 So, Roberto has long been a hero for me because here's somebody who has obviously the passion and the knowledge and the political skills to be an effective advocate, not just for preschool kids, but for children and youth generally. So, it's my pleasure to introduce Jeremy Anderson, who is the president of the Education Commission of the States. When we first began to plan this event, Learning Policy Institute, it was important that we share this report with state policy makers because the report so focuses on the great work they have done and are continuing to do. So we reached out to Jeremy, who is gracious enough to invite us to host our event at this venue, preceding the Education Commission of the States 2016 National Forum. Jeremy has been the president of Education Commission of the States since 2012, strong public service record, working with officials in Washington, D.C., governors, state legislators and education policy organizations across the country. He is a great colleague and a great inspiration, and I'd like to invite him to share some remarks with us. Jeremy? Well, it's great to be here and to have so many of you out in the audience, and I think it's really important with the report that's been released today. I want to take a quick moment because he's got to depart for another event to recognize Bruce Atchison in the back of the room, who is actually the director of our Early Learning Institute at the Education Commission of the States, and is really the leader within our work on all of the different reports we're doing around early learning, around K3 quality, around funding mechanisms. So Bruce has another event because we are putting on our national forum that he's got to run to, but I wanted to make sure to acknowledge him. And it's great to be here with all of you. I think the bigger picture for me that I want to make sure you understand is the push that we have on early learning comes not only from what we're hearing in the states, but from what we're hearing from community leaders, and on a personal note, I hear it every day. My wife is an early learning teacher. She works in a hearing impaired preschool, and so I understand the issues that are going on in a lot of states where the policies are not always meeting up with the demand and the needs that these students really have. And so we're excited not only to endorse and embrace the work that has been done by LPI and many of you out there in the field, but also to look at ways that I think we've got to be cognizant of changes that are taking place. So when I sit there and look at the great work that's been done in West Virginia and North Carolina and Michigan and Washington, it pretty much embodies what we do with the Education Commission of the states every day. We believe in the power of learning from experience, and one of the best ways we can help states make a change in policy is to show them a state that has succeeded in moving policy and getting better outcomes. And I think these four states are great states to showcase, and it's going to be good to be hearing from each of them. I have to tell you that as we talk about some of the big early learning issues that we get questions from, and our commissioners are governors and lieutenant governors and chief state school officers and legislators, a lot of it comes to funding. Not as much of it comes to the quality side, and that's what I think is really important for there to be a discussion on. We put out a report every year that shows you where the funding levels are for the states. We continue to see increased funding for multiple different early learning programs in the states. Part of that is that there's a large number of governors who are embracing the investment and seeing that it's worth it. Social reality is also that for many of those governors, investment in early learning is not inside their school finance plan. I think there's only one or two states where it's inside their school finance plan so they can put money into early learning without needing to have such a big amount of money that it will cover all of the K-12 experience for those students. And that's an important thing that we need to look at because we've seen a large number of governors making early learning a priority in not only their state of the states, but also in the funding that they've put forward. In fact, last year I think there were actually more Republican governors than Democratic governors who had done increases. And we saw a pre-K funding increase by $755 million on the state's investment last year alone. That was a 12% increase over what was actually funded from the 2014-2015 budgets with the states. And there were 32 states in the District of Columbia that provided an increase in early learning funding. That's a big number when you talk about increases for education funding to have 32 states putting additional funds in. We did not see anything near that on K-12 or post-secondary investments when you look at all 50 states. It really was a bipartisan issue. I think sometimes we look at this as a partisan one, but of the 32 states that increased funding, 22 of those states had a Republican governor, 10 of those had a Democratic governor. And so I think that's something that is important for you to note also when you're working with your states. There's only five states that currently do not provide any pre-K funding. And I think when we look at the five big issues that are highlighted in the report that's out, I think quality and improvement is a key one. The investment is where we're seeing a need in a lot of those states on the training side. A lot of the funding is going towards programs, but not always towards training and coaching, which is where we see at least in states that are making a difference like the four you're going to hear from. That training and coaching makes a big difference for them. We have a lot of states that are contacting us on early learning issues and there is great work being done, but there's a lot of ambiguity. Is it birth to three? Is it three to K? Is it K to three? It's all over the place and how states are looking at this, depending on if it's a legislator or if it's a governor or if it's a chief. There's a lot of support from all three of them, but how they want to go about it is totally different. And I just urge you to keep working on the policies that are outlined in this report in the states, because there's a lot of change going on that makes it a little bit more difficult than maybe it was five years ago. Currently, if you look at chairs of legislative committees, some of the champions you may need to move some of these policies, across the country, 32% of the chairs of legislative education committees are new in the last 18 months. That means a third of the legislative education chairs have turned over. I think even more important for you to look at is chief state school officers who are embracing a lot of the early learning policies, but also have some political difficulties trying to add additional services on in some of their states when the K-12 classrooms are already full and they don't really have the capacity to take that on. It's not that they don't support it, but they have to figure out how they would do it with classroom issues. Chief state school officers, more than 60% of them, are new in their job in the last 18 months. Amazing leaders who are trying to do great work in the states, but when you have two thirds of the chief state school officers new in the last 18 months, there's a change in leadership and you're gonna have to take that into account. And finally, the other thing I would just tell you as you're looking at the policy leaders who can help you is governors, we have over 30 of them that are up for election or reelection in 2018. So as we're working on these policies, there's gonna have to be a way that all three of those players, the executive, the legislative and the state education agency are working together if there's gonna be some meaningful impact for the students, especially the early learning students that we really wanna help. I also wanna just highlight that what we see in a lot of states, and we work with them left and right on this, is that the scaling aspect of early learning programs is what's most difficult. They can have some really good pilot programs in some districts. Sometimes that's leadership by a superintendent or a local school board or even just teachers, but the scaling effect of getting this across all states so that truly we are serving all of the students who need that kind of assistance and can be provided all day, fully funded early learning, that scaling part is what's very difficult in a lot of the states. And so I'd urge you to not only continue to work in states almost every single year doing multiple events on early learning to help do technical assistance for legislators or chiefs or governors and having your insight on where we can assist in those states that you're focused on would be very important. I know Linda wasn't able to join and I think that's unfortunate because she has been doing tremendous work on this and we've worked with her team on the report and I know they utilized a few of our reports. The partnership that I think we see in this is that quality is one of the issues that's not being discussed in the state house. Funding is a little bit more but quality has not been as much and if we're really gonna have the outcomes that are desired there's gonna have to be a broader conversation around what is the quality that's necessary to guarantee that all students in America can start a K-12 experience on an equal footing with a foundation that allows them all to be at the same place. So it's truly an honor to be here. I hope some of you are staying for our national forum. I'd say all of you but we are already at capacity and so I'm not sure where to put all of you since Linda did such a good job getting more than 200 people here but do contact us and let us know how we can help because there's a lot of power and synergy going on across the country on this issue and it's one that we wanna be able to support you in. Thank you very much.