One of the main goals of recent education reform efforts, including NCLB, is to close the achievement gap between disadvantaged and minority students and their wealthier, white peers. The authors present data showing that closing those gaps once they have emerged is no easy task. THE PHRASE Child Left (NCLB) likens education to a journey. Just as a traveler can fall behind his or her companions in terms of distance covered, so can a student fall behind his or her peers in terms of academic progress. Might the educational incorporate alternative routes that would allow children to make up the distance they have lost so that they would arrive at the destination with their peers? Since many of the children at greatest risk of falling behind are poor and minority students, answering this question would facilitate closing achievement gaps -- or even prevent such gaps emerging in the first place. The expression from womb to tomb captures the common belief that education is a lifelong journey, rather than one that starts with kindergarten or first grade. But where along the journey do children begin falling behind? Broadly speaking, there are two views on this issue. The first view is represented by the following quotation Ruth Johnson, author of Using Data to Close the Achievement Gap: I went into teaching with the belief that all students could learn high-level material. I soon saw that child after child came into kindergarten ready to learn and doing well, but as they moved through the upper grades their learning curve diminished. By first, second, or third grade, many students were already behind.1 Whatever differences there may have been in the children's home backgrounds, those differences did not prevent them entering school well prepared. If, as Johnson suggests, children don't begin falling behind until after they enter school, it seems only natural to suspect that schools are a major source of the problem. However, not everyone shares Johnson's opinion that educational disparities emerge only after K-12 schooling begins. Among those who believe the gaps begin before kindergarten are the authors of the No Child Left Behind website: Children who enter school with language skills and pre-reading skills (e.g., understanding that print reads left to right and top to bottom) are more likely to learn to read well in the early grades and succeed in later years. In fact, research shows that most reading problems faced by adolescents and adults are the result of problems that could have been prevented by good instruction in the early childhood years.2 Children homes in which the primary language is not English may arrive at school with a knowledge of that language's structure but without a knowledge of oral English. Since ours is for the most part a phonetic alphabet in which the letters represent sounds of English words, a child who does not understand spoken English will usually not understand the alphabetic representation of spoken English words. Therefore, a child with limited spoken English has limited readiness for reading in the language used by most schools. A similar lack of readiness can exist among English-speaking low-income children. Betty Hart and Todd Risley observed 42 families for an hour a month for 21A2 years to learn what typically happened in homes with 1- and 2-year-old children learning to talk.3 Their longitudinal data showed that ordinary families differed immensely in the amount and quality of parents' language interactions with their children. In an average hour, professional parents spoke to their children using more words, more multi-clause sentences, and more past and future verb tenses, and they asked more questions. By contrast, in the lower-income families, the utterances addressed to children were both fewer in quantity and less rich in nouns, modifiers, verbs, past-tense verbs, and clauses. …