There used to be an aging wooden sign outside my kids' elementary school. It identified the school as an "Early Primary School, Pre-K through Grade 3". Since the school actually goes through Grade 5, and had done so for years before my eldest enrolled, I saw the sign as one of the more benign examples of a school district not quite up to its task. Since then, the sign has rotted away and been removed.

So when I heard Gene Maeroff of Columbia University Teachers College making a fairly impassioned plea for what he was presenting as a powerful new model for effective school reform..."What many of us are calling Pre-K/Three," as Maeroff put it...I thought of that old sign.

Maeroff, who has just written a book on the subject, believes that these first years of semi-formal and formal schooling are where school reformers can get the most bang for the buck, as it were: "Unprecedented attention to the primary grades ought to occur," Maeroff said at a Brookings Institution panel discussion. He called for universal access to voluntary preschool starting at age 3, and for full-day kindergarten for all five-year-olds. Then, to solidify early gains, an effort is needed to put in place rigorous standards, curricula, and assessment tools in grades 1 to 3. Teachers need special training in working collaboratively to address the needs of these youngest students.

While I'm not enough of an expert to take exception to Maeroff's assumptions regarding the importance of the early years, and in fact I don't really want to, I do feel a certain fatigue at yet another effort to identify THE critical window for learning. My kids' school has been reincarnated a number of times -- at one time, it went up to fourth grade, then fifth, and even sixth. The changes have reflected changing neighborhood demographics, fluctuations in city finances, changing political forces. What they have not reflected, as far as I can tell, is changing ideas about childhood development and education. Those show up, if at all, in individual classrooms.

Another thing they haven't reflected is a community willingness to support some levels of elementary education over others. (There seems to be quite a high level of willingness to shortchange middle and high school students, but that's a different story.) I can't even begin to imagine how a board of education might make a realistic case for any effort to funnel additional resources towards the early primary grades at the expense of fourth and fifth graders. (And additional resources are always perceived as coming at someone else's expense.)

So, while a laser-like focus on early primary education might get the most bang for the actual buck, it would be pretty costly in political capital, and school reformers can't really afford to throw that currency around.