Office of Science and Technology Policy Blog

Talk With Me Baby! Increasing Early Learning Opportunities for Every Child in Georgia

And some states are proving that it’s possible to give every child that chance.  For 16 years, every child in Oklahoma has been guaranteed a preschool education.  Georgia’s building on their successful pre-K program by launching something called “Talk With Me Baby” – which sounds like an Al Green song, but is actually a program to make sure language learning begins in the very first weeks of a child’s life.  Oklahoma and Georgia are not places where I did particularly well politically – but that just goes to show you that this issue is bigger than politics.  It’s not a red issue or a blue issue.  It’s about doing what’s best for our kids, and for our country, and that’s an American issue. 

-President Obama, White House Early Learning Summit, December 10, 2014

This week, President Obama hosted the White House Summit on Early Childhood Education, where he highlighted new efforts to ensure that every child in America has access to high-quality preschool and rich early learning opportunities. The Summit brought together state and local policymakers, mayors, school superintendents, corporate and community leaders, and advocates, who together committed to $1 billion of support for the President’s Early Learning Agenda.

Back in September, the White House hosted a workshop in which we heard about exciting Federal, State, and Local efforts to “bridge the word gap” that develops between poor children and their more affluent peers during the first few years of life. For example, Too Small to Fail, in partnership with the George Kaiser Family Foundation, has launched a community-wide Talking is Teaching: Talk, Read, Sing campaign in Tulsa, Oklahoma with the help of their local faith-based, medical, and childcare communities. Working through trusted messengers such as pastors, home visitors, pediatricians, nurses, obstetricians and gynecologists, information and resources are being distributed to help Tulsa parents talk, read and sing to their young children to boost early brain and vocabulary development. Moreover, the State of Georgia has launched the Talk With Me Baby Initiative, which aims to provide language nutrition to every child in Georgia through the public health care system and has continued to grow in response to the President’s call-to-action to bridge the word gap.

I recently sat down with Arianne Weldon, Director of the Get Georgia Reading Campaign and member of the team guiding Talk With Me Baby, to hear more about her team’s work, new developments and future plans.

Higher Education Institutions Respond to the President’s Call to Support Making on College Campuses

At the White House Maker Faire last June, more than 150 universities committed to expanding opportunities for Making on their campuses and in their communities. The Maker Faire was one of several OSTP initiatives this year aimed at highlighting the importance of the Maker Movement in creating opportunities for hands-on STEM learning, facilitating entrepreneurship, and expanding advanced manufacturing in the United States. At that event, the President issued a call to action to enable the next generation of innovators to be not just the consumers of things, but the makers of things.

Today, OSTP Director John Holdren visited Spelman College’s innovation lab and Makerspace. Spelman is one example of the many colleges that are creating opportunities for Making in response to the President’s call. Spelman’s innovation lab is home to the Spelbots, an all-female robotics team that has competed in international robotics competitions and is currently building an autonomous Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) system. 

As part of the visit to Spelman, Director Holdren discussed how a subset of higher education institutions have come together to form the Make Schools Alliance. This new initiative will provide students with spaces, projects and mentors to engage in hands-on Making activities and boost their interest and persistence in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). The Alliance will capture best practices and support research that examines the impact of Making on learning, student retention, and degree completion in STEM fields. It will also serve as a network, dynamic platform, and one-stop online resource for information on higher education institutions regarding initiatives, programs and collaboration that foster Making. Currently, information on nearly 50 colleges and universities can be found on the Alliance’s online platform.

The Make Schools Alliance builds on a growing momentum in the higher education community to support Making. Earlier this month, members of the Alliance met with Federal agencies, including USAID, CNCS, SBA, NSF and USDA, in Washington, DC to explore potential avenues for broadening accessibility and participation in Making in communities across the country.

K-12 superintendents, teachers, and organizations across the U.S. have joined the higher education community in creating ways for students to design, tinker, invent, and Make in the classroom and after school. One example is the Roanoke County Public School District in Virginia, which has created Makerspaces for its special education students to solve problems by designing and creating their own solutions. A number of programs being offered by Makerspaces, museums, and educational organizations focus on providing professional development for teachers around integrating Making into curriculum and the use of tools and technologies such as programmable microcontrollers, 3D modeling and 3D printing.

Building an educational pipeline that will enable students to make throughout K-12 and continue to develop and pursue their interests in STEM, arts, and design in college will be critical to supporting the America’s next generation of problem solvers and innovators. If your educational institution is doing something to engage students in Making, we want to hear about it! Send an email to maker@ostp.gov.

Stephanie Santoso is the OSTP Senior Advisor for Making.