The online pre-kindergarten
(pre-K) literacy program called UPSTART
created by Waterford.org seeks to
blend the best aspects of learning science, mentoring relationships, and
innovative technologies to form community, school, and in-home programs that
deliver literacy excellence and equity for unserved and under-served four-year-old
learners.
About half of America’s four-year-old children are not prepared to
begin kindergarten when they turn five. In Philadelphia, for example, nearly two-thirds
of children cannot read at grade level by the fourth grade, which is a
challenge made worse by a shortage of affordable pre-K literacy programs. Children
without access to pre-K education may enter school as many as two years behind
and may never catch up with their classmates. Their parents have little or no
affordable access to early education solutions to prepare their children for
school. And their children therefore are at the
greatest risk of multi-generational functional illiteracy that can adversely
affect them for the rest of their lives.
The nonprofit Waterford.org in Salt Lake City, Utah, has created
an evidence-tested, home-based, successful, online pre-K literacy program
called UPSTART. UPSTART enables
early education access to unserved and under-served families in their homes by
providing parental support, technology, and internet connectivity, thereby
ensuring equity and fairness for all four-year-olds, regardless of their
socio-economic status. In Utah’s Washington County School District, for
example, about half of its schools are Title I schools with students who faced
significant achievement gaps and were unable to catch up with their peers. The
district ran two early learning programs simultaneously to prepare their
children for kindergarten. After a head-to-head comparison, the children who
used Waterford.org software displayed greater gains in early literacy and were
better prepared to enter kindergarten than students who did not use Waterford
UPSTART.
Waterford UPSTART empowers parents because the program is
voluntary and it increases parental choice, parental involvement, and parental
control of their children’s learning. UPSTART supports
families through personalized parental coaching, empowering parents as their
children’s first educator in the home to prepare their children to arrive at
school ready to learn. Parents help their children invest 15 minutes online for
five days per week for nine months using exciting literacy programming. Waterford
UPSTART children thereby enter kindergarten reading at nearly a first-grade
level and outperform their peers on standardized tests at least through the
fourth grade.
According to a
New York Times story, most states have preschool choices — some
public, some private, half day, full day, local and state run. But many
families fall in between, earning too much to qualify for public programs while
not being able to afford private ones, or living too far from the nearest site-based
pre-K school, or living in states which do not yet provide publicly-financed
pre-K education.
UPSTART has been pilot-tested in urban working-class families,
low-income rural families,
and non-English-speaking
refugee families. The online UPSTART lessons are animated, funny, and
interesting to children; they keep children’s attention as they learn. In one
lesson, for example, children listen to a song and watch a video about how “gh”
is silent in many English words.
UPSTART is funded by state
legislatures, private donations from programs like TED’s philanthropic arm
called the Audacious
Project, and grants from the federal Department
of Education.
Waterford.org was
founded by Dr. Dustin Heuston, a pioneering educator who believed every child
is entitled to lifelong learning success. Over the years, Dr. Heuston built a technology-based
collaborative model of child, family, and educator engagement that delivers
significant and lasting academic achievement gains.
Blog Author James R. Holbrook is a retired clinical legal professor
who is a board member of Waterford.org.
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