'A good start'- Chilean early childhood program makes a difference

• Late in January, a delegation from Chile visited Harvard to discuss Un Buen Comienzo ("A Good Start"), an early childhood education program undertaken in 2006 by the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), Harvard Medical School (HMS), and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS), with the Chilean Ministries of Education and Health and other local institutions that impart preschool education. The pilot project and its evaluation, sponsored by Fundación Educacional Oportunidad, Centro de Estudios Educar, the World Bank, and Unicef, grew out of Chilean president Michelle Bachelet's stated commitment to make early childhood a priority in her administration.

• The main focus of the project is language and literacy skills, with a concomitant emphasis on parental involvement and child health, particularly pollution-related respiratory diseases and obesity - which affect nearly 20 percent of Chilean children. Meetings covered a wide range of topics, including the intensive evaluation of the project and the impact the program could have on policy debate in Chile and other Latin American countries.

• About two dozen people attended the Jan. 23 session at the David Rockefeller Center to review the progress made thus far. Principal investigators on the project Catherine Snow and Hirokazu Yoshikawa, both professors at HGSE, presided over the meeting. The evening began with a presentation by Andrea Rolla, director of research at the Centro de Estudios Educar in Santiago and director of the project in Chile. "Chile is a middle-income country that goes from the desert to the Patagonias," she said, "so it's very diverse. The economy has done very well, so now our focus is on improving social policy, especially the quality of education."

• Research shows that high-quality preschool education is one of the best investments a country can make in its future, and that language and literacy skills are crucial to lifelong learning. Worldwide, children from low-income families have lower levels of reading comprehension, but in Chile, said Rolla, "More than 50 percent of parents from all different social classes report never reading books to their children, which in general leads to low levels of oral language skills in Chilean children and, later on, low levels of reading comprehension."