Warning: The lede on David Brooks’ column in today’s New York Times carries a nearly lethal dosage of glibness, and I’m about to quote it here. Read forth at your own peril.

Brooks opens, “Over the past decade we’ve had a rich debate on how to expand opportunity for underprivileged children. But we’ve probably made two mistakes.”

Get that? The debate about the poor has been rich. That’s a sentence overflowing with connotation. It’s an opulent festival of implication. What’s more—and perhaps even better—we’ve only stepped wrong twice.

Our first mistake, Brooks writes, is that we’ve “placed too much emphasis on early education.” Important as those years can be, he thinks that we should focus on all of the years. To “really make an impact,” we need “a developmental strategy for all the learning stages, ages 0 to 25.”

It’s hard to imagine where Brooks gets the notion that early education has received disproportionately great attention. Here at the New America Foundation where I work, we recently released a paper surveying the last five years of early education in the United States. While there are a few isolated bright spots—states have built systems to continuously monitor and improve early education programs’ quality—most of the metrics waver between stagnant and dire.