http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=406012JS
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By JOEL DRESANG and
SARAH CARR
jdresang@journalsentinel.com,
scarr@journalsentinel.com
About The Reporters
Sarah Carr, an education reporter, and Joel Dresang, who covers work force development, researched this story through a Journalism Fellowship in Child and Family Policy. The University of Maryland program is funded by the Foundation for Child Development.
Support for expanded
early education has ebbed and flowed in the 150 years since America's first
kindergarten opened in Watertown. Now, the tide is rising, as business leaders
and economists join neuroscientists in calling for more education for even
younger children.
The newest champions of
early education are pragmatists connecting the dots between impoverished early
childhood and squandered human capital. They're concerned about the poor
beginning of work force development in an increasingly knowledge-based economy.
They're tired of the wasted potential of disadvantaged children who eventually
wind up burdening - rather than becoming - taxpayers.
Early education is
mobilizing a motley assortment of supporters variously concerned about family
welfare, global competition and schools. Together, they're behind a
state-by-state surge that's sweeping younger children into education. Signs of
the wave are everywhere.
In California, more than a
million voters petitioned for a referendum, set for June, on whether the state
should fund voluntary preschool for all children. States as disparate as
Oklahoma and Florida already offer preschool for any family that wants it.
In Illinois, Gov. Rod
Blagojevich made "Preschool for All" the centerpiece of the
election-year budget he proposed this month. His plan calls for an additional
$225 million in state funding over five years so that 140,000 3- and
4-year-olds would be in voluntary pre-kindergarten programs.
In Wisconsin - and in 25
other states - funding increased for pre-kindergarten last year, with 10 states
raising it more than 30%. The number of Wisconsin 4-year-olds in publicly
funded schools is up by 45% in the last five years, to 21,000. Competition for
those youngsters is intensifying between private and public schools.
Just look at Milwaukee's
beleaguered Metcalfe Park, where the Educare Center opened in the fall. It's a
state-of-the-art prototype for educating newborns to preschoolers, sponsored by
the Buffett Family Foundations - the charitable legacy of one of the world's
shrewdest investors - with contributions from such corporate Milwaukee
stalwarts as Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance, Harley-Davidson, Master Lock
and the Marshall & Ilsley Foundation.
Here and elsewhere, the
primary stumbling block for the movement is money. Supporters are divided over
whether tax-financed preschool should target poor children or be open to all.
And others worry about the impact on existing child-care providers, whether
smaller programs can remain successful as they grow, and what is the best
method of teaching children that young.
'Critical mass of evidence'
Momentum has been fueled by
mounting evidence on the importance of developing a young child's brain and
economic studies that show a high return on investing in preschool children.
"There's a new,
critical mass of evidence that suggests that if you do preschool programs well,
the potential for impacting child development is much greater than if you take
those dollars and put them in almost any other kind of program," says
Arthur Reynolds, a child-development authority at the University of Minnesota.
Reynolds' long-term studies
of Chicago's Child-Parent Centers have found that poor children who went
through that intensive preschool program were much more likely to finish high
school and less likely to need special education or repeat a grade or get
arrested than poor children who didn't attend the centers.
Other studies have shown
that proper early education for low-income children leads to lower rates of
teen pregnancy, higher earnings and even better health for those children as
they grow up. Parents active in their children's programs are known to have
steadier employment and higher wages.
"Preschool is a great
engine for economic development," Reynolds says.
Reynolds and Judy Temple,
an economist at the University of Minnesota, have studied early education
experiments and shown that by the time poor children reached their 20s, the
benefits for every $1 spent on those programs ranged between about $4 and $10.
Putting it in investment
terms, Art Rolnick, senior vice president and research director for the Federal
Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, calculated the inflation-adjusted rate of return
to society for one of the programs at 12% a year, about twice the return from
the stock market historically.
Jack Shonkoff is an
academic pediatrician who led a project for the National Research Council that
showed that the most crucial opportunity for brain development is in the first
years. After that, brain circuits stabilize, reinforcing the adage about old
dogs and new tricks.
"The older you are,
the harder and more expensive it is to get change," says Shonkoff, of the
National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. "It's better to get
it right the first time than to fix it later."
James Heckman, a Nobel
laureate economist, agrees. He calls America "a second-chance
society" that freely funds remedial education and rehabilitation for
criminals when it could be preventing such expenses by investing more in the
early education of at-risk children.
"We're overspending in
the later years relative to under-spending in the early years," Heckman
says.
Less than 9% of public
spending on education is directed at children younger than 5, at which point
85% of the brain is developed. That's not to say it's too late to help people
after that, but it gets harder - and costlier - as time goes on.
In the transition from the
industrial age to a knowledge-based economy, the premium for education is
escalating. The holder of a bachelor's degree can earn $1 million more in a
lifetime than a high school dropout. Even so, projections show rising numbers
of dropouts by 2020 and only half the growth in college attendance as in the
'80s and '90s.
On the front line
Kelly Young teaches
3-year-olds at Educare and is the epitome of the effervescence, respect and
patience required in such a vocation. She has lived in Metcalfe Park more than
30 years and for 13 years ran a child-care center out of her home.
Young often spends free
time during evenings and weekends visiting the families of students. She says
it's important that she "bond with the parents."
At the dedication of
Educare in October, Young told the dignitaries, donors, preachers, scholars and
families gathered there that she applied for her job after learning that the
building and the curriculum were based on research about young children's brain
development. She called Educare a place, a program and a partnership that she
wanted to join.
Peter Buffett - a Milwaukee
resident and son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett - spoke of putting
"Milwaukee on the forefront of early childhood development" and
"strengthening a community in a way that we won't be around long enough to
see all the effects." Guests included corporate leaders and public
officials.
"Educare really is an
effort to get people to think about early childhood education in a different
way," says Dan Pedersen, president of the Buffett Early Childhood Fund,
which provided $2 million in capital for Educare in Milwaukee.
The model relies on private
and public money, as well as parent involvement, and uses highly trained
teachers in small classes to teach poor preschool children.
Pedersen says the program
is aimed at improving outcomes for children who otherwise might have poorly
qualified child-care providers working for meager wages. It's not about
"leftover business for leftover children to be conducted in leftover
space," he explained.
More mothers working
Earlier generations could
rely more on parents to prepare children for kindergarten. Back when President
Nixon vetoed the Child Development Act of 1971, which Congress had passed to
provide funding and standards for early education, about one-third of American
mothers with children under 3 were in the labor force. Now, it's more than 60%.
Working mothers have become
so much the norm that the federal welfare system - which was overhauled
following pioneering initiatives in Wisconsin - requires employment from
mothers whose children are 12 weeks or older.
Not only aren't parents
home as much for young children, but more children are being born into
circumstances that can put them at an early disadvantage for learning and
social skills.
Nationwide, about 20% of
children younger than 6 live in poverty; it was less than 17% 35 years ago. In
Milwaukee, 41.3% of all children are in poverty, the fourth-worst rate among
American cities.
Backers of expanded early
childhood education cite a great divide in the skill sets of students from
different socioeconomic backgrounds.
"Once a child falls
behind, he or she is likely to remain behind," Heckman says.
With the spread of
preschool, a divide of a different sort is emerging - the gap between children
of all income levels who have attended educational programs in their early
years and those who have not.
Gracye McCoy, a
kindergarten teacher in a poor neighborhood in Tulsa, Okla., can separate the
dids from the didn'ts almost immediately.
When they arrive in her
class, those students who attended a solid child-care, Head Start or preschool
program usually already can use crayons and pencils, McCoy says. They can cut
with scissors. They know more than a dozen letters. The ones who have not been
in a school-like setting usually haven't been exposed to any type of writing -
and might not know how to hold a crayon.
Even at the end of
kindergarten, McCoy says, the kids who did go through pre-kindergarten are
still ahead.
Many states are looking to
Oklahoma to learn about early education. At the urging of business leaders,
Oklahoma has built up a system for 4-year-old kindergarten that leads the
nation in percentage of 4-year-olds enrolled in school - 69%. Based on data
from the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University,
Wisconsin ranked ninth at 25%.
'Strange bedfellows'
The push for preschool
still stirs some traditional partisan political divisions. But the embrace by
some business leaders, as well as the support of Republicans in states such as
Oklahoma, have blurred political lines and formed "strange
bedfellows," observes William Gormley, co-director of the Center for
Research on Children in the United States, at Georgetown University.
One of the deepest divides
may be among proponents themselves as to whether to campaign for preschool for
all 3- and 4-year-olds whose parents want it or for targeted programs limited
to the neediest children from the poorest families.
With federal deficits,
defense expenses and spending pressures on state and local authorities, some
supporters of expanding early education contend that it's more feasible to
direct resources only at low-income children. Yearly costs for universal access
ranges from about $60 billion to $70 billion, based on separate studies by the
Brookings Institution and researchers at Rutgers. For low-income 4-year-olds,
the cost would be about one-fifth the cost for all 4-year-olds, according to a
University of Washington study.
At the ground level, Jeremy
Walton has an appreciation for the payoff of cultivating young minds. At Educare,
he's one of three teachers in a class of 17 pupils who are 3 and 4 years old.
As he waits for the
children to arrive one morning, Walton reflects on why he's teaching where he
is.
"The way I look at
it," Walton says, "these are the people that are going to be writing
my prescriptions. They're going to be teaching my grandchildren. They're going
to be protecting my home. They're going to be lawyers and dentists."
James Robinson, another
teacher, agrees.
"The younger we can
get 'em, the better they'll be out there," Robinson says, pointing his
thumb toward the window. In that direction, across the street, is a junkyard
ringed by barbed wire. Beyond that to the west sprawls the Master Lock factory,
down to about a fourth of the 1,200 employees working there less than a decade
ago.
On the other side of Master
Lock, six blocks from Educare, is the site of Milwaukee's first homicide of
2006 - a 17-year-old boy gunned down on the street, shot in the head, chest and
hip.
The community needs more
solid citizens, Robinson says, and a good start is helping the neediest
children get ready to learn. Another teacher, Kate Heifner, nods her head.
"And for kids who
don't get it at home," Heifner says, "all they have is here."
From the Mar. 5, 2006
editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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Photo/Jack Orton
Dorain Taylor,
4, traces numbers in a workbook at Milwaukees Educare Center for early
childhood education. Educare and other similar programs, in Milwaukee and
elsewhere in the United States, seek to give poor kids a head start in life.
Multimedia
Watch video essays and view audio slideshows discussing the benefits and challenges of early education.
GO TO INTERACTIVE
Audio: Interview with reporters Joel Dresang
and Sarah Carr
Audio: Interview with Nobel Prize winner
James Heckman
Online Chats
Daniel
Pedersen: The Buffett
Early Childhood Fund - Monday, noon
Ann Terrell
and Stacie Nelson:
Milwaukee Public Schools, Tuesday, noon
Related Coverage
Success
depends on an early start
Preschool's
open, and it's a challenge
Related Links
On the
following page are Web sites mentioned in the series as well as sites with
information on early education.
Web sites
The Series
Sunday: Business leaders, economists,
philanthropists climb on board.
Monday: A far
cry from traditional child care.
Tuesday: For
everyone, or just a few?
Preschool Investment
Graphic/Bob Veierstahler
Click to enlarge
Pay-Off Of Early Education
Graphic/Bob Veierstahler
Click to enlarge