Low-income Grand Rapids preschoolers are catching up. Will Lansing notice?
“In some of the poorest neighborhoods in Grand Rapids, in places inured to academic failure, children are grasping at a chance to defy the odds. So it was one recent spring day, in a pre-K classroom on the city’s southwest side. In a poor, largely Hispanic neighborhood, where more than half of adults over age 25 lack a high school degree, a group 4-year-olds watched a classmate draw a ‘2’ and a squiggly ‘0’ on a whiteboard.”