 Thank you for being here on this humid reminder that summer is coming in the morning. My name is Lisa Guernsey. I direct the Early Education Initiative here at New America. And I'm also starting a new project called the Learning Technologies Project in our Education Policy Program here at New America. So both of them are incredibly kind of exciting places to be right now and I am thrilled to have you all here to help us start a conversation that helps to find the intersection point between these two places. I am joined by Skype with one of our co-hosts today, Michael Levine, who is the founding director for the Joan Gantz CUNY Center, a Sesame workshop and who is a partner with us on a couple of projects here at New America. Michael had to fly out to California a bit at a last minute and so he is bright and early awake in California and with us on the phone and Michael, are you there? Yes, good morning everyone. I hope you can hear me from sunny California. So I'm sorry you can't be here Michael, I know you really wanted to be with us but I am so glad you can join us at least on audio. And what I wanted to do was just open with a couple of just quick remarks about why we're here. Michael's going to give a couple of remarks as well. We may shift around a little bit of our schedule depending on when Roberto from the White House is able to join us, which is fine, and he's right there. Thank you for being here. I know you've had a lot on your plate the past 24 hours so that's great. So let me just first explain a little bit about how this event came together and why we think it's a really important conversation to be starting right now. In the world of early education, birth through age eight, there is just a flurry of activity and interest right now. A lot of it is focused on some pretty distressing numbers that we're seeing in achievement in reading by the end of third grade or fourth grade, especially among children who are in underserved populations. So that conversation is happening out in our society and our public policy right now. There's also, of course, a very animated conversation right now happening, especially in June and July each year, around the summer and what is happening for our children in the summer, especially in communities where there are not as many resources or especially for families that don't have the means to sign up for $200 summer camps. And so that conversation is happening. And then the third one that is incredibly important in our society right now is what role does technology play and what should it play, especially for kids when they are in these very younger years and their formative years of learning. And we know how much social and cognitive development hinges on their social interactions. So we want to bring all three of those strands together in this event today. And we're thrilled to have you here. And Michael, would you like to add something to that? Sure. I'm just going to echo some of those themes, and thanks so much to you, Lisa and your colleagues at New America. It's just a joy to work with you. I'd just like to say that today's forum is going to focus, I hope, on several practical ways in which we can support new models to help children, especially those who are underperforming their potential to keep up with the skills, knowledge, and perspectives they will need to compete and cooperate in a digital and global age. At the CUNY Center, our mission is to use research-based evidence and proven program expertise to move key sectors towards possible breakthroughs in children's learning and healthy development. And in the early reading arena, after two decades of limited progress, we certainly need to be bold and forward-thinking. You mentioned the three interconnected themes that have not recently at least as a nation been confronted seriously, nor have we offered a modern or a fresh perspective. So first, what can we do across sectors to recognize the tremendous strain on our children's capacity to learn? The fact that, as you suggested, millions of preschoolers and elementary school children have precious few opportunities to engage in enriching activities that so many of their higher income peers experience sort of as a matter of course. These kids are suffering from limited access to academically or socially valuable experiences within communities that are often distressed with high unemployment, shorten hours of public utilities like libraries, and a paucity of safe outdoor activities that nourish children's mind, bodies, and souls, and we're at unfortunately academic summer school programs that do exist are often focused on remedial work with only limited value. And then how can this forum help us to think about new strategies to mobilize parents, especially those who are deeply connected to their kids, but who have limited resources and limited education to do more? Can we reach the most vulnerable parents to encourage them to use available fun activities in the community and to offer their kids a daily dose of proven interactions to intentionally build their oral language abilities to connect them to reading and storytelling experiences at home and libraries, museum schools, and community centers? And I think it's really important that we'll be showcasing Lisa and colleagues, those community programs that are modernizing their approaches today. They're finding really cool and up-to-date ways to get kids and families focused on reading. I think they'll be very excited about some of the programs that you see that might be ready for scaling. And finally, and it's sort of something that I think we haven't talked about before this forum very often, how can we harness technology and well-designed educational media, many of which are part of a public good. They're supported by public tax dollars, but which we haven't deployed properly, given the fact that the average third grader is, believe it or not, engaged with some media platform over seven hours a day during the school year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and even longer hours presumably during the summer. What will it take to encourage a new media, let's call it a new media food pyramid, can we find a way to balance the many tech calories that teach children the skills of communicating with friends on Facebook or playing video games throughout the day with new habits that certainly encourage to the old ours reading and writing with what I would call our three new essential 21st century skills that summer can help promote creation, communication and coding. So one last note for me. For most children, summer time is a season for exciting growth and change, for relaxing fun by the pool, lake or shore, family trips, cookouts and deepening important social relationships. Reversing the summer slide isn't about serving up a new dose of some magical concoction that's never been rolled out before. Whatever we imagine is possible for those children who are failing to read well will likely rely on ramping up those experiences. We already know work for kids who are blessed with the advantages of high expectations and highly engaged communities and parents. Fueling the summer months with new purpose and passion for intellectually ambitious exploration in libraries, museums, boys and girls clubs and camps and at local block parties or concerts is really long overdue. I really look forward to today's conversation. I'll be watching the live streaming. So sorry I couldn't be there, but excited by this first convening on these topics. Thanks, Lisa. Thank you. Thank you so much, Michael. There's a lot of food for thought already in those in that conversation there. So we will move into some opening statements from our partners on this project. Sarah Pitcock, the CEO for the National Summer Learning Association, will be speaking briefly and Yoli Flores, senior fellow for the campaign for grade level reading as well. Many thanks to the campaign and to the National Summer Learning Association for their help in putting this event together. Before they come up to the podium, though, I am very honored to introduce our special guest today, Roberto J. Rodriguez, who is special assistant to the President for Education Policy in the White House Domestic Policy Council. And it was a real honor, Roberto joined us last night as many of us met for dinner to talk about some of these issues in advisory group that we've pulled together. And it's amazing to me whenever I have a chance to interact with Roberto at the level of both depth and breadth that he can bring to this conversation, I think we're in good hands and his advice to the President. And it's a real honor to have him here with us. So thank you. Good morning, everyone. It's great to join you for this conversation today. Let me begin by thanking Lisa and Michael and their respective institutions, also the National Summer Learning Association and the campaign for grade level reading for being great partners in hosting this convening today for this really important event. I'm really thrilled to have a chance to address this topic and really encourage to see all of you here and to be able to benefit from the discussions that you'll have here on the importance of any time, anywhere summer learning. You know, the President reminds us that an excellent education today is no longer just a pathway to opportunity in our economy. It really is the prerequisite. And because our economic progress and our educational success of our students goes hand in hand, we know that we have a serious national imperative to educate every single one of our young people to graduate from high school fully prepared for college and a career. And that necessitates a couple of things. It necessitates beginning early. The path toward college and career readiness has to begin in the earliest years. And we all have to endeavor to make sure that we are supporting our kids with those opportunities that enable them in the early grades once they reach school to grow into strong readers and strong writers and strong thinkers. It also necessitates the topic of today's agenda here around anytime, anywhere summer learning. Because in addition to the systemic reforms that are underway in our system, college and career ready standards, focus on teacher effectiveness, the work underway to drive change and new learning opportunities in our low performing schools, we have to have a integrated strategy around anytime, anywhere learning that really meets our children where they are, where they spend time and helps maximize that time so that they can reach their full potential. You know, many of you know me well, you've seen, you know, I would be remiss if I didn't discuss the importance of expanding access to high quality early learning and high quality early education. Does the topic that is close to our administration's heart close to my heart, we've made some really important strides there that I just want to remind everyone of because I think they're an important backdrop to today's conversation. Those begin with doing more around expanding evidence based home visiting programs in states across our country. You know, today we have home visitors that are connecting families to a whole wide range of services from health care to early education to early intervention and more. And better ensuring that our students will begin school healthy, prepared for success. An essential part of that effective home visit is the connection that is made with parents as their child's first teacher and beginning to support and nurture our parents and our families in that role. We're also taking steps. We've taken steps over the past few years to expand and to begin to drive some change in reform in our Head Start and early Head Start programs, focus more clearly on adult child interactions, do more to promote school readiness as a central goal and a central tenant and to make sure that all of our Head Start children and families can depend on the most effective and reliable service for their kids. We've done more to really begin to knit together a race to the top that will establish a system for early childhood education across our states, focused on the goal of narrowing the school readiness gap and focused on strategies to drive and develop the early education workforce to align our services and programs to high standards and to a focus on outcomes. And this year we are very pleased to take a step forward on the president's broader and more ambitious early education agenda known as preschool for all and early Head Start child care partnerships. We will be advancing opportunities, one which is currently available and I want to draw everyone's attention to the early Head Start child care partnership program out of the Department of Health and Human Services that brings a new focus of partnership between our child care subsidy system and our early Head Start programs to raise the quality and ultimately improve the supply, boost the supply of high quality infant and toddler care. And that will be followed along by an exciting opportunity from Secretary Duncan to expand preschool opportunities for our four-year-olds in states and communities across the country this year. So, you know, these are all important markers in terms of the importance of beginning this work early. I think there are also three important themes that I just want to mention that frame the conversations that will take place today. The first is that when it comes to learning, we know that time matters and how we use time with our learners matters tremendously. You know, we have the benefit of some more fortunate families and learners to have more time in school, more time in enrichment programs, more time in the out-of-school hours, maximized and focused on their learning, their development, their engagement and their success. We should endeavor to provide that amount of time and engagement to all of our students. So, there's a central equity challenge in that. Second, the summer months matter. You know, as we know our young learners can lose more than two months of progress and reading achievement over the summer. This loss becomes particularly acute for our underserved children and their families. And third, our children's homes matter, their families matter. And the time that they spend connected with adults that are caring for them is opportunity for them to grow, to develop and to learn. So, we also know that anytime anywhere learning is especially critical to closing the word gap. Many of you are familiar with that research. You know that by age three children from low-income families have heard roughly 30 million fewer words and engaged in fewer back-and-forth conversations than their higher-income peers. You know, we know that that gap, there's science that's solid here that shows that that gap affects what a young child learns and is later associated with disparities in school readiness and outcomes. So, when we have that 30 million word gap, we know summer learning is not just an option. It really is an imperative. It's a necessity to begin to remedy that gap in these early years. And we know that quality summer learning programs can help prevent summer learning loss. They can reduce the school readiness gap. They can connect our families to community resources like libraries and museums where children can discover new ideas and new opportunities where they can deepen their interests, where they can expand their knowledge and their vocabulary and their words and connect their natural curiosity to the wider world around them in their city and in their world around them. You know, anytime anywhere learning can also help support family literacy and early language and literacy development at home. You know, we know that reading with an adult is an especially important way for children to learn, particularly during these early, crucial first years. And here we can leverage a wide range of individuals, of community organizations, of other leaders, businesses to build and support a culture of reading and a culture of early language development at home and in our communities. You know, we can also, again, make use of the informal learning environments of museums, libraries and other partners as an essential component to provide safe and accessible civic spaces that promote learning, cultural enrichment, civic engagement for our kids in the early years, and that become digital hubs. You know, to help provide opportunities for our children early to navigate new technologies and online resources that will help ultimately close the digital divide. You know, events like Summer Learning Day do a great job of bringing awareness to these challenges and these opportunities we have. We also believe, and I'm glad that Michael mentioned this issue as well, that we can invest in new technologies as an important medium to facilitating learning anytime anywhere for our children. You know, these new technologies have the potential to connect families to resources to give children opportunities to learn through new digital resources and to learn skills and technological awareness that they may not receive at home and to fill in those gaps. So, you know, here the president has focused literally on bringing our schools and our libraries up to speed. His Connected initiative would deliver high speed broadband connectivity to 99 percent of our students in their schools and in their libraries over the next five years across the country and allow our teachers and students to take advantage of technologically rich devices and content to really help our students learn and engage with material and reach their full potential. Here we've brought a focus to building and knitting together public and private partnerships as one of the best ways to ensure that we deliver on the promise of Connected. And we believe that, you know, we've facilitated some private partnerships to begin to look at bringing more devices and more connectivity in the home. We think there's a lot that could be done here through partnerships with our nonprofit partners, through partnerships with libraries, with museums, with community-based organizations, and, of course, with our schools to make sure that we are taking full advantage of this technological revolution and this greater connectivity, particularly in the context of the anytime, anywhere learning agenda. And to think more about how we can make sure that those adults that are spending time with our learners are well equipped to help them connect to these new technologies and ultimately facilitate their learning and their connection to the world around them. One last initiative I also want to mention is the My Brother's Keeper Initiative that really focuses on targeting resources and support and opportunity for our children who live in poverty and making sure that we have a strategy for the disproportionate number of children of color who face a number of environmental factors that, you know, that are too often become barriers to their learning and to their development. We know that we have these gaps in opportunity financially that play out in a child's earliest years. And we have study after study that shows and documents the school achievement gap at kindergarten entry, particularly among our African American and Latino children. So we know that we need to endeavor to do more there to bring an anytime, anywhere approach that will help fill, again, fill the gaps in opportunity that too often our children living in poverty face even before they walk through that kindergarten door. So, you know, we must do all we can to realize every single opportunity that exists for our kids to be able to succeed. And that's going to require diverse partners. I think one of the greatest things about this convening is that you have such a diversity of of expertise here and sectors here coming together to think about what a new agenda might look like around reaching children where they are making, maximizing use of time and resources, maximizing the use of their home connections and maximizing the time that they spend throughout their summer months to help them get ahead. You know, we are all here and we all share this common interest of seeing our students grow, succeed and really pursue the American dream that makes our country great and that can help open opportunities for them for a lifetime. So we will continue to rely on your voices, on your advocacy to move this agenda forward, and I hope you will continue to find the rest of the morning and the day productive in your endeavors. And thank you again so much for having me. It was great to join you. Thank you. I will pass the podium. Good morning. I'm Sarah Pitcock with the National Summer Learning Association and NSLA is thrilled to be partnering with the New America Foundation and the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading to talk today about any time, anywhere summer learning. And I'm here to give you a little bit of the summer learning context. So why is anytime, anywhere summer learning so important? As many of you may know, we know for more than a hundred years worth of research that all kids lose skills and math over the summer without practice. You can imagine that's because math isn't everywhere in your day-to-day life. It takes really concerted effort to practice math skills. What we've learned more recently that is perhaps even more troubling is that whereas middle and higher-income kids continue making reading gains over the summer, regardless of whether or not they're enrolled in a program, low-income youth tend to lose two to three months worth of their hard-earned skills from the school year each summer without practice. And you can think of something we call the faucet theory. It's solely because of access to public education during the nine months of the school year, all children have access to books, to adult mentors, to meaningful enrichment, and to nutritious meals. And in the summer, when schools are closed, many low-income children lose access to all of those critical supports. So the annual losses, two to three months, are cumulative and they deepen the existing deficits that kids have from lack of high-quality preschool. So what are those losses result in? We know that four out of five minority children in this country are not proficient in reading by third grade, making them four times as likely to drop out of high school. And all told, just by fifth grade alone, low-income children are up to two and a half years behind their higher-income peers because of their early learning deficits and because of summer learning loss. So we have a lot of work to do in the summer. Nationally, only about 20 percent of low-income kids are enrolled in a summer learning program. About a third are enrolled in some type of organized activity. Polls have shown that an additional 54 percent of parents would love to put their kids in a summer learning opportunity if they felt like there was a free or affordable option in their community. On the other hand, even when kids are participating, attendance is low and we know kids need to attend 85 percent of the program in order to reap the full benefits. So we have a lot of work to do to educate and equip and empower parents to make the most of the summer months and I think Yoli is going to speak about that in the context of the campaign for grade-level reading. So the National Summer Learning Association is an implementation partner of the campaign for grade-level reading. So we are trying to help 140 communities across this country use summer learning to double their rate of third-grade reading proficiency by the year 2020. So this is no small task and for us thinking about population-level change in that way has forced us to think about population-level solutions which are very different from going program by program. So as Roberto said, population-level solutions meet kids and families where they are, often quite literally where they are. So here's what I mean. We won't solve this problem by putting every child in an eight-week comprehensive summer learning program. We can't do it because every city can't afford to do that for free for all the children who need it but it's also just not the best fit for every child or family. So instead the campaign has taught us and shown us and the communities have shown us that we need a variety of solutions, ways to turn settings that might not typically be educational into learning settings and ways to turn staff who might not be teachers into competent educators. So increasingly handheld devices, internet access and learning applications are opening those doors. There are still many issues of equity and access which our panel will discuss but in a reality where a low-income child might not have a single book in their home, one learning app can open up for them a world of thousands of books that are matched to their interests, matched to their ability level that include built-in checks for comprehension, basically all of the core building blocks of reading right there in an app. So it's definitely something it's a conversation we have to be having. So here's a little bit of what we're seeing in the summer with technology. We're seeing teachers bring mobile devices and learning games into rec centers, so into those recreational settings that typically don't have a learning focus for one hour a day. Teachers are coming in and doing some reading with kids on handheld devices. Those kids are not only not experiencing summer learning laws, they're actually making reading gains over the summer, one hour a day. We're seeing center-based programs use shared view apps that enable parents to see what their children are learning at the center all day and actually offer them suggestions for how to engage in conversations with their kids about what they're learning. We're seeing cities of learning spread across the country including right here in Washington DC which are turning entire cities into classrooms and connecting in-person learning experiences in libraries and cultural institutions and schools with those anytime anywhere learning opportunities online and recognizing those achievements through digital badges. So in short we're excited by the opportunities that technology can bring to connect and extend learning that's happening in schools in rec centers and in libraries to what's happening at home in the summer and we think the technology can expand access to learning opportunities not only expand access to learning opportunities but help us begin to understand more globally what kids are doing in the summer, how they're spending their time and how that connects to their school success. We have precious little data on what children are doing in the summer and it's very hard to solve a problem when you don't know the size or scope of it. So I'll close by sharing the obvious. There's even an exclamation point. National Summer Learning Day is June 20th. We're very excited about it. Across the country on that day summer learning programs and city and state leaders will come together to shine a light on the incredible opportunities that they are providing to young people to keep their learning and their growing going over the summer. Right now if you go to this, well if you go to summerlearningdaymap.org you'll see a national interactive map of events. We have about 400 events right now already. We expect to surpass the 600 that we had last year. So you can see if there's an event near you if you're interested in participating and seeing what's happening across a country on summer learning day. So with that I will bring Yoli up to talk more about the Campaign for Guide Level Reading. Thank you Sarah. Good morning everyone. Would you believe that somebody spent the weekend making a step stool so that I could see over the podium? I love it. Thank you so much. I've actually wanted to start with several thank you. So let me just jump in. I want to start with our implementation partner at the Campaign for Guide Level Reading, the National Summer Learning Association, who is spearheading such a critical and important piece of work for us and for children across this nation. Thank you also to the New America Foundation, Lisa in particular, the Joan Gans Cooney Center. We heard from Michael Levine earlier this morning. Thank you to all of you for the partnership with the Campaign for Guide Level Reading and for organizing this discussion. There are other campaign partners that are here today that I also want to lift up and thank, including IMLS, Abriendo Puertas, Opening Doors, the YMCA, United Way, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Urban Library Council, Libraries Council, and many of our other partners that are listening in. Thank you so much. And thank you to all of you, the many organizations and individuals here today that are really here to speak, think, aspire, to learn, to weave together an approach, a better approach to summer learning anytime anywhere, and one that mobilizes the talent in this room and across the country. I want to speak a little bit about the Campaign for Guide Level Reading and to share with you the work that continues to grow. So thanks to the many people that are here today and several others, the Campaign's Community Network continues to grow. We are now in 140 plus communities and counting in more than 30 states across the nation. That number is larger than what we anticipated when we started just a few years ago, lifting up the importance of reading at grade level by third grade. And let me tell you why. Well, first off, amid all the gridlock and the paralysis in our country today, the message that all children, in particular low-income children, reading proficiently by the end of third grade, enable so many people to come together. People with very different points of view, but people who refuse to accept that polarizing politics or the gridlock that I speak of, that beyond that, that we have a point of view that we can all rally around and that's the importance of reading at grade level by third grade. But also, we believe that the growth is because the research is very clear. Low-income kids who are not reading at grade level by the end of third grade are up to six times less likely to graduate from high school on time. We know that quality teaching matters, so we acknowledge that up front, and the campaign must insist on quality teaching for every child in every setting every day. But here's an inconvenient truth. There are a large and growing number of children across this country who will not succeed even in a good school with great teachers. And the truth is that schools can't do it alone. As Sarah spoke of earlier, there are too many children that are starting school too far behind, that are missing too many days during the school year, and that are losing too much ground over the summer months. So this is why the campaign places so much emphasis on community-driven solutions to make sure that kids are ready for school, that we address chronic absence, and that we address summer learning loss. And so across the nation, thousands of people and organizations are working together in communities, putting these pieces together that will make sure that kids are healthy and ready to learn, that they're in school every single day, and that they have enriching opportunities over the summer so that they can sustain the summer gains. And across our work, we place two big bets, and the bets are children and their parents, and being healthy to start school ready to learn. In the parents, in the work of our parents, we know that first and foremost, and I think Roberto talked about this morning the word gap, that they are the most essential element in closing the word gap. They're the most essential element in making sure that babies' brains are developed optimally. They are the most important element in making sure that kids really do enter school ready to learn. But secondly, we know that the role of parents matters in school, and we're finding such an incredible need to address the teacher-parent relationship. And so the work of the campaign around the work of successful parents will focus on parents and teachers. But thirdly, is the role of technology, which we'll talk about today. So together, across these three solution areas of early school readiness, of attendance, and summer learning, we're committed to moving the needle on grade-level reading. In fact, we've set a very ambitious goal. By 2020, a dozen states or more will have increased by at least 100 percent the number of low-income children reading proficiently by third grade. Let me speak a little bit to summer learning now, and Sarah spoke to some of this data a moment ago, and why this matters. We know it matters because we see what happens when kids do not have that enriching summertime enrichment activity that many have. But if you just look at by fifth grade, although we focus much more on the early years and our target is third grade, but what we see that by fifth grade, the summer gains for high income kids are spectacular. 46.6 percent. And for middle income kids, it's 4.1. So not only do our low-income kids not sustain their gains, but they actually fall behind. So we know that summer matters, and for parents it matters a lot. So for most of us, most middle-class parents and most parents in this room can tell you exactly where their children will be by the third week of July. Roberto was talking to us last night about where his kids will be this summer. But for too many low-income kids and parents, they can't answer that question for certainty. For many parents who are disconnected and isolated, summer is a time of huge anxiety and risk. So the question before us today is how can technology help? Well, there are so many compelling reasons and we all feel the excitement of mobile apps and websites and all this incredible technology that we can use to expand the reach and the capacity of communities and to programs to effectively serve and support families to be successful during the summer months. Michael this morning reminded us of the need to be practical. We like the innovation, but we also feel a great sense of urgency to connect families with technology, with tools and with opportunities to address summer learning. But we need to be very, very careful because technology can easily move us from the important relationship between adults and caregivers and children. And technology cannot and must not be about replacing adults. It's about equipping them with information, with tools, with learning supports for breaking down isolation and we cannot forget that. We must also pay very close attention to barriers or assumptions that might leave out the very families that we're trying to reach. So earlier Roberto talked to us about meeting parents and children where they are. In our enthusiasm for technology we might forget that. We might forget that many children across this nation are living in public housing with no broadband. So what good is it for us to develop the apps and to have the technology available if the very kids and the very families have no access? And beyond paying attention to access we want to make sure just as you're already doing to pay attention to the quality of the digital media that we are brokering to make sure it has the potential to make a significant impact. So really the question is how do we leverage the promise of technology to better engage parents to equip schools and community-based organizations and systems to better place the tools and the mechanisms to reach and impact families? This is of increasing concern for the campaign for grade level reading. Most importantly how do we make sure we do good and not harm? So today's conversation should challenge us to examine our assumptions about the extent to which low-income parents and families have access to the technologies that can make a difference during the summer months. This is why the work and you'll hear about this a little later. This is why the work on read on Arizona, pardon me, as well as the libraries and museums around the country are so important. We know that as always there are people working very, very hard to address many and all of these issues and as always we're humbled by the ambitious and the tireless efforts of community leaders that are working to move the needle on community solutions and third-grade reading. We share their vision and we share their struggles and we share the important reminder that it's first and foremost always about relationships and that technology is a tool. Thank you. Thank you very much Yoli and Sarah and Roberto. So there's a lot now that we could start in on our panel discussion conversation with. I want to just give you a sense of where we're going to go from here and how we're going to try to put all this together and maybe I think probably in our conversation even put more challenges on the table because as much promises there is there already a lot of challenges even coming up in my mind and I think it's important for us to kind of meet those head-on and tackle them. I want to just kind of briefly tell you a couple of things that we're doing here at New America and then we're going to bring Terry Clark in via Skype. She could not be with us in person but she has graciously made available to us via technology from her office in Arizona. But first let me just tell you many of you picked up as you came in a brief that we published here at New America just about a month or two ago. Envisioning a digital age architecture for early education and it lays out some of the larger questions and challenges that we need to grapple with at the policy level to ensure that our teachers, educators, our parents are supported and that we're tapping into what we call hidden assets which are libraries and museums and ensuring that we're really sharing resources across a lot of different education settings for young children up through age eight. We also here at New America are embarking on a project that we're calling Seeding Reading which is looking at where technology intersects with what we know about how children learn to read and bringing out new research case studies, analysis of the app marketplace, a variety of things. So look for that in the next couple of weeks. It's something that's a lead on from or a follow-up to a paper that Michael Levine and I and our colleagues at our respective institutions wrote two years ago called Pioneering Literacy in the Digital Wild West and through the support of the Children's, the Pritzker Children's Initiative we've been able to kind of bring that into this larger project that we're calling Seeding Reading. And you'll also start seeing this on our new and redesigned website at Central in the coming weeks already if you go to the learning tech section of our site you, oops my clicker's not working right in a second, but you can see it there it's one of the tabs and you can get to that and that's where you'll start seeing the Seeding Reading materials as well as on our early education section of our site as well. So now let me show you a couple of things that Terri is going to talk about right before we kind of put her on screen. She is the, I'll see make sure I get her exact title right in terms of her role in Arizona. She is directing the read on Arizona project which is statewide and also in very deep partnership with the campaign for grade level reading and one of the interesting things that they're doing that Terri will talk to us about is a digital library project initiative that's creating a digital library for every child in the state of Arizona for the summer months. How she's doing that is what we'll talk about in a minute. Part of that involves using badges and other online incentives for children to help them see their progress and this slide here just shows you a little bit of what children and parents might see in Maricopa County as they go to see the badges that they can collect as they're using this digital library and so as you see here for example there's a badge for going to say the preschool story time and a value of 10 points so we'll have to learn more from Terri about kind of exactly how this point system works but everything from going to preschool story time to in other places their badges show particular content areas geology or history that older children might be reading and acquiring new knowledge from. So I will now I hope our amazing magic of our technology will work and we'll be able to bring Terri into the room with us here and I'm going to start by asking her several questions wonderful hello Terri it's great to see you. Good morning thanks so much for having me. So we wanted to excuse me for just one second. We have a great audience here to hear from you about your initiative in the state of Arizona and I wanted to start by I've shown them a couple of slides to give them just kind of picture of what you're trying to do there but you and I have talked a bit about this project and I wanted you to have a chance to explain it a little bit more you've described this as a two-pronged approach to literacy building and reading success throughout the state so can you explain that a little bit more. Absolutely so first let me put a little bit of context to my role and read on Arizona so that you understand how we're able to actually pull this off. My role as the Arizona Literacy Director is to really help guide the public-private collaboration that is read on Arizona which is committed to building an early literacy system that improves language and literacy outcomes for Arizona's kids birth through age 8. So we have a deeply engaged state agencies philanthropic organizations community nonprofits that are all committed to tackling early literacy through a collaborative approach but we also knew that this summer was a critical time and we wanted to leverage technology so we're very excited we have two key technology strategies that were unfolding in Arizona this summer. One is as the first slide showed our Myon partnership that allows us to make a digital library available for free to every child in Arizona for the summer months so that we can truly deliver on that anytime anywhere promise of reading this summer. The second strategy involves our public libraries. We're very lucky to have a fantastic state library system and a very innovative one our Maricopa County library system received a grant to develop an online summer reading platform so that participants could not only log minutes and track how much they read over the summer but they'd have a more robust experience involving earning points, literacy activities and earning those badges that you saw a sample of so that we could make participating in our Arizona summer reading program as fun as it could be. So a number of libraries throughout the state are piloting this platform starting now through early August. Fantastic and so tell me a little bit about why this seemed like a good idea in the first place. This is all about ebooks through Myon, right? Ebooks being available to children and was this related to a feeling that there were not enough books available to children in the through the traditional methods of going and checking them out from the library or having them available in their homes or rec centers? Yeah, we've discovered as we've gotten into this work in the last two years that there are a lot of challenges to making books accessible to the families. And as some of our speakers have already related to, you know, of meeting families where they're at. So access to books is a critical issue here in Arizona, and we wanted some statewide strategies that would give us some concrete analytics at the same time about usage. So these two strategies will help us really understand how families are utilizing the libraries and which families can and which families can't. And also what other how technology can come into play. And what are some of those hurdles as Yoli and some others have have alluded to families that still are not able to access technology in the way that that would really help them. Help us just see Arizona for a moment for those of us who kind of spend most of our life here on the East Coast. Lots of rural areas hard to reach. Is it kids are not two or three blocks from a library all the time? Exactly. I mean, some I've done some site visits across the state and and my heart breaks when I hear teachers or families or even librarians talk about for some families in Arizona, the library, the closest library with two or three hours away. That makes a huge hurdle to get over. So if we can connect them to some digital opportunities and broadband is available, that becomes much easier for them to access using either this digital library or even the ebooks in their own public library, which the public libraries here have been fantastic about investing in making ebooks more available and more of a robust selection. So talk to us about how this is going to work just practically going back to that great call from Michael at the very beginning of this that we really need to understand practically on the ground. Are there is the assumption that parents with their children will log into a website and then what what are the components of the process that they would go through? And maybe if you could also address how you might be dealing with families that may not have easy access to the website in the first place. Sure. So we've tried to make it as simple as possible. And for the my on project, the Digital Library Initiative, it's a three step process. A family or a parent goes to read on Arizona dot org and clicks on the my on link. They select read on Arizona in the school name area and type in for their username and password, the word read. So both the same and they sign in and they're able to select books and start reading immediately. So it's fairly and the wonderful thing about the read on Arizona collaboration, it means that all of our partners are sending out this information and getting it out to families. So it is a circle of network of influence that we're able to reach, you know, broader than just one entity or agency. So on the summer reading program through our public libraries, again, we've tried to make it as easy as possible on read on Arizona summer reading page. There is a link and you click on that and you immediately go to the sign up page to participate in the public library summer reading program. And it's individualized for each child or each family for any child and up even adults can participate. And for that program in particular, we're very conscious that again, some families don't have the access to technology. So it really is they're able to participate in the summer reading program through the library, you know, by physically going there sort of the old, you know, the more traditional way. So there isn't, you know, you can't participate. It's just you're going to participate differently. So we wanted to be conscious that we know not all of our families have access to technology. But those that do can leverage it. And those that don't still can participate and get that information to them. And and and we have a unified goal of 20 minutes a day every day for our families to really encourage them to work with their children read with their children, whether they're using technology or not that bond that is formed between the adult and the child is really what we're after. And I should also say I've been calling this a website. It is a website or is an app or it's both? It is a website and it is available online, but it can be used by downloading an app on a smartphone or a tablet for the my own project. Yeah, absolutely. As well as the summer reading program is a unified platform. So we we really they our partners have been very thoughtful about understanding our families are going to be coming at it in very different ways. And what you've seen so far, tell us about the families that have been taking part in this. What have you been seeing from those families? What are they like or dislike about it so far? Yeah, well, as I mentioned, we're getting some really great analytics that we're, you know, not we were not able to get always when we gave that traditional book to the to the child. So we're getting weekly analytics on the reading participation of the my own project. And I think we're into our fifth or sixth week. And we know the total amount of books read is nearly 30,000 total time spent reading is 5700 hours of reading, which means an ad. And we're also seeing an average session for each child that's reading of about 20 minutes, which is great, because that is exactly what we wanted to to see. We're anecdotally we're getting more direct contact with families around this initiative. They're learning about the program. They're asking questions. They're wanting to find out how they can participate. So it's a chance for us to support them with other tools and resources. But we also know what's great about this is that we're also seeing across the state that both rural and urban areas are using it. And their access to technology varies. So what platforms they're using is definitely varying. But smartphones and tablets seem to be the primary way that they're accessing the my own digital library. Interesting. One last question and then we will have Terry go up into the up into the cloud and we'll all have a conversation with her as well in a moment here as I bring up our panelists. But one last question for you is just if you could help us get this conversation started. What are the lessons learned so far? I mean, putting something like this together in a state as big and as diverse in terms of rural and cities as Arizona. What are you finding so far? So I think one of the biggest lessons learned for us was that at first, everyone is extremely passionate about early literacy and everyone wanted to do something, but everyone was sort of doing their own thing. And what we had to focus on and what we've been able to do with these two approaches for the summer is let everyone see the strength of the bigger and sort of connecting to the bigger picture and that collective vision that read on Arizona brings to the table. So we started to have consistent and common messaging that's very powerful. Families are getting a unified voice, whether they're getting it from the Department of Education or their local school district or their local public library. So we're starting to see our partners are really feeling committed to that common message and supporting that common goal for some this summer, it's 20 minutes of reading every day. And they're utilizing the tools that we're providing. So we've developed some social media toolkits and hundreds of organizations are using that to communicate to their circle of influence and families that they connect with directly. And and that's been really powerful. But I will admit it was a little like herding cats at the beginning. But now we have just hit our stride and it's really I can't thank enough all the partners that are involved in Arizona for the support that they give us every day and their ability to work with us on this. And it's just allowed us to you know, accelerate what we've been able to do. Great. Thank you, Terry. OK, so that was a great overview and we'll be able to come back to Terry and ask her some more questions about it. Let me now introduce our our panelists. And as I'm introducing you, please come on up and sit down. Sandra Gutierrez is with us. She's the National Director of Briendo Puertas or Open Doors. Susan Newman, a Professor of Early Childhood and Literacy Education at the Department of Teaching and Learning at New York University. And we are very fortunate to have Michael Furgale stand in today for Deborah Sanchez, who emailed the several hours ago. She was just not feeling well at all, fell quite ill last night and really wishes she could be here. And Michael, who is Vice President for Education at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, has really graciously and with much courage jumped in and I'm sure that Michael can answer many of our questions. So I'm going to go ahead and sit down here with everyone and we can open up the conversation. It is about, let's see, it's about after 11. And so we will talk for, say, in the 30, 35 minutes or so. And then we'll have some time. I think there's going to be a lot of really rich questions from the audience as well. So I wanted to start with you, Susan. And also to kind of introduce to those who may not know some of your work that's been really quite influential and are thinking at New America about what children need when it comes to early literacy opportunities and the environments and the interactions that they need. Many may not know, but hopefully they will in the next couple of minutes and go out and rush and buy it that you are the co-author of a book called Giving Our Children a Fighting Chance, which I recommend highly that looked at a lot of these issues related to literacy and libraries and their role as well as where technology comes in. And what I thought was very fascinating about that work was that you were comparing two settings. One, a library in a fairly well-to-do part of Philadelphia and another library in a much less and really quite impoverished, the more I read about it, a neighborhood in Philadelphia. And so do you mind just giving us a little bit of a sense of what you learned from that and how you feel it may connect to this conversation we're having today? I think first I'd like to say that there are not just differences among low income, middle income, and upper income. There are extraordinary differences. And there are extraordinary differences in a number of key ways that are affecting our children terribly in the early years. The first thing is there's a tremendous gap in terms of book access. So in one of our communities, we saw 10 books for every children. In another community, we found one book for every 300 children. So when we talk about the gap, we're talking about an extraordinary gap. Now let's go to the digital divide. And we see much of this happening all over again. It's almost like there's a new digital divide. What is happening is a lot of homework, a lot of effort in learning about apps and whatever occurs out of school. It is not a school phenomena. It's extraordinary in terms of what children are learning out of school. And again, the gap is tremendous, where we see one computer for every 100 children in out-of-school learning opportunities versus children who have a laptop in their room. So the gap is extraordinary. And what we're also seeing, and just to bring this again to the topic today, is that during the summer, what is happening is many of our middle class kids and upper middle class are no longer just sitting on the beach or hanging out. They're going to digital camps. They're going to learn about robotics and exciting things like that, where many of our children who are low income are just hanging out. And there's a tremendous gap in so many ways. And if I could just ask you to elaborate a little bit more on what you saw in that Philadelphia research, you were looking at these two libraries, and it wasn't as if the libraries didn't have the technology. It wasn't as if the library in the poor neighborhood didn't have technology. In fact, that foundation had been quite generous and donating lots of computers, computer stations, and some software. But still, there was a difference in the way both the books and the technology were used. Exactly. So in a middle-income community, they would go to the library, they would privilege books, because they don't have so many books. They have a lot, but not so many. But they have a computer in their room very often. But the kids in the poor area would use the library resources. So the pressure on the library was tremendous. So I want to give you just a little quick scenario of what we would see. And this is not unusual. The children would come into the library. They would have to sign up after school for their time at the library. They'd get a half an hour to get on the computer. They would then sometimes have to leave the library to wait for their time in line. They would get to the computer finally, start their homework on the computer. But their computer skills are often not as good as other children. So they flail and they'd need help. And so therefore, they wouldn't finish the assignment. And so they'd have to sign up all over again. So they'd have to go to the back of a line, sometimes waiting two and a half hours before they got the second half hour they would be using. These differences are even more extraordinary during the summer where some of our kids are coming to the library and they're hanging out all day. So one of the things we know is that the current pressure on our libraries and museums is just tremendous. And we've got to bridge that kind of gap. And I want to note that several library groups contacted me as we were getting organized for this event and wanted to say, make sure you mention the library. And obviously, from the very beginning we have them. But I do think that it's important to note that there are children's librarians, especially out there doing amazing programs in the summer for kids. But there are just hordes of children coming in and staying for hours and hours at a time and lining up for those computers and also, of course, to get the books as well. So Sandra, let's talk for a little bit about what you're seeing and your work. So if you could, many people here may not really know what Abriendo Brittis is in the first place. One of the things I was hoping you might do is just give us a quick explainer on how it works as a program to help parents. And then secondly, where you're starting to see the need for some new development of technology resources for those parents. Gladly. Thank you. Abriendo Brittis Opening Doors is a program, an evidence-based program that was developed about seven years ago. It was co-created with parents. So it's parent voices, parent inputs are in each session of the curriculum. It's just been evaluated through a random control trial. And we found that 80% of folks in the control group were using the library and one of our most significant findings was around reading. So we're very, very proud of that. And you can find more information about that in our website. It's a comprehensive program. It's not only about literacy, it deals with emotional wellness, health, advocacy, a variety of topics. Very engaging and fun. And we scale through national partnerships with Head Start, Catholic Charities and similar groups. But one of the things that I'm happy about today is the title of this conversation Anywhere, Anytime. Because we know that all these things have to start by first honoring the role that parents play, the central role that parents play. And that acknowledging that having a parent regardless of income that's informed and engaged is one of life's greatest advantages that can help mitigate a lot of what we're talking about here. The concept of Anywhere, Anytime is an important one because it challenges us to broaden our view of how, where, and when learning takes place. And I think this is something we have to share with parents who still might have a traditional view of learning, equal school, and the story. So there's a great potential to do a lot of great things with parents. Cesar Chavez has a quote, part of his quote that says you can't uneducate a child who has learned to read. And I think parents really resonate with that. So our program starts with parents that have kids that are zero to five. And I think it's a good place to start because habits are formed. We want these summer learning activities and just day-to-day learning activities Anywhere, Anytime. Not to be chores, but to be integrated into daily life, into family goals, and into create a love of learning and definitely a love of reading. So that's one of the premises of the program. I think one of the things I did wanna share, and that troubles me a bit about all of these campaigns that are so powerful and I'm very sure we'll have a lot of impact. The intentions, the talent is all there. I think the more the campaigns can authentically and explicitly connect to the dreams and aspirations that parents have for their kids, the better it will be. We work with 30,000 parents throughout the country. We ask them to draw what they want for their children. What's success for them? And we get these beautiful photos back, hand-drawn photos of people graduating, of people being successful in a variety of professions. We don't get photos or drawings of people with a 20% loss of learning during the summer. That's not what parents want. So the more we can tie all this into the vision and the stories that parents have up for their own kids, the more it'll resonate and embrace what parents do each and every day. And I think we need to do a much better job of that. I think I'm really happy also because there's great opportunities in this room and outside of this room for real progress on this issue of summer learning loss. And some of them involve technology, some of them don't. And I just would like to list a few of the things that I think really do resonate and that have the pulse of where parents are going or things that they care about. One of them is that slowly but surely hidden myths, I'll find sassos as they say in Spanish, which means sort of just happening, they're, we're becoming more of an early learning nation, that idea that early learning is not just childcare, it's really, it's just a fact and there's oceans of research to support that. So that really does help sort of lay the foundation to avoid some of that, to have greater learning outcomes. The other thing is that there's slowly but surely again, there's more interest in families and two generation approaches to working with children and families together. Department of Education recently put out a framework for capacity building for parents and schools to work together. And that's an avenue that I think all of us concerned about summer learning loss need to explore further. That framework could do a lot more in terms of being explicit about that as a real partnership opportunity with schools, the schools do a better job of informing parents about summer learning loss because in our work in the last seven years, we find that a lot of parents still don't know about summer learning loss. How many of you here remember that video that was narrated by Brian Williams, a famous summer slide video, very impactful? So one of the things we do in our program that does resonate with people, sorry about that, and that motivates them to act is we actually get up and re-enact that animation with child A and child B. Not to shock in awe parents, but so that they can see the power of their daily decisions. In other words, if they make certain decisions, their things will just walk to successful, will look a lot differently. So back to the things that I think are of great importance besides those two sort of general themes. One of the things that I'm very excited about in terms of the technology, and I'm a very old school type of thinker, but there's a very well thought out campaign, an information campaign, and it includes an app, but it's a lot more than the app. It's a whole campaign, a whole mindset. A lot of support for parents called Vroom, V-R-O-O-M, it's an app in Spanish, and it's available in English and Spanish, and they developed it simultaneously, which we're very grateful for. It's developed by the Bessels Family Foundation, and it's new, but I encourage you to look at their website, which is www.joinvroom-v-r-o-o-m.org, because there's great information in there about anywhere, anytime. Things you can do each and every day. Anybody can do, regardless of their education, formal education, regardless of the language they speak, regardless of their immigration status, regardless of the income, everything, things that you can do each and every day that'll improve learning throughout the year. I love the idea that they really promote this concept and that every parent, again, regardless of all the things I just mentioned, can be a brain builder, and so it's a very well thought out and quite moving campaign that I encourage you to look at, so that's a very hopeful and good use of technology, I think. We have, and I've shared with you something that I do want to put out to everyone listening and folks here, there is a real authentic concern among parents about connectivity, and just how often kids are connected, not just zero to five, but older kids, primarily. I think someone earlier mentioned that it's about seven hours a day of connectivity and common sense media tells us in the case of Latinos, it's nine hour, Latino kids, it's nine hours a day of connectivity, so just take a moment to think about that and parents not being as savvy as the kids, perhaps, are as comfortable as the kids with all of this technology. So that's something that I think does need to be addressed. We are venturing slowly and thoughtfully into the idea of providing a resource that will be available through a mobile device that reflects parents' realities of real life, so it'll be sort of a cinema verite kind of approach with parents talking to other parents, so these are just some of the things that we're doing, but we have to keep alive this theme of anywhere, anytime, because I think it makes all the difference, and it's not just the schools. About that, the cinema verite apps that you're creating in a moment. One thing I was gonna note about the data on how many hours children may be using media, just a quick note, it's not usually labeled as connectivity, it's more seeing, viewing, playing with media, and often they're not actually online in some of these cases when they're doing that, so in the world of those who are trying to make sure there's broadband access to all the world connectivity is a very positive one and that we wanna just make sure people have the ability to gain access, but of course there are just concerns, I think they need to be not just about the amount of time that the children may be using media, but the quality and the interactions that they're having with that media. So Michael, speaking of quality in media, over the years I've certainly been watching and seeing how the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its work with the Ready to Learn program have been trying to develop what may meet certain measures of quality. It certainly has some evaluation and research behind it. So can you give us a quick sense of how those types of materials that are being built through that Ready to Learn project, how they are being made available in the summer? Sure, thank you, thanks for being here and it's really great to be with Susan again. You mentioned Ready to Learn, we've worked with Susan a number of years ago with her preschool literacy for low income and low resource students and really that laid the foundation for us to think about how media is being used in certain times of the year but also with certain communities around the country, rural, urban, we've heard a lot of it today and what the challenge is and as you mentioned is getting these resources to parents and I think what we've learned through Ready to Learn, our partnership with the US Department of Education and our colleagues at PBS is that media alone isn't good or bad, parents alone aren't good or bad, schools, teachers alone aren't good or bad but together a collaborative approach is always good. That's really what we've learned. I mean I could talk a lot about the technology aspects of this and I'd probably be chastised for not promoting more but I really wanna underscore this idea that what we are really finding is that when media is used with intention, when it is guided by an adult and that adult could be a parent, it could be the grocer, it could be any number of people, when it's combined with access, when people can actually use it, that's where we see our biggest result. So how does that work when you're talking about a show that kids might watch through television, right? Here's how it works. So we know through our research that kids relate to character. They relate to Big Bird, they relate to Super Y, they relate to Peg of Peg plus Cat and by relating to that character they're gonna wanna watch the show and if the show is about learning your letters or numbers or other math concepts, it's like learning from a friend or learning from an older sibling. So we use that, we try to use that power and through again, ready to learn we've been able to innovate with different approaches like a Super Y summer reading camp. So we take the resources that are developed by very good producers, lots of advisors like Susan telling us how you can communicate certain letter recognition or sound skills or decoding or encoding. We make it hopefully fun and engaging and kids are actually learning a couple of that with a curriculum that can be used in a one day, one week, three week summer program called the summer learning camp. You involve parents, you let parents know what the kids are learning. Suddenly you build this community that is not just about the video or about the game or the app but is about helping the kid in every way, understand a skill that's gonna be important for them in our case to be ready to learn when they enter school. And then for older kids, we have the electric company. Again, engaging characters, the kids wanna be with. I think the most interesting thing that we're hearing today is that what we're trying to do I think with out of school time learning and particularly summer learning, yes, hopefully kids will learn skills and gain but what we wanna do is keep them in the practice of learning. We wanna keep them engaged in learning to know that learning is something that doesn't stop in June and start up again in September, right? And the way to do that is through the use of media and technology because let's face it, if we're talking about anytime, anywhere learning, that's where kids are and that's where parents are and that's the tool that we have to use to reach them. I was gonna ask about those camps. I know that there was some research on summer super wide camp in New York City if I'm remembering correctly a couple of years ago but are those things that are ongoing or are they still part of research projects and they're not necessarily something that's... They are ongoing and I encourage you all if you have not, contact your local public television station. Tell them I sent you. They have resources. PBS just, I mean, in the last few years have really taken a look at parents because you're right, parents want their kids to succeed. There are so many tools and apps out there. Parents don't know even where to begin or where to dive in. PBS Parents app contains not just recommendations but it gives you offline activities to do with your kids. Anytime, any place you are in a restaurant, there are games that you can use the sugar packets to sort and to do colors and to do pattern recognition. And parents, we don't say to parents, use the sugar cubes to teach pattern recognition. Play the game and guess what? When you're playing the game that's what you're actually sharing with your kids. That's one of those apps that's encouraging parents or children to look up from the device, look at the table, around them in the restaurant. Use the device to reach. And use those kind of hands-on pieces, sure, sure. Exactly, so local public television stations have lots of resources at their disposal. They're free, freely accessible. This is public media and they can work with partners. I think that's the other thing that we've learned is that we used to go in honestly and think, you know, white horse, we're from Washington, we're here to help. Here, do this and it'll all be right. What we recognize is that there are lots of partners in the community that are actually doing it better than we do. What we can provide are the resources that libraries, that housing, that Tacoma Washington has partnered in credible partnership with their local housing authority so that they're implanting resources into learning centers in housing authorities and seeing tremendous gains in kids spending time with quality resources and improving their school readiness skills. So let me throw up this question because I think it'll help to kind of get some of this, but the challenges on the table too and maybe lead us into the, just so you know what's in my mind. So I'm first gonna ask you about challenges and then I do wanna do a follow-up question around policies that may need to change. So keep that in mind. And Terry up there in the skies, I'm looking toward the ceiling, I would love to kind of get your thoughts on that as well. I wanted to ask any of you, feel free to just jump in on this, where you are most worried when it comes to the intersection of technology, reading and summertime? I'd like to start. I am a strong believer of technology in print and digital form, but I often say to parents, put down that cell phone and look at your child and talk to your child and have a conversation. Our children are very aware of multitasking. They're very aware when you're not paying attention to them. And what is happening is vital time being lost in terms of what children are learning. One of the things that people have been talking about very much this whole session is about the word gap and the oral language gap, but what is often happening and not recognized is there's a print gap, a huge print gap. And what that means is that there's only for young children, the only one that can bridge that gap for that child is an adult. So in other words, what we do is we go into the library and we see the children, wonderful, beautiful children coming to the library without an adult there. And they pick up the book or they do the app. It doesn't matter, but they pick up the book and there's no one there to read. And so what do they do? Because they're little kids. They put it down and they pick up another book. They look for someone to read to them. And so what we find very early on is this notion of flipping. You know, open up a book. No one to help me, close a book. My point, if I could do one thing today is to encourage you that it's all about the relationship between adult and a child regardless of the medium. And that what will enable our children to learn about reading and to care about reading is that loving adult who is sitting next to that child and bridging that gap. And that's what I'm worried. I'm worried that all of you out there will be so enamored of apps and technology that you will forget the human person and that wonderful connection. You know, I go to the libraries, I hang out a whole lot. You know, I just hang out. And I watched this little child and the mother was reading, the grandmother was reading to the child and the grandmother couldn't read very well. But the child was sitting on her grandmother's lap and just nestling in her neck as this woman was attempting to read and she was in heaven. That was the connection. That's what brings literacy. That's what it's all about. I would agree with that. I just wanna add that we conducted some focus groups recently. And one of the things that was worrisome was that parents admitted that these decisions that they make about what app or how they're gonna use technology are sort of made at the last minute like after so many give me, give me, give me. That it's just done. And then it's so this luck what you're talking about that interaction isn't a thoughtful part of how that decision is made. It's sort of often used as a way to provide some quiet time for the parent, things of that nature. And I'm very impressed with how often people said, well, we just do it just on the spot. In our advisory group meeting yesterday and so I should note that there are many people who come to town for this event who have been helping us at New America and at the Joan against Cooney Center to try to recognize these challenges and issues and see where a policy and new initiatives can help. And one of the things that has come out of those conversations is a feeling that right now many parents may not be seeing the media something they're supposed to do with their children. There's a feeling that it's gonna do it better than I am. So I'm gonna sit back from it and let the kids just engage with that game or that app or have the book being read to them and how difficult it may be to start and how important it may be though to start shifting the conversation so that or just even some rethinking and changing the paradigm so that parents see that, oh, I have a role to play with my child in using this and we can have fun together on playing this. Then just one final point of that. And that's that we so appreciate the work that you do here at New America and that Joan against Cooney does because that's where we get our guidance for families and for all of us in the community on what should happen, how these interactions should take place. So there's a lot writing on what you present to us because you are the trusted source and sort of the thought leaders in this and there is a lot of confusion on the part of appearance this is still relatively new so it's gonna be important to message beyond our usual suspects and maybe even use radio and television all that to get the tips out. Terry, did you wanna jump in? Yeah, the voice from the sky. Yes. I just wanted to, I echo everything that Susan and Sandra have said. I think for us, our big concern is that digital and technology use could become a crutch for parents and we don't want that to happen. It's supposed to be an instrument and a tool as you said. But I also just wanted to share because I got a wonderful email yesterday afternoon from a parent who learned about our digital library and she talked about how wonderful they're finding it using it this summer because her son has a reading learning difficulty and so always struggles with reading but because the Mayan Digital Library allows, every book is also audio so they're reading them together with the sound and he is loving it and excited about getting up and choosing a new book every day. So again, but that mother is using the tool with him and as part of a routine and building that relationship and activity together. So I think we just need to get better at how we use the tool and helping families learn how to use it in an engaging and interactive way. And I think that there are lots of opportunities but we have a lot to learn. Yeah, thank you. And Michael. I mean, everyone said it so well but just to give an example, so we through the Ready to Learn project this time have partnered with Apple because we recognize that we're creating these apps and many of them are free. A few of them cost money but there are a lot of families who can't afford to download. So we have this program where you can get gift codes through your local public television station or through a local Head Start. We've partnered with Head Start. And we recognize that a lot of gift codes were being given out but fewer of them were being redeemed. So we kind of took a look at it and we discovered it's just that parents don't, they want to help but they have no idea. So I think the greatest challenge for us is to figure out how we can help parents use these again with intentionality and understand their role in their child's learning. So in Southern California, PBS SoCal got this idea. They partnered with one of their local partners and they invited all the parents in this one zip code to come to the station and bring their device, their smartphone, whatever device that they use. And the parents had them. That's the important thing to recognize. They have them but what they're using them for is not always for learning. They brought them in, they had all these volunteers show them how to use their phone with their child for learning, where to find quality resources. And parents could then make the decision for themselves what they felt empowered and parents told us that they even felt more comfortable with their own math learning after going through this experience. And so they're very sort of practical ways we just kind of help mentor parents in a way and provide them with the ability to make the decisions themselves and inform decisions themselves. That leads me to ask before we go to the policy question. I did, Sandra, want to make sure that there was a chance to understand a little bit better the app that you're developing. And as we had been talking over the past day or so, this idea that Michael just brought up here, the fact that it can't just be out there and parents are just gonna automatically use it or love it or even think it makes sense for their child, but instead a trusted partner, whether it's someone that they know through their Head Start community or through Abriendo, where it is, is showing them or giving them some guidance or helping them to explore. Is that the idea behind what you're doing? It's part of the idea and we definitely, there's some brands that people trust and Sesame Street is definitely one of them. So we didn't want to replicate or we could never do as well as they do in terms of the focus of the interaction that they have in their apps with parents and kids. So we went in a different direction after listening to what parents wanted and the first thing that came up, we asked some very open-ended questions about what would you like to see in an app and what would make you use it? The number one concern was wait for it, wait for it. Stress, parents are stressed and they wanna know the techniques to deliver, to alleviate stress and also connection to resources through a local GPS to real-time resources. So we're in the very beginning stages and I don't know how this will all roll out but where we're thinking that we have a good brand but also this will be co-created with parents or we'll actually be real parents in it, talking to other parents about myths and realities, about child development, some fun facts but it'll be very engaging and lively and I think it's a way to elevate the role of parents and sort of in this horizontal way that Elaine Zimmerman always talks about where they can support each other and see what other folks have done what. So it's very different from what's out there. As I say, we're still in the beginning stages so things will evolve. We wanna partner with folks that have done this and can do it better than we do so we're very open about that and we're still in listening and learning mode. I wanna mention another app that was just actually this last month released from PBS called the Super Vision app for parents and what you're able to do with this app and I'm gonna be very simple on my explanation but my colleague David Lohnstein I see in the back from PBS is there he could jump in if I struggle. What it allows parents to do is on their hand, on their device, on their phone register a computer that their child uses. So you go to pbskids.org, your parent signs up, you get a code and that ties your phone to the computer that your child is using to interact with video, with games and whatever. The parent can then see in real time no matter where the parent is. So we have a parent who is currently deployed in the military. He is able to see at the end of the day what video his son watched, how long he watched it, what was on that video, what did he learn, what other resources could be so that when he does his night night call with his son at the end of the day he's able to reference and know what his child did. The other really cool thing which I think is just a godsend for parents is there's a built in timer. So the parent can set some restrictions for the child where they get a message like five more minutes and then it's lunch or time to go to bed, turn off the machine or it just turns off on a timer. So there are lots of fascinating innovative things being developed not just by us but by other folks and I think the more we can all as a community talk and share, I mean love to talk more with you about what you're doing. I think we're actually going to make progress and we're going to succeed in these efforts. I would like to offer a cautionary note. And I think one of the things that we have to remember is there's a long history of media and there's a long history of media actually exacerbating a gap. The people who often tend to use these materials are those who are already at a certain level and already prepared. So again, my caution is to say that there are a lot of other people in that community that are wonderful beside parents and they are often mentors to our children and they have such an important role. So I just want to give you a quick anecdote from a library. And can you roll in a policy wreck at the end of that? So we'll shift to that policy. One of the things that we need in terms of policy recommendation is people funding for our stay off and go in and out and in. Our students in library settings, museum settings, it makes a difference. So let me just tell you a quick little story. It isn't policy really, but what we're seeing is a new librarian in this country. And that new librarian is a whole different, you know when I was in the library they used to say shh and you know they used to point, but now they do over the shoulder teaching. It's a whole different kind of mechanism for teaching, but they're doing teaching all the time. And often we don't see them as having that role. So we were in a school in a summer program and you know a lot of our libraries have wonderful summer programs. And there was a librarian and she said to the child, I'm sorry, that book is too easy for you. And you should have a harder book. And the child looked at her because she so admired her and she dropped her face down. And she then said to the librarian, will you show me the kind of book that I should be going to? So what I'm saying is there are trusted resources in the community that are important to our children and that we need to embrace because they are not just parents. They are after school people. They are librarians and museum people and they're very important for children's development. Absolutely. Any other policy? Is that policy? No. I think we're still in that they have the new library and policies to support that new library. I'll try to give you one or two, one definite. So I think Roberto and everyone mentioned it, Michael. It's access. Parents need access. Our community is rural and urban need access. That's the main thing. Preschools are under-resourced in so many ways but including in reliable bandwidth to access the resources that are there and the equipment and the knowledge of how to use the equipment. I mean, we could just go on and on, right? So I think that what can be done in terms of that is important. But I also, something we, I don't know if this is a policy thing, but the challenge that we have is to really have, I think we are the choir here, right? I mean, the thing that we think about is how we can use media to inform the public, the general public about these issues and why should they care about kids getting a good start early in life, right? We know the connection to high school dropout. But the more we can explain the impact on communities and the community health about the reasons for an early start and that's the thing. And you and I have talked to Lisa about this a little bit. It's like, how much do parents even know? But even beyond parents, how much do people in the community know the role that Susan was referring to that they could potentially have in a child's life? I mean, that's a great challenge that we have. Absolutely. Terry, do you have any policy wishes for us? And then we'll start, get ready for questions. Everyone out there, we'll start rotating a mic around. But Terry, I just wanted to give you a chance to jump in. Oh, I just echo what our panelists have already said. I mean, access is huge and also opportunity and the preschool pathway is huge for us here in Arizona. I have a comment. I agree with everything that my colleagues have said. I think also there isn't a blanket that we don't have a steady drumbeat of information about the importance of summer learning or the different options in terms of that. So it's not something that John Q. Public would normally know. So I think that we've done a really great job with reading and with early education and elevating how well people understand and accept their value. Not so much yet with summer learning. So I think there's a lot of great partnerships, opportunities there, and some media partnerships as well that I think would be very important. Interesting. Yeah. So let's see, who would like to ask a question of our panelists? We have many, many questions that are wonderful. Let's go here to Margaret and then we'll go to the woman in blue and then right behind. And that'll both of those and see where we are. So first of all, I want to say thank you. Wow. But I want to say a special thank you. Oh, will you introduce yourself? Oh, I'm Margaret Dalty. I'm with the Rural Literacy Coalition in a very, very, very tiny, very, very, very rural village on the Texas Gulf Coast. And I want to say to Michael, you know, we were one of the organizations that got the grants for the Peg Plus Cat for 100 days of learning. And what I want to say is in small communities, it's very difficult to get the resources to do the kinds of things that parents would like to have help with to make your opportunities for success for their children. And in our community, our big urban PBS station, Channel 8, you're reached out to the furthest away little rural community to say, you know, can we partner with you? We know you can't come to the big city. We know that the big city is sort of receiving all of the major resources. We know it's a struggle for you to find funding and to do the activities that you would really like to do. And for that, that was a huge, it was the biggest gift that our community had. And the question is, it's not, it's a comment to be responded to, I think, more than a question. You know, how do we really sort of get away for all children to have the opportunity that we had in our small community that was free and yet the return on that investment was so huge. So you know, how do we, it's not just sort of broadband access, but it's access to all of the wide range of resources. Okay, great. And actually, let's hold on that question for a moment and take one from the woman in blue in front and we'll have two of them on the floor so that we can respond. Hi. I'm, yeah, it's working. I'm Kathleen Reath. I'm a public library director in Southern Maryland. Thank you for doing this event. This is an awesome opportunity for I think all of us to think as a group. So I think I have an offer for a policy idea. And it is to continue, I just love the tradition of the last couple of years that the federal government has made sure all grants are collaborative partnerships. So I want to urge them to continue to do that. And I have an idea for a new grant. I have my, I am a less director in the room somewhere, Susan Hildreth, and I love the concept of a new librarian. Again, Dr. Susan Newman is such a superhero to us in the library world. Her most recent book, Give Our Children a Fighting Chance inspired me back home because I have those two worlds in my tiny little county of 100,000 people. And so what we are doing is working with our churches and getting what we're calling reading ambassadors to come into the library in the low income area. And we used a toolkit. I think Dr. Newman will be familiar with this toolkit. The American Library Association has it and I want to urge everybody to get a copy. It isn't just for librarians. It's called Every Child Ready to Read at Your Library. And it has strategies in there and they're all research-based on how you get young children ready to read. So we are training those volunteers in that. So I would like to just urge us all to continue to work collaboratively and reach out and bring ambassadors into the libraries. How many are there, Susan, in the nation? Public library. We have all of these access points. So thank you all. Fabulous. So do you want to respond to that and then we can get another question from the floor as well. Are there any things that sparked? How can we give more grants? Yeah. Well, you can tell Congress to increase our funding and make sure Ready to Learn gets continued. Sorry. That's a policy thing I could offer, right? I do have a policy. Good. Related kind of thing. One of the things that I heard a lot today is about getting kids in preschool and getting kids more opportunity in universal pre-K. But one of the things that we know is the behavior with the app and the behavior with the book is very, very similar. In other words, if you regard it and use it for learning, you'll use either medium for learning. And one of the things that we have traditionally not been able to do, and you know this, is fund the birth through three. So for example, when we did Early Reading first, I really wanted to see a birth through five kind of intervention where we could actually see that's when word learning is happening. That's when initial understanding of print is happening. But many of our policies, even now, are starting at age four or maybe three. And that's just not early enough. Yeah, birth through eight is what's certainly at New America, and I think many other places, too, are trying to. But it's not always so easy when you have to do policy solution. Let's get another question from the floor. Yes, thank you. Hi, my name is Maura Keeney. I'm with IE Communications. And my question is, how much is your work in Arizona bringing in the child welfare community? There's been a lot of research. I've been working on a program in California focusing on bridging the gap between education and child welfare, and there's been research out of USC that while being in foster care may be a small population, the number of families in lower economic who touch the child welfare system is upwards of one third to one half. So there's a whole cadre of social workers and foundations who are engaged. And we're trying to do that in California. And it's, as she mentioned, a little bit of herding cats. But I'm wondering if there's any activities that you are involved in that bringing that in. And if not, I encourage people to see that as another partner. And another source of adults who touch these children, particularly in the summer months, where teachers may not be as involved. Terry, feel free to jump in if there's that initiative underway in Arizona. Sure, so absolutely. That's integrated into our, when I talk about partnerships and the number of organizations that we're working with. Department of Health and Human Services is a key agency that's helping us with that. And that is, in particular, a group of children and families that they reach. And as well as to Susan's point, we're also really trying to work with home visitation workers and programs to really get a more targeted, direct interaction with our youngest children and those families that have children 0 to 3. But some of our programs are actively utilizing the foster grandparents programs and other things. But it is that focus and tactical effort around cross-sector engagement that makes that work. So they don't have to be an education organization to be involved in our work. We've supplied the technical assistance in around early literacy. And they are really reaching that population of children that we no need our support. And that's what they bring to the table. So we're absolutely. But there's always room for improvement. And we are definitely factoring that in as we move forward. Great. Do you have it? Yeah, just related to that, the multi-sector collaboration. There's just so many opportunities we have been put together. There's a lot of great workforce development programs that could benefit from having information about these issues as well. Wherever people are, this information should be available. The Nurse Family Partnership, for example, is a great source of information, channel to deliver information. Something explicit about summer learning loss would be very, very welcome by that field. So I think there's a lot of natural partners, chambers of commerce, and other national networks where we should bring the message of summer learning and take more of a two-generation approach so that parents understand what this means in terms of their own family goals, as well as the goals that they have for their kids. To echo the faith-based organizations as partners, it's been a really powerful partnership for our stations as well. One more question here, and then I'll have some closing. I'm Dorothy Stoltz with Carroll County Public Library in Maryland. And something that we've been doing in the last few years is working with our high-needs families alongside our low-needs families. So we have programs where we mix the groups so that one is modeling for the other and they're learning from each other. Do they know they're being mixed? Like, is that kind of purposeful? It is purposeful. They understand that they've been labeled low-income or high-income? Well, it's working with our community partners to reach out to the high-needs families. And then we offer some programs and workshops, every child ready to read, where we're then reaching out to the larger, regular story time families as well. And so it's a mix, and it's a step at a time, but we find that the modeling is helping. Interesting. So I want to just raise one quick issue myself. Maybe moderate is prerogative for a second here, and then maybe we'll close with, there's some burning thought at the edge of your mind that you want to mention. The one thing as a parent who is just kind of trying to figure out the juggle of summer and all of the different things you have to kind of put together when you've got eight to 12 weeks to fill, I do worry that the summer learning loss conversation, and I'm sure that this is something that Sarah and others at the National Summer Learning Association are kind of grappling with as well. You do worry that it, for those parents who really don't have the resources that it makes them feel even more kind of guilty or unable to really help their children, the more that they learn how much summer matters to children's learning and development. And so maybe one thing that I might put out there that is right now just at a high level in terms of where we could go in policy is how do we ensure that we are directing funds and resources not only to those, to ensure that these programs can flourish and that libraries can offer what they can offer, but also to maybe take a little bit of a load off parent so they don't feel like they have to do it all by themselves and that their school districts can be helping supporting that there's more material out there that's free and accessible and to take away that idea that, oh gosh, if I don't get this together for my kid, they're really gonna be missing out. Just wanted to throw that out there. Oh, and before I forget, before I turn to you all, I do wanna mention one thing. We have friends in the National Center for Families Learning and CFL, and they're working on some things this summer too that I quickly wanted to mention. There's a Camp Wonduropolis that is free and the minute I said free, I wanted to make sure I referenced this. That is a free resource for the summer for families and children anywhere that you can register for and gain new resources and the Camp Counselors and Rec Center supervisors can also use it. So I just wanted to note that. So let me just, I'll start with you, Michael. I'll go to Sandra, Susan, and then Terri. I'll let you have the last word. So go ahead, Michael. Wow, okay, I would just end by saying, as we've all talked about, there's a great need out there. There are lots of resources. I would encourage you all to not forget your public media station as a partner. And that is not just a plug, that is a sincere opportunity for you to access free resources. They're like libraries and communities. They are like museums. They are resources there for you to use and to partner with to help end the summer learning gap. And I should have mentioned NSLA as a big partner in our work and has helped us with our programs and projects and has been doing technical assistance with stations, so they're very well aware of the issue. So I just encourage you to use these free resources. pbskids.org slash lab, it's all there. That's great, it's a great resource. We use it often. To keep parents and parent power central to this work, they are the leaders of their family. The agents have changed for their family. So let's try to look beyond our noses in terms of agencies and really get to the pulse of what's happening with parents and stay as true as we can to the often difficult conversations that are taking place in homes throughout the country and the kitchens and living rooms throughout our country given the economy and social mobility problems. Stay true to that and offer this information and all of these resources in a way that is relevant to folks that are struggling to get ahead. And lastly, just because I spend all Saturday listening to the memorial of a legendary voice, Maya Angelou, that this is a pie of the truism for all of us that when we know better, we do better. So don't assume that everybody knows about summer learning loss and keep that drumbeat of information out there in a friendly and rhythmic way. And I'd just like to end by making a pitch for the children. So remember that kids are kids and that summer is supposed to be fun. And what learning is and early literacy is for the summer is a wonderful opportunity, especially for our poor kids to have a different kind of learning experience. So what I find is when kids can go out in the backyard and scoop up a whole bunch of worms and learn about these ooey gooey worms and how long they are and all sorts of interesting things and discover their world, they are learning. And it's really important that parents and adults recognize that there are many different kinds of learning types. And this is the opportunity when summer kids who may not succeed in school can succeed in life. And that's really important for them. Terry. I always hate going last. I have to admit. I think for, I mean, I echo everything everyone else has said but I think also we have to start letting go that there's one strategy that's gonna sort of be the silver bullet. And we have really tried to embrace in Arizona that variety and meeting families where they're at and understanding what works for families is what's really going to move us forward. And we feel like technology is a tool and it's a very strong tool. It's not the only tool in our tool belt but that it can really actually level the playing field as far as mobility goes for our families which is a huge issue. And so that's why we're investing a lot of time and energy into how to use that tool effectively. And I think as everyone goes forward keeping that in mind, variety, understanding what works for families and some of the issues that are unique to our families that we're trying to serve and how technology plays a part in that would be helpful. Thank you all. Please join me in thanking our great panelists.