 At this time, then I would like to introduce my colleague, Professor David Kerr, one of our senior fellows in residence at LPI. As many you know, David has written extensively about education and early learning opportunities. His 17 books include Kids First, Five Big Ideas for Transforming Children's Lives in America's Future, and Improbable Scholars, the rebirth of a great American school system and a strategy for American education, which was named Outstanding Book of 2013 by the American Educational Research Association. Please join me in welcoming David Kerr. I think it's a pleasure to be here a little bit earlier than you might have expected to hear from me. We look forward to Roberto joining us soon. So I wanna begin with motto, the catchphrase that I use in thinking about anything that has to do with education or anything that has to do with kids. And it's the test, the talisman that I always use, which is simple. Every child deserves what you would want for a child that you love. Every child deserves what you'd want for a child that you love. You start there, start with a child, and it's easy to see what is that so much attention is getting paid now and so much more attention needs to be paid to early education. As we heard earlier, there is no sounder investment in kids' futures than high quality programs for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. There, and Warren Buffett asked his kids to go find social investments that were comparable in that sector to the kind of investments that he'd been making so successfully. It's not a great surprise that Susie Buffett and others in the family picked early education as their focus. We have shells full of good research studies, and the results linking high quality early education to strong outcomes in school and beyond. Fewer kids left back, fewer children placed in special education, more high school graduates, more students going to college, more students working not on welfare, earning a decent amount of money, staying out of prison, raising families. That data is stronger than the evidence that links smoking and cancer. It's pretty powerful. Some of those studies have tracked students for 40 years into midlife, and those are the famous ones, Perry Preschool and the like. But as people say, that's a long time ago when there are small scale studies and they're right. Fortunately, we have a lot of studies, a lot of work that's been done in recent years on wide scale programs, the kind of high quality programs that are within the reach of states and the federal government. In New Jersey, for example, the research shows enormous and sustained gains for children through the fifth grade. Now they've tracked this one group of kids who'd received early education. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, about to hear results from a study that has taken these students into eighth grade and from what I understand, the impact is astonishing in terms of reading and math growth. There are other studies, places like Michigan, Georgia, other places that have produced really fine results. And by the way, we're talking about four states and I'll say a bit about how we selected them, but there's a lot of other stuff going on, both at the state level and the municipal level in the country and I don't want you to have any thoughts that we've slided those places. But there's one study, recent study, that got a lot of traction that had people shaking their heads, is it really true that pre-K works? So there's a study that came out of Tennessee, some of you will be familiar with, it was published this fall, showed that as a third grade, children who'd been in the state preschool program, were doing no better, no worse, no better than kids who hadn't had that experience. Well that's unnerving obviously as a result and any good policy analyst wants to know what's going on, fortunately, it's another piece of research on the Tennessee program done by the same researchers. They visited about 45 of the programs in the state to see what they look like and they were terrible. They had teachers who had no experience with pre-kindergarten, they're told okay, this year you're teaching pre-K, you got no counseling, no coaching, pick a curriculum and the only curriculum that they could get their hands around was a very strict, academically focused, direct instruction curriculum. So it's not a great surprise that that program didn't make a huge difference and indeed, it's the exception that proves the rule and the rule is this, for pre-K to work, it has to be high quality preschool. That's crucial to this story. So that's one point. A second point is that we know the elements of what quality means. We throw the term around a lot but we really have a research base and we've summarized it in a separate report which you can find online at the Learning Policy Institute website, the elements of high quality preschool but they include, for example, really good curricula that don't just engage kids' cognitive skills but really have to do with social-emotional skills, physical skills, health, all the rest of it that involve well-trained teachers who are being coached in the classroom to get better and better and we know that the more experienced teachers have and the more coaching they have, the better they wind up being. We know those things. So the question for the day and the question that lawmakers have asked and that we've tried to answer is so how do we make it happen? How do you go from, we know what quality is, we know how important it is, how do you actually do this? And while the federal government has played a significant role, the states really have led the way. There are 45 states in the District of Columbia that now provide funds. A year ago, the increase in funds was nearly 10%. There have been funding increases since the Great Recession and even during the Great Recession, many states held firm and quality is getting better. The best known states are places like Oklahoma and New Jersey. We wanted to focus on four states that haven't gotten as much attention but they're doing great work. Washington, Michigan, West Virginia, North Carolina and we picked those four states as you'll hear from my colleague Marjorie in a bit. We picked those four states because they represented diversity in all sorts of ways. Importantly, they're politically different. They're Republican led, they're Democratic led. If you take Michigan, it's Michigan and North Carolina have both been led by both parties at different times in this story. They're big, they're small, they're urban, they're rural, they're northern, they're southern and as importantly, they took different paths to getting to high quality early education. One of the big, big themes of this report is there is no one cookie cutter answer. There is no solution that Washington could be handing down. Lots of different ways of proceeding and you'll hear more about those. Other thing that's important to take away from this work is that we talk about pre-kindergarten but it doesn't stand alone. If we think about it as standing alone, we're in trouble because it's part of a continuum of education that begins at birth, early education of infants and toddlers where lots of work needs to get done, taking you into kindergarten and here's where North Carolina has led the way and then if you don't connect pre-kindergarten with K-12, if it just stands alone, all the gains of pre-k get lost and it's wonderful to see how in many states there are strategies in which it's clear that pre-k has a lot to teach the K-12 system, how to evaluate students, how to evaluate teachers, how to develop a curriculum, how to engage parents, these are all things that the education system can learn and I hope that you can learn a fair amount about what states have been doing and pass it on. I see Roberto has joined us. So I'm delighted to pass the baton to my friend and colleague, Roberto Rodriguez.