready for school. Let's do what we can to enhance children's readiness. What we can do is a lot, but let's also insist that schools develop and deploy remedial programs that will bring up those children who start behind.

Knowledge of the importance of pre-reading skills and ways to enhance those skills for all children is important for every adult, not just parents or preschool teachers.

Let's remember the story of pig and hen. As they walked down the street together they passed a charity box. Hen said, "I'll give some eggs if you'll give a ham." Pig said, "For you that would be a gift. For me that would be a commitment." We need to be pig, not hen.

Let's make a commitment to do what we can to see that all children have the preschool experiences they need when they get on that school bus for first grade.

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