Only about one-third of children attending school in the United States can read proficiently at fourth grade, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as "the nation's report card." If that is not dismaying enough, consider the outcomes for the nation's most vulnerable students. The first eight years of children's experiences, from birth through third grade (B-3rd), lay the critical foundation of cognitive, social, and emotional skills on which the entirety of their future learning rests. How can state policymakers lessen the achievement gap and improve literacy outcomes for all children? This report examines the state of early education policy in all 50 states and Washington, DC and offers a framework for moving forward. Most of the policies in this scan center on PreK-3rd grade, but given the importance of what happens before pre-K, the authors include a few areas where states can and should establish policies to better support children's literacy and overall learning and development from birth. States were placed into the categories of "Crawling," "Toddling," or "Walking" based on their progress toward achieving 65 policy indicators across seven individual policy areas and across all of them together. The majority of states, 34 and Washington, DC, are "Toddling," meaning they are meeting some indicators but clearly lacking on others. Only five states are "Walking": New York, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Connecticut, and Wisconsin. Finally, the report identifies the 11 states that have the most work to do--Kansas, Kentucky, Arizona, North Dakota, Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming, South Dakota, New Hampshire, and Montana--as "Crawling." The majority of states in this category do not have public pre-K programs and do not require districts to provide full-day kindergarten. Two appendices are included: (1) Other Structures, Processes, and Policies That Matter; and (2) More Details about State Policy Indicators. [This paper is accompanied by a data visualization tool on New America's policy analysis platform, atlas.newamerica.org. These two components combined make up New America's complete "From Crawling to Walking" project.]