4. Get ‘Em While They’re Still Young
Want to know why Johnny and Susie can’t read, don’t graduate and wind up losers? In part it’s because 34 percent of children enter kindergarten without knowing their letters, and 42 percent can’t count to 20. States and the federal government spend about $10 billion annually on early education, but the average U.S. preschool doesn’t even get a “good” rating on a scale used by teachers worldwide. “It’s not at a level that’s detrimental to children — their brains aren’t melting — but it doesn’t assure kids are cared for in an optimal way,” says Amy Wilkins, executive director of the nonpartisan Trust for Early Education.

We’ve got to do better than that, and make quality preschool available to every family who wants it. A study at a top Chicago program for at-risk children showed its graduates were 40 percent less likely to fail a grade, had a 33 percent lower juvenile arrest rate and were 29 percent more likely to graduate from high school by age 20. How to replicate this nationwide? For starters, fix Head Start. Each year the groundbreaking program serves 900,000 children ages 3 to 5, but it needs a new academic focus and national performance standards.

One effort that deserves more attention is Georgia’s universal preschool program. With money from the lottery, the Office of School Readiness contracts with community-based providers to run preschools; private-sector groups, like churches, provide over half the classrooms. The program gets solid marks from the experts.

Good preschool isn’t cheap, though. Says Wilkins, “There’s no point in subsidizing low-quality programs. Because we haven’t invested in quality, we haven’t gotten the returns we want.” That could mean more than $20 billion in new funding from the states and the feds. What kind of return could we expect? Experts who studied the Chicago preschool program estimated a return on investment of $7.14 for every $1 spent.

5. Leave the Car at Home — and Shake Loose Our Oil Dependence
Despite the lessons of the Arab oil embargo of the ’70s, we still import 58 percent of our oil. And given the pace of industrialization, especially in China and India, supplies are likely to get tighter and tighter.

We see a way to address both of these problems: Turn fuel conservation into a giant national reality show. Let’s pick one week when we’ll ask every American driver to save one gallon of gas. Walk. Carpool. Consider a high miles-per-gallon car.

There are 130 million drivers on the road in the United States. A typical person drives 32 miles in a day, getting 22 MPG. Just one gallon from each of us would add up to 6.7 million barrels of crude oil — more than we import from Kuwait in a month.

6. Strike a McTreaty With Fast Food
Phil Esterhaus, the mighty desk sergeant on the old “Hill Street Blues” TV show, sent his cops to the streets with the admonition: “Hey, let’s be careful out there.” We’d like a similar resolution: “Hey, let’s be careful when we eat out out there.”

Here’s the problem. We’ve heard so often that two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese that those once shocking stats now seem almost normal. While it’s true that the food industry hasn’t done us any favors, what with giant portions and monstrous calorie counts, we’re the ones who bought the food and ate it. All of it. “The restaurants are good at what they do, and they’ll give us what they know we’ll buy,” says Penn State nutritionist Barbara Rolls. “If they put healthy foods out there and the consumer doesn’t buy them, then they’ll say, ‘I told you so.’ ”

We’d like to see both sides wise up and reach a peace — a McTreaty, if you will. The food industry should make good on its promises to serve healthier food. At the very least the chains should put calorie counts where we can see them, not hidden on a website, or in teeny type on a poster by the restroom. Consumers have responsibilities too. If restaurants serve food that’s better for us, we have to order the good stuff, not the triple burger and fries. That’s the only way to stop the cycle, and finally begin to drop those fast-food pounds.

7. Send Bert and Ernie (and Bart) to Baghdad
No matter how you felt about invading Iraq, at this point the United States has a challenge that won’t go away: educating a generation of Iraqi children about democracy and a liberal, civil society.

First we should invest heavily in classrooms and books, in Iraq and Afghanistan as well. But we should also export loads of the most vibrant American pop culture for kids: “SpongeBob Squarepants,” Toy Story and “Barney & Friends.” What better way to compete with fundamentalist madrassa schools, which use the Koran as their only textbook? We need to respect Muslim mores, so there’s a lot we can’t beam to Iraq, like “Friends,” or “Will & Grace.” But “Sesame Street,” Bugs and Mickey seem like great bets. And ponder the moral lesson of “The Roadrunner,” which is that speed and smarts will beat bombs, guns, rocks and even really big hammers any day.

Maybe some of this would rub off on Iraqi adults too. “There’s no age limit on laughing and learning,” says Martha Van Gelder of Sesame Workshop, which produces an Egyptian “Sesame Street” and another featuring Palestinian and Israeli kids. Before the war, only about 13 percent of Iraqis had access to a TV, but that number will jump once the power grid is back up. “The Simpsons” executive producer Al Jean says: “I think the flow of information is the friend of democracy. The more a country has, the better.”

Now over to you… What’s your New Year’s resolution for America? Tell us what you’d hope for — and how far you’d go to make it happen. Write to us at letters@rd.com.