National reading scores for our children and students are low and have now fallen to record low levels, and we actually know why that's happening and what we could have done to prevent it.
We're failing our children badly.
We should be helping every child from every group get the best possible start for the rapidly changing and challenging world we're facing now and in the immediate future.
We're failing miserably for millions of children because we completely ignore the brain development science that's painfully true for all of our children. We could steer the vast majority of our children to much better lives if we do the right thing in those golden months and years when it is possible, to do the right thing for each child.
It's painfully simple.
We know the science.
Neuron connections are the cause of our failure.
We have poor performance for too many children in all of those schools because we didn't do the things we needed to do with each child to make those neurons connect in their brain in those extremely important time frames for each child when those connections happen.
Neurons connect by the billions in the heads of every child.
The connection process starts before birth, and it explodes in the days, weeks, and months after each child is born based entirely on the interactions we create for each of those children in that extremely important and high opportunity time frame.
We can give much better lives for millions of children by making sure that those interactions happen for the child at that golden moment in time.
We can connect neurons by the billions and sometimes trillions in the head of each child — and we should be able to help children from every group if we start immediately in the weeks and months after each child is born to help each child.
That's a temporary opportunity for each child. It never happens again at that level for any child after those first months of life. We waste that opportunity for far too many of our children now and we have the worst learning gaps in our schools across the country because that opportunity was lost for far too many of our children immediately after they were born.
People who ignore the science, and who insist on political correctness, generic and hopeful optimism, and wishful thinking as the context for their thoughts and discussions about the learning gaps pretend that those realities don't exist — and when they pretend that that process is not our reality, they sadly cause us to damage many children by not providing that support when it's needed by each child.
We know what's true about that need and about that brain nurturing process for each child.
Brains Prune Before Age 4
Students who don’t get enough neurons connected in their heads in the first two and three years of life have extremely difficult lives and have much lower learning ability in their lives that can’t be overcome later with interventions for those children.
People find it too painful to understand and know that those first years are that important in the life of each child, and too many children have difficult and challenged lives in our country today because those interventions did not happen.
It’s a massive failure.
We've failed in all of our communities and we have failed in all of our schools with even in our most well-meaning and best-intentioned efforts to close those learning gaps later, because the interventions to close those gaps for each child need to happen at 15 months and not at 15 years.
That seems unbelievable and even impossible, but we know from overwhelming evidence that it is true. We have a national body of evidence and we've measured decades of failure trying to close those gaps later in the process for each child with all of the other approaches that we've been using to have those children catch up to the children who didn't have that deficiency early in their life process.
Those well-meaning efforts across the country to close those gaps obviously fail everywhere at 15 years or at any other time frame that's too late for the functional neuron connections that we can build for each child and the situation is getting worse, because our schools have the lowest learning levels in our history and they're getting worse, because those neurons don’t exist for too many children in our schools today.
Many people find it too painful to appreciate the reality of the process and some people refuse to even discuss the learning gap issue if anyone in the discussion says that the well-meaning processes to catch up that happen later in all of those settings for all of those children will have very high degrees of failure and will have very little chance of success when that opportunity is missed in those first two years of life.
The brains prune themselves at ages 2 and 3.
We need everyone looking at the development and education realities for our children to understand, know, and remember that the brains of children change in an epigenetic process for every child, and they go through a pruning process that eliminates many of the unused neuron connections for each child when the children are three and four years old.
Four years old is an extremely important part of that time frame, and most people in policy circles don’t know that those early pruning processes happen or that there are any time-related issues of any kind in the education process.
Most educators don’t have a clue that there are billions of neuron connections being made in the first days and weeks of life that can transform life trajectories for children and most educators who do have a sense of the neuro nurturing opportunities that happen for each child are sculpted by the pruning processes that happen after the second year.
That pruning of unused neuron connections that gets triggered before age 4 is a hugely important process reality and functional time frame that all of the schools and communities haven't known or understood, and we need it understood by everyone because it has such a huge impact on the heads and brains of so many children.
The medical description is that “synapses that are more active in those two years are strengthened and synapses that are less active are weakened and ultimately pruned.”
That's extremely important information as well that we've done a horrible job of sharing with educators, policy people, and community leaders who would make different decisions about their children and communities and families if everyone knew what was happening for all of those children at that point in time.
Kindergarten Is Too Late
We generally think that we can fix those horrible and historic learning deficiencies with special efforts in the kindergarten setting.
Schools everywhere in the country who do badly on their reading levels and math level tests put together a wide variety of programs to improve the teaching processes in the schools, and very large numbers of schools or communities blame their kindergartens for the failures and try to set up programs to improve the teaching that happens at the kindergarten level.
Catching up in kindergarten has been the very public and well-intentioned goal in many settings that have major learning gaps for their children.
The painful truth is that those kindergarten enhancement plans that have been created by tens of thousands of schools have failed to change the learning gap levels in every school system with gaps in America, because those children in kindergarten in each school are age 5 or older, and the pruning process for each child for neuron connections already happened at age 4.
People keep insisting — for both political and emotional reasons — that we should continue to do things to help children in those failing schools catch up in kindergarten. The truth is that kindergarten is a bit too late for that process to change the lives for those children in all of those schools, and those programs have failed everywhere in the country to solve that issue.
Dropouts Have Much More Difficult Lives
The children who don’t get those connections made in those first two years of their lives tend to drop out of school, and they tend to have much more difficult lives as dropouts.
Dropping out of school sets up some very negative trajectories.
We imprison more people than any country on the planet. When you look at African American male high school dropouts in our country now, 60 percent of those dropouts from that group are in jail today and 80 percent will be in jail in their lifetime.
We have more African Americans males in jail today than were enslaved at the beginning of the civil war.
We have serious and growing challenges in some cities with gang activities today, and we know that 90 percent of the gang members in both Chicago and Milwaukee have dropped out of school.
When we look at our oldest Americans, we see Medicare programs that take care of people who are very low income and who have high health care needs and we know that more than 6 million of those older Americans have enrolled in Medicare Advantage Special Needs Plans.
The drop out percentages look very similar.
Sixty percent of those enrollees in the Medicare Advantage Special Needs Plans dropped out of high school many decades earlier, and those particular Medicare members who dropped out of school have had difficult health care patterns — with much higher levels of diabetes and heart failure — for their entire lives.
Those seniors are getting the best care of their lives as enrollees in Medicare Advantage plan — and there’s nothing that can be done at that age to change whether they will drop out of school.
Kids With Strong Neuron Connections Stay in School and Learn to Read
The kids with strong neuron connections don't drop out of school.
They thrive in our school system.
We need to build neuron connections by the billions and even trillions in those first two and three years when we have the highest return and the most positive impact from those interactions for each child in order to save our schools and end those gaps in learning.
We can now know with a high level of accuracy by age 3 whether people will drop out of school.
The first months and years of life have a huge impact on each child’s life and the difference is very high, huge, and permanent for the life trajectory of children.
We can actually predict with a surprising level of accuracy by 100 days old whether our children are likely to have problems in kindergarten and high school, because of the wonderful work done by Dr. Beatrice Beebe and her team at Columbia on those first weeks and months of life for newborn children.
We don’t need that study to point us in the right direction for every child. We can steer that trajectory for each and all of our children if we do it early in their lives. Some newborn children are falling behind today — and we should reject that reality and we should change it now for all of the children being born today in this country.
We need to be honest with ourselves about how badly we've been doing to help millions of our children up to this moment in time.
Our school systems and our communities and our care systems have all failed miserably for decades to close the learning gaps in almost all of our cities, and we need to stop failing those children.
We've Tended to Blame the Schools
We've tended to blame the schools.
It wasn't the fault of those schools across the country who've now failed so consistently in all of those settings and who have even lower reading levels in 2025.
The truth is that those schools have had students with far fewer neuron connections than we want and need them to have, and those students in the schools with fewer connections who have learning deficiencies and failures today that are actually not the fault of those schools.
The schools across the country actually, generally, do well with the students with higher neuron connections levels and we've had some significant successes with some of the groups in many of the schools.
We know what to do.
We need to read to every child.
We now know from extensive experience and research that talking and reading to children in the first months and years of life are game changing for the children.
We know that just talking to children in those first days, weeks, and months can have a major positive impact on their lives and can make neuron connections by the billions in the heads of the children.
We should make that happen for all children, and we should create a community commitment to provide neuro nurturing adult interactions with every child.
Books Are Extremely Important for Everyone
Books are extremely important to that process for all of the children from every group in the process.
Books create opportunities for interactions with adults and with parents that make neurons connect and that provide emotional benefits for each child.
We very clearly need books in every home, because the interactions that happen with books at their core both build billions of neuron connections and create strong emotional security and even bonding for the children who are read to.
The families that have books in their homes and that interact minute by minute with each child have had some of the best test scores in history on some of the academic screening processes in some settings.
All parents who read to their children can describe easily how much the children love their books and love being read to. The families with good and available books have very powerful and positive interactions with each child in the context of reading, and the books tend to be a strong and emotionally solid linking with the children that creates high scores for ability levels for the children.
We see major differences by group on learning scores today.
The Asian American students now have the highest reading scores in the country, and their scores got better under Covid. We know that the Asian American families have many books for every child, and that’s one of the reasons their children do extremely well on those tests.
We know from multiple studies that too many of the African American and Hispanic homes have no books. That's true for economic reasons and for community activity level reasons — and the results can be seen in too many results with the lowest reading level scores of any group.
Our African American and Hispanic children lost ground in the most recent national measures.
The African American and Hispanic homes with multiple books and with extensive parental and adult interactions for the newborn children have some of the highest reading levels in the country. Those successes for those children prove to us that the difference in outcome for those children isn’t by group, but by opportunities to make neurons connect for each child.
The children with connected neurons from those groups are star performers and the children without those connections create much lower scores on those tests.
Losing ground for those groups is sad and wrong and it's completely unnecessary, because we should be able to help every child from every group in ways that cost very little overall, and that change life trajectories permanently for those children.
We're a wealthy country and we should be able to easily help every child from every group in those first months and years when books should be in every home, regardless of the economic position of the family.
Not One Book in Over One-Third of the Homes
We need parents to know and understand the process.
We need to teach people from every group the basic brain science that favors and supports neuron connecting interactions with each child. We've done a terrible and almost inexcusably bad job as a country teaching that basic and foundational information to our parents and families.
We've failed miserably in teaching that information to people who should know and understand it.
It's extremely disrespectful and actually both a moral and ethical failure not to teach that information to every parent and every family in America when we know it and when we know that it's life changing for children.
Ninety percent of the Medicaid mothers in one survey didn't believe or know or understand that they could do anything to change the learning levels or intelligence levels of their children, and those Medicaid mothers didn’t get the education from their caregivers that would cause them to have higher impact and highly beneficial interactions with their children for those activities.
That's a major failure in communications.
Over half the births in many communities last year were Medicaid births.
We can do things to change and massively improve the life trajectories for all of our children if we do it in those first months and first years when that functional epigenetic opportunity exists for each child.
The children who are interacting with adults in the most effective ways at that point in time are happier, more emotionally secure, and highly capable in their learning levels — and those children with those higher levels of early interactions have much lower levels of stress and even less anger when they do get into school settings.
Children from every group love books, and the children very much appreciate the interactions that are connected to books.
Families in homes with books have much better exposure to word volumes than the families that don't have books.
We don't have an equitable distribution for books.
The Asian American and white families tend to have 20–30 books for each child.
The Hispanic and African American families have far fewer books.
We have too many communities where the Medicaid births are a majority of the births and where over half of the Medicaid families actually don't have a single book.
Those children in all of those homes without one single book start in a very deep hole for the neuron connections they need to make.
It's criminal, wrong, immoral, unethical, dysfunctional, and damaging to children not to have a significant and useful supply of books in every setting in America for every child in the setting. Books are very affordable and they should be everywhere that kids want to have books.
Basic Equity Calls for Us to Support Every Child from Every Group
Some people argue that we should add the practice of reparations of some kind to our reality as a country. That’s a heated debate in some settings, and we might reposition the issue and think of helping every child from every group in their hour of immediate need and opportunity as being an equity resource issue that can help offset some of the inequity issues we have for both resources and education assets for our families and children
Some people argue that the history of slavery and extensive economic damage done over periods of time to people in this country should create and trigger some level of reparations and some kind of resource entitlement for some of our people based on those long periods of time of wrong behavior.
People who advocate today for reparations should think about and look at the science of brain development for all children and could argue for high leverage and immediate and high priority use of those resources to help far more children from the damaged groups end that particular cycle of damage today by having powerful neuron linkage realities in their brains.
When we understand how absolutely important both interactions and books are for the children in those first weeks and months of life, it’s hard not to say that we should get books funded and given in sufficient quantities to all of our low-income babies from several communities as the least we can do, and maybe even the immediate best we can do relative to the issue of reparations and support for those groups if we believe that that equity balancing process should be factored into our thinking.
We have massive differences in resources now by group for the country.
When we look at our retired populations and at people who are retiring today, we know that we've lost the old practice, expectation, and aspiration of having retirement activated pensions for all of our workers, and we are now in the situation where most retirees in this country today have no pension at all and most have inadequate retirement resources.
When we look at net worth, the average white family has a net worth of $285,000 and that compares to $61,600 in net worth for Hispanic families and $44,900 in net worth for black families.
We're not going to see that differences in economic realities shrink if the majority of children from two of those groups in many schools can’t read. That difference was what we just saw in the reading comparison tests that we just gave our children.
We need to understand both the growing learning gap deficiency and the massive and growing net worth deficiencies that got worse during Covid, and we should change that trajectory for everyone now.
We should help every child.
We should end the neurol nurturing deficiencies for all of our kids by making sure we help and support every child from every group in those first weeks and first months when life trajectories are being determined for the life of every child so we can minimize future levels of economic inequity for those children.
We start in a deep hole on those basic economic issues, and we should absolutely not be making those holes deeper by not providing neuron building support for every single child being born now.
We Can End Those Learning Gaps By Helping Every Child
We can actually fix the learning gap situation by helping every child now at birth with neuro nurturing support and approaches that responds directly to each child and creates both emotional support and massive neuron growth in the children.
All of our children from every group go through the same learning opportunities in the first days, weeks, months, and first years of life — and the reality is that we can build great brains in many millions of kids by making sure we provide that support and contact to every child.
We could go and move from 30 years of painful functional failure in the learning processes to achieving an explosion of learning ability in all of those children because we know for a fact that it works for every child and that we can do it for every child born today in this country if we chose to do that.
We know the science and we can make this happen for the children being born now everywhere in the country.
We should decide to do exactly that.
Let’s’ get the right people involved.
Anyone reading this piece who believes this to be true and the right thing to do can help by going to your local caregivers and getting them to teach neuron development to everyone who gives birth in their settings and by going to your local school board and have them expand and improve and evolve their thinking from the traditional K–12 into the new Birth–Three paradigm as their opportunity to finally end those failures have been so bad for so many schools for so many years.
Think about who you personally can teach this to.
Think about who that you know should understand this process and this reality and then teach it to them.
Major Wins Happen Quickly
This doesn't take decades to do or decades to achieve major wins.
It has immediate effect.
The children being born now will be stronger, brighter, more settled, and happier three years from now.
Three years is not a long time to wait.
There’s nothing we can do in our communities that can have a bigger, quicker, and faster impact on our world than going down this road with our children.
The beauty of the process is that it's specific to each child and it happens for each child — and every child you help today will have a better life starting now because you helped them in that important and effective way.
How many things can you do that actually significantly changes lives?
Teach this yourself to everyone you know who is having children.
Mothers all want their children to have wonderful and positive lives, and you will help the mothers achieve that goal with this information. They will love you for helping them with this game-changing and life-affirming information.
The feedback loop on changing lives is immediate.
That’s not a long time.
Do it.
Now.
Make a difference — and make those horrible reading gaps that we've failed to remedy for three decades disappear for all of the kids from every group who are in the process now.
We should be able to very quickly measure reading readiness levels in three-year-olds and we should know that we've made the big problem a painful and damaging historical anomaly and not an inherent and permanent part of who and what we are as a nation.
Peace for us all.
Be well.
Important Information
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Early childhood and the developing brain
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