Texting Parents to get Kids Ready 4K!

[Commentary] Over the past few years, a growing number of early education programs focused on building literacy skills are seeking to address this issue at an early age with the help of technological tools. Ready 4K! is one program that shows evidence of succeeding at closing the word gap. The program focuses on building parent knowledge by sending text messages explaining how to help build children’s literacy skills. The program primarily promotes early literacy and language, but also is piloting texts that target other early learning skills, such as socioemotional learning and early math.

In 2013, Ben York and Susanna Loeb of Stanford University piloted Ready 4K! in the San Francisco Unified School District to help close the word gap between affluent and low-income children. The text messaging program targeted low-income families with four-year-old children. Through the use of a randomized controlled trial, the program showed significant gains between families that had received the targeted early literacy text messages and those that received the placebo messages that, for instance, may have just alerted parents about vaccination requirements for kindergarten. Children who received the early literacy text messages gained an additional two to three months of learning in some areas.