Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families (AACF) and the Arkansas Campaign for Grade-Level Reading (AR-GLR) have researched the new federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and the opportunities it provides to improve educational outcomes for all students in Arkansas....
In partnership with the Arkansas Campaign for Grade-Level Reading and the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, today we’re releasing a new policy brief on the importance of talking, reading, and singing with children from birth. More than half of Arkansas children start kindergarten...
AACF would like to thank Governor Asa Hutchinson for including $3 million in his FY 2018 budget this legislative session for our state’s Arkansas Better Chance (ABC) pre-K program—the first permanent funding increase since 2008. However, despite a major...
Arkansas pre-K program needs an investment of $20 million to maintain quality, avoid cuts Pre-K works! Research has shown that children who attend quality pre-kindergarten programs are better prepared for K-12 education and are more likely to read at grade...
Last month, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson vowed to make third-grade reading a top priority, building on the impressive work the state has already done to bring more children into early education programs. Now the federal push to scrap the...
Today, the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) released their annual Yearbook that rates and ranks state’s pre-K programs. There is some good news: enrollment was up by 3,400 children in 2014-2015*, including 3,300 3-year-olds, while maintaining high...
Our pre-K paint-by-numbers picture is closer to completion after this past year and a half. Let’s take the next year and a half and fill it in completely. This is within our reach. All we have to do is:...
Arkansas’s Department of Education, the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation allied themselves to put forth a set of recommendations to move Arkansas’s education system ‘ForwARd.’ Their very first recommendation is high quality pre-K and their very...
Children who participate in pre-K, particularly low-income children, are better prepared for kindergarten.
Study after study shows that investing in high quality early education is one of the best investments we can make in our children and communities. The latest comes from a study posted online in the journal Science. Researchers following...