Leave No Mother Behind

It would be hard to miss the new literacy initiative, "No Child Left Behind," which will be implemented in an attempt to ensure that every American child will learn to read before the third grade. It’s a great concept, but will it work?

According to the National Children’s Reading Foundation, "One reason why education reforms have failed is that scholastic success or failure can typically be traced back to homes, where students receive critical pre-literacy experience. Some children arrive at school already 1,000 hours behind their classmates in pre-literacy training. Many parents fail to read to their children, fail to provide books for them, fail to model good literacy habits, and fail to provide any direct instruction of letters and their phonetic sounds before their children enter kindergarten. Even with extraordinary efforts (like the "No Child Left Behind" initiative), 75% of the children who enter school significantly behind never catch up."

Current brain development research highlights the fact that a child’s brain is "wired" for success (or failure) in the first three years of life. Formal education misses this basic power curve.

The 2000 Census reports that, in my state (Idaho) alone, 25% of families that have children under five years of age are "Female head of household" families. Of those families, 49% live below the poverty line of approximately $15,000 per year. Unfortunately, other states have similarly dismal statistics. Many, if not most, of these young mothers face horrendous challenges and are not prepared to provide the pre-literacy training that is crucial to their children’s success in school and in life. What if a significant investment of education money and time were devoted to programs that would back up existing research, reinstate the value of a mother’s influence, and empower these important young mothers to do what God has uniquely positioned them to do best?

However wonderful an educational system may become, it cannot replace a mother as her child’s first and best teacher. Leave no mother behind, and no child will be left behind.