Expanding Opportunity for America’s Youngest Learners
The Ready To Learn program is the country’s single largest investment in children’s media. Under it, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) partnered with PBS KIDS to design a program to develop, test, and share early learning resources centered around four pillars: reach, results, resources, and relationships.
This report provides an overview of the CPB-PBS Ready To Learn initiative, and shows how 30 years of federal investment in educational media supported families, communities, and school readiness for millions of children. It begins with a brief history of the Ready To Learn program and describes the contributions of the CPB-PBS Ready To Learn initiative to developing high-quality media for early learning and the role of research in grounding media design.
The report also examines the initiative’s scale and reach through a national local model and its approach to engaging communities through station partnerships.
Finally, it reviews evidence of the value for children, families, and communities and considers implications for future investments.
