Advocates See Pre-K-3 as Key Early Education Focus

A parent works with children at a community center in Carpinteria, Calif., where parent involvement is a key piece of the pre-K-3 agenda.

—Sarah Garland/Hechinger Report

By Sarah Garland, The Hechinger Report

A few years ago, preschool teachers in Santa Maria, Calif., a low-income, mostly Hispanic city north of Santa Barbara, attended a series of meetings with kindergarten teachers in the district. Most had never met. Although their students were only a year apart in age, teachers had little idea what happened in each other’s classrooms.

What they discovered changed the course of early education in Santa Maria, and is at the heart of a national reform movement known as pre-K-3.

Among the revelations, the kindergarten teachers told the preschool teachers that their 5-year-olds, many of them immigrants, struggled with stories covered in the kindergarten reading curriculum. They weren’t hearing English-language classics like “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” or “Humpty Dumpty” at home. So the preschools began incorporating those stories into their curricula, to help...