Now that preschool is making national headlines, the country faces a key question: Will the benefits of small, effective programs be seen if such programs are implemented on a large scale?
In Texas, the answer is yes.
Texas has a targeted pre-K program for disadvantaged children. In the 2010-2011 school year, the state served 224,000 three- and four-year-olds, including those who are homeless, speak limited English, and are eligible for subsidized school lunches. Funding goes to school districts, and schools can run their own programs or partner with Head Start and other early education and care providers.
The program improves children’s outcomes, according to a report released last fall by the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research. Children who had been in targeted pre-K did better when they got to third grade on standardized math and reading tests. These children were also less likely to be held back a grade and less likely to need special education programs. (more…)
John E. Pepper Jr. and James Zimmerman, two prominent corporate leaders, recently took to the pages of The New York Times to declare universal access to high-quality pre-kindergarten “not only the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do.”
Pepper is a former chairman and chief executive of Procter & Gamble and a former chairman of the Walt Disney Company. Zimmerman is a former chairman and chief executive of Macy’s.
“Children who attend high-quality preschool do much better when they arrive in kindergarten, and this makes an enormous difference for their later success,” they write in a Times op-ed. “The data on preschool is overwhelmingly positive. Although some studies suggest that the positive impact decreases over time, this is mainly attributable to differences in the quality of preschool and of the schooling that follows — not a deficiency in preschool itself.”
Pepper and Zimmerman cite a 2010 report from the Institute for a Competitive Workforce, a program of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which notes future savings of $2.50 to $17 for each dollar invested in high-quality early education. They cite Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman’s estimate of a 7-10% return on investment. They cite research that finds children who struggle with reading in third grade are four times less likely than other children to finish high school by 19.
“The connections from preschool to reading proficiency to high school completion — a bare-minimum requirement in today’s economy — could not be clearer,” they write. “Universally available prekindergarten is not only the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do. Raising lifetime wages (and thereby tax revenues) and reducing the likelihood that children will drop out of school, get involved in crime, and become a burden on the justice system more than make up for the costs of early childhood education. …
“We have spent most of our careers in business and have come to support quality prekindergarten for all children, especially those whose families cannot afford it, because we know these programs work. The only question is how to bring them to a huge scale. Our nation’s future demands it. If there ever was a nonpartisan issue, this is it.”
Head Start has been in the news lately, both because of the effects of sequestration on the program and because of discussion about its effectiveness in light of proposals to expand early education. W. Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, sheds light on the research in a recent column on the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog.
Barnett concludes that Head Start is neither as ineffective as its critics contend nor as effective as its staunchest defenders claim. “Which side is correct?” he asks. “Neither.”
Barnett discusses the recent report by the Department of Health and Human Services that critics say show the benefits of Head Start fade by third grade. Although the study, based on a large-scale randomized trial, is the best to date on Head Start, Barnett cautions that it “does not say what critics claim it says.” (more…)
High-quality early education – and efforts to expand it – continue to generate headlines in media outlets across Massachusetts. Here’s the latest round-up:
Clear case for early childhood funding
Boston Business Journal, op-ed by Paul O’Brien, former CEO, New England Telephone, and Arnold Hiatt, former president, CEO and chairman, StrideRite Corp., March 22, 2013
David Sciarra at State House event. (Photo: Micaela Bedell for Strategies for Children)
In 1998, in the landmark Abbott v. Burke school finance ruling that the New York Times called “the most significant education case” since Brown v. Board of Education, the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered the state to provide high-quality pre-kindergarten in 31 districts with the largest concentrations of low-income families. Fifteen years later, New Jersey has built a nationally recognized, large-scale system of early education that embeds quality across the private and public settings where young children learn. The latest report from a longitudinal study of the program finds substantial benefits that persist through fifth grade.
The New Jersey experience carries lessons for states across the country, but has particular resonance here in Massachusetts, which has focused its early education policy on improving quality throughout a mixed delivery system that includes public school pre-kindergarten, community-based centers, Head Start and family child care.
This was the message two New Jersey leaders delivered at a standing-room-only State House briefing yesterday attended by more than 50 legislators, legislative staff and educators. It was the message W. Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute of Early Education Research, delivered in Washington yesterday when he released fifth grade results from the longitudinal study of children who were in an Abbott class for 4-year-olds in 2004-5. NIEER found a 10-20% narrowing of the achievement gap for children who had one year in an Abbott preschool and a narrowing of 20-40% for children who had two years of preschool. (more…)
Photo: Caroline Silber for Strategies for Children
I recently shared the fascinating radio story from This American Life about how Oklahoma instituted universal pre-kindergarten in 1998 through what, essentially, was a stealth amendment that added a year to the state’s school funding formula. Now American Prospect weighs in with an article — Pre-K on the Range – that delves deeper into the Oklahoma story.
“Historically, Americans have operated on the assumption that kids will just somehow pick up such essentials along the way to ‘real’ school,” American Prospect reports. “But, with concerns mounting over rising dropout rates and grim earning prospects for poorly educated Americans, the matter of when and under what circumstances we begin to teach children is of growing importance. Guided by research that shows that most of the wiring for future academic accomplishment happens in the first five years of life, education experts have been exploring how to get our children off to a better, and earlier, start. Many point to France and some of the Scandinavian countries, where almost all 3- and 4-year-olds participate in good, public preschool.
“But the United States has several stalwarts of early education, too. Even with budgetary challenges, Georgia, Arkansas, and West Virginia have all managed to create high-quality pre-kindergarten programs with strong enrollment over the past few years. But it is… Oklahoma that offers the single best example of how preschool can work when it’s done well — of how it can elevate its students’ learning, expand the horizons of the educational system, and enhance the entire community.” (more…)
Photo: Caroline Silber for Strategies for Children
An old adage warns that there are two things one should never witness being made: sausage and legislation. In a recent radio story on This American Life, producer Alex Blumberg ignores this advice and provides a fascinating look at how Oklahoma in 1998 became the nation’s first state to have universal, publicly funded pre-kindergarten. The state legislature changed its school funding formula to include pre-kindergarten. Today, Blumberg reports, 75% of Oklahoma’s 4-year-olds attend publicly funded pre-kindergarten.
Did proponents of high-quality early education march out the evidence, launch a large grass-roots campaign, line up business leaders for the bully pulpit, and persuade a forward-thinking legislature to spend millions of dollars to adopt a proven strategy that would more than pay back the initial investment?
No. The change was hidden in an amendment to a bill on a related issue. A loophole in Oklahoma law had allowed school districts to pad their kindergartens with 4-year-olds as a way to collect large amounts of extra funding. A bill to close the loophole contained an amendment expanding the school funding formula to include pre-kindergarten. The bill’s sponsor talked up fixing the loophole, but remained silent on the seemingly obscure amendment. Thus, the loophole was erased, and preschool became part of the school funding formula. Listen to This American Life: PK-O for more on this stealth operation.
As Blumberg reports, schools immediately noticed an improvement in children’s school readiness, and research from Oklahoma joins other evidence of the benefits of high-quality early education.
WORCESTER – It’s hokey pokey time at the Children’s School in Quinsigamond Community College’s Child Study Center. Twenty preschoolers stand in a circle and put their right hands in and shake them all about. The adults in the room include three classroom teachers and four college students of early education. The students’ professor is observing through a window in the corridor when Charlene Mara, faculty coordinator of Quinsigamond’s early childhood program, and I stop by to watch.
The Quinsigamond program is a lab school, where students apply what they learn in their college classroom upstairs to the early education classroom downstairs. For one semester, they observe veteran early educators, who serve as mentors and model the best practices that the college students studied. In the second semester, students practice what they learned. At day’s end, the early educators join the students and faculty to discuss how they applied theories of child development and classroom management to their practice. The program, Mara tells me, is one of the few associate degree lab school programs, intertwining the academic with experience-based practice. It is also accredited by the National Association for the Education of Young Children.
On the day that I visit, the topic is group time. How did the early educators successfully transition children to circle time? How did they use strategic positioning? How did they introduce a new topic? What were children learning in circle time? How did the early educators guide the children from sitting to standing for hokey pokey? How does the hokey pokey meet the pre-kindergarten curriculum standards that Massachusetts aligned with the Common Core State Standards?
“This is the glue,” Mara says. “When we’re working on something with the students upstairs in the college classroom, that’s what the focus is down here in the Children’s School. (more…)
The audience at the November meeting of the Massachusetts Board of Early Education and Care broke into applause when the panel approved a fiscal year 2014 budget ask of $557,509,730, which is $69.4 million above current funding levels.
Our research and field associate, Emily Levine, who attended the meeting, reports that the $69.4 million will support access, quality and the early childhood workforce, as well as transportation. Here’s a breakdown:
An investment in quality: $15.6 million
Workforce quality: A rate increase of 3% to support an increase in salaries, benefits and stipends for early education and care workers ($13.8 million)
Quality Rating and Improvement System : A $1 million set-aside to support investments in QRIS and help sustain program improvements
Quality infrastructure: $0.8 million to support staffing to hold providers accountable for health and safety, quality care and quality programs
An investment in children and families: $36.2 million to open access for preschool-age children
An investment in transportation: $17.6 million to affirm the board’s June vote to increase the rate paid for transportation to support system improvements and the addition of an adult monitor on all vehicles carrying infants, toddlers and preschool-age children.
Associated Early Care and Education has operated a program at the Bromley-Heath public housing development for 60 years. It serves 80 children in a basement center. This is about to change.
Earlier this month, Associated announced it is ready to break ground on a $16 million children’s learning center that is expected to open in early 2014. The innovative new center will not only serve about 175 children up to age 8, but will also offer career-focused courses for adults and programs on parenting, nutrition and financial stability, The Boston Globe reports. The early education program will operate as a lab school, and its early educators will be required to have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher credential.
Funding for the center includes $5 million in federal grants, a $1.5 million state grant, and another $11 million in philanthropic donations and financing. (Check out the Boston Neighborhood News video above.)
“This is Associated’s crowning achievement and is the result of four years of planning and dreaming with many community partners to bring our vision to completion,” Wayne Ysaguirre, president and CEO of Associated, tells me. “The center’s goal is to engage the community – parents, civic partners, service providers, neighborhood leaders, public schools, health care institutions – to take a shared interest in helping young children achieve school readiness to succeed in school and in life.”
Approximately 200 people attended the groundbreaking ceremony, which highlighted early childhood development and family engagement, as well as the inter-agency cooperation needed to transform idea to reality. Ysaguirre, Secretary of Education Paul Reville, Boston Schools Superintendent Carol Johnson, Senator Sonia Chang-Diaz (co-chair of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Education), Representative Jeffrey Sanchez, and Bill McGonagle, administrator of the Boston Housing Authority, were among those who spoke at the event. Gregory Bialecki, Massachusetts secretary of housing and economic development, announced the state grant.
“We lead the nation in K-12 education, but we have large and persistent achievement gaps,” Reville said. “Schools alone cannot get the job done. We need to start early with high-quality early education for all children.”
Representative Sanchez called the center “a catalyst for change,” the Globe reports.
“Sanchez said that when he was 4, he enrolled in the Associated Early Care and Education center in the Mission Main housing development after his Spanish-speaking family moved from New York City,” the Globe reports. “’It’s where I learned English,’ he said. ‘I hope more children who are in the same situation that I was in can access programs like this.’”
Eye on Early Education focuses on the twin goals of ensuring that Massachusetts children have access to high-quality early education and become proficient readers by the end of third grade.
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Alyssa Haywoode comes to Eye on Early Education after a career in journalism that included writing editorials for the Des Moines Register and Boston Globe. She has written about education, human services, immigration, homelessness, philanthropy and the arts.
Eye on Early Education focuses on the twin goals of ensuring that Massachusetts children have access to high-quality early education and become proficient readers by the end of third grade.
