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Educational System Alignment

Every Child, Every Advantage

Learning at the Earliest Stage

Government funds are shrinking. Texas' number of impoverished households is growing. So how do we best educate the disadvantaged children in our state?

Start early and work more efficiently, says Dr. Susan Landry.

Education is too important to wait till kindergarten, says Dr. Landry, the Michael Matthew Knight Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. If a generation of children comes to kindergarten unprepared to learn to read, they may never catch up.

Dr. Landry plays a key role in studying and improving the learning skills of Texas' preschool children. Director of the Center for Improving the Readiness of Children for Learning and Education (CIRCLE), she also heads the Houston-based State Center for Early Childhood Development. Since last year, she has overseen the Texas Early Education Model, or TEEM, an ambitious statewide effort to coordinate early-education programs for children from poor and high-risk backgrounds.

Dr. Landry's work is one of many examples of how the University of Texas System's 9 academic and 6 health institutions are involved in the lives of Texas children from their very earliest years. UT System's institutions are also engaged in groundbreaking educational research for students of all ages, for example, as well as in educating and training a new generation of teachers for Texas classrooms.

"Children have to be exposed to early reading," Dr. Landry says. "They need to recognize letters of the alphabet. They need to know that sentences are broken into words, words into syllables and syllables into letters. They have to have that stimulation and a large, rich vocabulary. Otherwise, they can slide back and get lost. That's why you have kids failing the third grade."

To this end, TEEM is working with child-care centers, public school districts and Head Start in 11 different communities across the state. Under the state center's guidance, the three early-learning programs are beginning to share their resources, use the same research-based instruction, and evaluate the progress their students make during a year. "For the first time in this state, we have these three groups working together," Dr. Landry says.

Child-care, Head Start, and public-school teachers instructed children in their classes with the same methods - emphasizing such skills as vocabulary, letter recognition and basic math concepts. Periodically, they evaluated their students' knowledge, using PDAs to record the results and changing their instruction to reflect the children's needs.

"We feel teachers should have goals," Dr. Landry says. "For example, teaching 25 vocabulary words per week. Too many of these children are way behind. They should know 4,000 words by the time they're 4 - and many of them have only 500 or 600."

Thus far, about 110 teachers have been trained across the state by TEEM, instructing a total of about 2,200 children. A year from now, at the end of the two-year period, 220 teachers will be trained, and 6,600 children will have been taught in a TEEM program.

To Susan Hoff, who participates in TEEM as executive director of Educational First Steps in Dallas and President of Texas Association for the Education of Young Children, the use of PDAs in the classroom is a particularly effective innovation.

"The rest of the world is very comfortable with technology," she says. "But the education system has lagged behind. Using PDAs to make lesson plans and individual evaluations and to individualize instruction based on needs - that takes much of the guesswork out of education.

"It sounds silly, but it makes me want to go back to the classroom. It's that exciting to me."

Similarly, Cheri Sherley, who coordinates TEEM in Amarillo , expects the project to have a large impact statewide. "It's going to have a great effect, especially in the child-care centers," she says. "The child-care centers are our biggest challenge. They don't have much funding, and their resources are so limited, they can't pay teachers well and they don't have adequate supplies in the classroom. I'm very optimistic we'll see more improvement as we get better at coordinating the training and resources."

TEEM, which was given its responsibility by the bipartisan-supported Senate Bill 76, filed its first interim report to the Texas Legislature on Sept. 1. Since this first report reflects students' progress only from January to mid-April, Dr. Landry was pleased that the results were greater than expected. "The report is incredibly powerful in terms of demonstrating the ability of these three groups to start working together," she says.

"I'm excited to see the level of collaboration we have," Susan Hoff says. "That way, we can all work together and share resources - and not double up over things."

As its children enter kindergarten and first grade, one of TEEM's most important missions will come into play. With an emphasis on results, longitudinal studies will follow the children's progress after they enter school. "We need much more understanding of how our children are developing and what they need prior to public schools," Dr. Landry says.

In the meantime, as TEEM begins its first full school year, Susan Landry reflects that the initiative's biggest hurdle is time.

"Things are expected to happen very quickly," she says. "We want so much to make this work - to use this opportunity to its best advantage."