High Quality Early Education

TOM AND "HQEE"
A little more than a week has passed since Tom Egan - community activist (half of the formidable Tom and Eleanor Egan duo) and former member of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District Board of Trustees - published an excellent commentary in the Daily Pilot on the value of High Quality Early Education (HQEE), which can be read HERE.  And, like so many children in our educational system, it slipped through the cracks in my busy life and I just finally got around to reading it.

HELLO!  ANYBODY HOME?
Egan's observations in that commentary are so spot-on that I thought I'd find many comments supporting his views and, perhaps, a few that didn't.  However, ten days since publication and there are zero comments.  Astounding!  Then, again, we're in the middle of one of the most heated political seasons in my memory, so folks probably don't have time to contemplate an issue without a political scalp at stake.

I UNDERSTAND
I, personally, understand the value of an early jump-start on education.  As the first born in my family, with loving and supportive parents who understood the value of an education, I spent hours on the lap of my mother or my aunt, reading with them from the Book House For Children series that my folks bought when I was about three years of age.  Those twelve books were tiered for progressive (not in the political sense, but in the practical sense) learning from early nursery rhymes through about the sixth grade level.  And, of course, this was in the days before television, so by the time I started kindergarten I could read every word in every one of those dozen volumes and understand the contents.

THANKS, BUT...
Thanks to Tom Egan for bringing this very important subject up front for us to consider.  Too bad so many of us seem uninterested...