“In traveling the world, I came to the realization that the media is the most powerful engine of change, more than any politician,” he said. Knell’s introduction to the power of the news media came in the late 1970s and early ’80s on Capitol Hill, where he worked as a lawyer on the United States Senate Judiciary and Governmental Affairs Committees. “We’re focusing on what is now being referred to by experts as a vocabulary gap.” He noted research indicates that children from low-income homes know about 3,000 words by the time they enter kindergarten, compared with the 20,000 or so recognized by children from higher-income households, in which parents tend to read and talk more at home.Īs Elmo’s and Big Bird’s boss for much of this decade, and their spokesman as the workshop’s director of corporate affairs in the 1990s, Mr.

Knell said of the theme of the show’s 38th season, which began last Monday. “Literacy is a huge indicator of school success and, at the end of the day, a huge indicator of getting out of poverty,” Mr. Knell, 53, has served for eight years as president and chief executive of Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization behind “Sesame Street,” shown weekday mornings on WNET at 7 and on WLIW at 9. For Gary Knell, a Mount Kisco resident, it is “literacy,” followed by “vocabulary” - the early childhood variety, of course.

Sesame street word of the day