Helping young children from economically disadvantaged homes "catch up" with their peers in language and vocabulary development is very difficult, but critical in heading off first grade failure and promoting long-term success.
When two local family foundations learned in 2000 that researchers at Johns Hopkins University had developed teacher training strategies that were helping to bridge this gap, they quickly and generously lent their support.
Funding from the Zanvyl & Isabelle Krieger Fund and the Lockhart Vaughn Foundation helped the Johns Hopkins University Early Learning Project pay for coaches to work intensively with Head Start teachers. The trainings illustrated new strategies to build language and vocabulary development in economically disadvantaged preschoolers. The funds also supported an evaluation that showed Head Start children whose teachers used these methods performed significantly better than those in a control group.
But the real icing on the cake?
The data gathered with the support of these funders reeled in $8.9 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Education to help spread these teaching methods to more Head Start classrooms in Baltimore.
"It used to be that if foundations could help demonstrate than an initiative was worthwhile, the government would pick it up and fund it, but that has changed over the years," notes Pete Powell, the Executive Director of the Lockhart Vaughn Foundation. "This effort demonstrates that a good pilot project can still attract government funding, even in these days of reduced government funding for social programs."
In the case of early literacy, the stakes are particularly high, Powell notes. "If kids are not ready to learn to read when they get to the first grade, they're likely to be failures in school."
