As the 112th Congress gets to work, its members face an important opportunity to make lasting changes to public education. With the pending reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, also currently known as No Child Left Behind) lawmakers could enact significant improvements to strengthen early learning, as they also could in legislation related to the appropriation of funding at federal agencies. In this brief, the New America Foundation's Early Education Initiative proposes 12 policy ideas to improve access, quality, and alignment for children before kindergarten and through the early grades of elementary school. These include: (1) Think PreK-12, not K-12; (2) In grant competitions, favor states with effective early learning strategies; (3) Use School Improvement Grants to expand full-day kindergarten and high-quality pre-k; (4) Build stronger links between principals and early childhood programs; (5) Encourage the use of valid and reliable observation tools to measure teacher effectiveness throughout the PreK-12 system; (6) Promote high-quality traditional and alternative teaching programs to recruit talented individuals in STEM to become pre-k and early elementary school teachers; (7) Fund research on young children and digital technology; (8) In rewriting Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) sanctions, give credit to elementary schools that show evidence of using student data to improve instruction in the early grades; (9) Target elementary absenteeism; (10) Support the ability of effective charter schools to offer high-quality pre-k programs; (11) Recognize the connection between the prosperity of families with young children and the economic future of our country; and (12) Channel funding to "effective" programs.