Building Blocks: Making Children Successful in the Early Years of School

Packed into a Methodist church on upscale Park Avenue in New York City, hundreds of parents of infants and toddlers hung on every word from the admissions directors of four top independent schools. These folks were well-heeled enough to crack open their checkbooks in a heartbeat to pay $25,000 for kindergarten if only their son and daughter could be the one in every 12 kids granted admission. Many of their kids were attending high quality pre-schools, among the best preparation for future schooling. But what was expected of a four-year-old to enter these exclusive schools? The answer: the schools would accept those that best exhibit work ethic, citizenship, a sense of community, character and enthusiastic learning. "Nonetheless, the school representatives said they sought to put the parents at ease and didn't want to feed the admissions hysteria. Fat chance," writes author Gene Maeroff. In his book, "Building Blocks: Making Children Successful in the Early Years of School," Maeroff challenges us to think differently about pre-school learning, and to value high quality early education much as the wealthy already do, although perhaps a little less hysterically. Through the public schools, he argues, kids from everyday families can achieve many of the same skills and preparation the Manhattanites at that church absolutely demanded for their kids in pre-school, if as a nation we are willing to make early learning a public policy priority. Building Blocks is a thoughtful, thoroughly researched study of early childhood education -- a great primer for parents, or policy makers, who want to better understand the issues in this rapidly-changing debate. Today, we know the benefits of a building a strong academic foundation even in child's earliest experiences. For about the past decade, as brain research has exploded thanks to new medical tools and observation methods, the bandwagon of advocates for better education program for very young children has begun to buckle. In the popular press, Ron Kotulak's Pulitzer Prize winning 1994 Chicago Tribune series on advances in brain science opened a lot of eyes -- kids who didn't receive proper brain stimulation even in early infancy could be left far behind by the time they started kindergarten at age five. (Kotulak's work is now a book called Inside the Brain: Revolutionary Discoveries of How the Mind Works.) Today there is a healthy national movement pushing for more and better early childhood education and they've had some success convincing states to ride along. Oklahoma and Georgia, for instance, have "universal" pre-kindergarten programs that make state funds available to allow any four-year-old to attend an accredited program. Maeroff, the former national education correspondent for the New York Times and the author of a dozen books about education in America, thinks its time to push the issue even farther. In Building Blocks, he argues that state-funded pre-kindergarten should be just the start