A head start,
for every learner.
Families in the highest-income fifth now spend almost 7× more each year on their kids' learning outside school than families in the lowest fifth.
Tutors, lessons, camps, test prep — the quiet machinery of a head start. To help close this gap, LeftStart gives every family the kind of personalized, patient practice money usually buys. It is free, and it will stay free.
The gap has nearly tripled since the 1970s.
Has it healed since? No.
Through 2010, the top tenth of households roughly tripled what they spend on young children's care and enrichment — about $3,000 to $9,000 a year — while the bottom fifth's spending rose by $152.‡ And as income inequality climbed, the class gap in these investments kept widening through at least 2014.§
The impact of real practice
Practice that asks you to retrieve what you know — rather than reread it — is one of the most reliable findings in learning science: students who practiced retrieval remembered about 50% more a week later than students who restudied.* A 2021 meta-analysis of 222 classroom studies and 48,478 students confirmed quizzing reliably boosts real classroom achievement.†
Spacing that practice out over days — the way LeftStart's refreshers and mastery decay do automatically — roughly doubles long-term retention compared to cramming the same amount,** and current reviews rank spacing among the most robust effects in the psychology of learning.††
Outcomes like these are the reason we build the way we do.
*Roediger & Karpicke (2006), Psychological Science. †Yang et al. (2021), Psychological Bulletin. **Cepeda et al. (2006), Psychological Bulletin. ††Carpenter, Pan & Butler (2022), Nature Reviews Psychology. ‡Kornrich (2016), AERA Open (children under 6, 2012 dollars). §Schneider, Hastings & LaBriola (2018), American Sociological Review.
The pledge
- • Free for every family, forever. No subscription, ever.
- • No ads. No selling data. Kids are not a product.
- • Run as a nonprofit, funded by donations.
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