WASHINGTON - So that's what Laura Bush has been up to.
Some were complaining that the first lady was all wrapped up in vacuous ceremonial duties, when all along she was organizing a major White House summit on "early childhood cognitive development." The two-day conference late last month brought to the capital 350 educators, researchers, librarians, business leaders and federal officials.
The unanimous verdict: It's never too early. Even the womb isn't out of bounds.
School news out of Washington has been dominated by President Bush's ambitious plan, now in congressional conference, to hold every public school in the nation strictly accountable for pupil performance, and to assess that performance by testing in grades three through eight.
Less well known are Bush's plans to promote early literacy - and by early the president means "day one to grade one."
For Bush, there's some political danger in emphasizing literacy training for infants and toddlers. Not a few of his supporters insist that government should stay out of child rearing, even in an advisory role. They say making early childhood reading a national priority is unwise and foolhardy.
But researchers say kindergarten and first grade are too late for a remedy when a child hasn't picked up the basic elements of literacy. One study shows that 3-year-olds from affluent families have larger vocabularies than some welfare parents. Another study found that one-quarter of the nation's children without such risk factors as poverty enter kindergarten lacking the oral language and early literacy skills critical for learning.
"By first grade," said Grover J. Whitehurst, President Bush's assistant secretary of education for research and improvement, "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. ... 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?"
Two initiatives were announced at the summit:
Whitehurst said a typical Head Start child enters as a 4-year-old knowing no more than a single letter of the alphabet - and shows no gains during the Head Start year. By contrast, "a typical middle-class child would be able to name all the letters on entry into kindergarten," he said. "Is this important? Reading scores in 10th grade can be predicted with surprising accuracy from knowledge of the alphabet in kindergarten."
"We're going to do what we've already done in elementary reading," said G. Reid Lyon, head of reading research at the National Institutes of Health. "But everyone who educates and cares for our youngest children must recognize that preschool children cannot be treated like older school-aged children and cannot be taught like school-aged children."
There's a lack of scientific research on preschool literacy, Lyon said, because learning among the very young crosses physiological, social, emotional and cognitive boundaries. That's why the research will be conducted jointly by researchers from health and education agencies.
The first lady and reading experts at the conference spoke often of applying "proven," "research-based" and "science-based" methods to early childhood reading. For example, Lyon said, "Launching a child into and across ... life is as important as launching the next space shuttle, and we certainly did use science in that regard."
At the summit, some discussion - but not a whole lot - explored the details of that "scientific" research. Patricia K. Kuhl of the University of Washington in Seattle delivered a fascinating lecture about the development of children's brains. Knowing what works is important to parents, she said, but so is knowing what doesn't.
Speaking "motherese" (aka baby talk, also known as "parentese") to an infant is beneficial, she said. But showing flash cards to 9-month-olds won't help them read any sooner.
Much of it is common sense. Literate parents raise literate children by talking and reading to them. But in one study described at the summit, an urban anthropologist taped 500 hours of conversation among a low-income mother and her three children. In two years, the mother initiated talk (other than giving brief orders) only 18 times.
Laura Bush said that when she wed George, "we had a couple of theories on raising kids. Now we have a couple of kids and no theories."
Not exactly true. Several of the first lady's theories have had tryouts in Texas. Now she wants them to play the national stage. But the remark got a huge laugh.
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