Giving Compass' Take:

• Chalkbeat profiles the LENA Start program in Detroit, which aims to improve the language skills of young children with help from a recording device.

• Another emphasis here is on encouraging families through such interventions, rather than diminishing their importance by saying that such new innovations "fill a gap."

• Here's an interactive map for early childhood education funding efforts.

A small program that started in Detroit last year with an innovative plan to improve infants’ language skills has proved promising and is preparing to expand.

When Concepción Orea entered the program, LENA Start, with her 18-month-old son, the boy was making a few simple sounds. She worried that he was displaying the same delays as her older son, a kindergartner who receives speech therapy.

“Now he grabs a book and pretends to read,” she said, speaking in Spanish at a graduation ceremony for the program on Tuesday. “Watching him pick up more sounds … it’s an emotion I don’t know how to explain.”

Over the course of the free 13-week program, Orea was coached to speak more to her child and read books to him. Her son was outfitted with a recorder that shows his — and her — progress. Each family is asked to place a recording device in a bib near their child’s chest, where it tracks and analyzes the sounds the baby hears at home.

The approach is based on research showing that when parents make a habit of talking to a very young child, that child is more likely to learn to read on grade level, with all the long-term benefits that come with literacy. That’s a big deal in all of the 20 cities where LENA Start operates, but the stakes are even higher in Detroit, where a tough new “read-or-flunk” state law, taking effect next year, will tighten the screws on a citywide literacy crisis.

Read the full article about the LENA Start program in Detroit by Koby Levin at Chalkbeat.