Bottom
Line: Let's Truly Invest in Children
Early childhood education promises
much for many. Is it early intervention, designed to
identify and treat physical and developmental delays before
school entry? Is it pre-kindergarten services for
four-year-olds, two hours a day to provide learning-related
skills prior to kindergarten entry? Is it child care, run by
that nice lady down the block, to provide a place for
children while their parents work?
Regardless of which goal it is
addressing, early childhood education is an area of public
policy that faces many challenges such as limited funding,
as it tries to reconcile parental needs and children's
development, and address hardships associated with growing
poverty.
The Brookings Institution and the
National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER)
waded into this conversation with a new compendium, Investing
in Young Children: New Directions in Federal Preschool and
Early Childhood Policy. The various essays are
thoughtful, well-researched and important for helping the
field address its many challenges, yet in many ways they
also avoid discussing the daily reality of early childhood
education for millions of families.
Twelve million children under age six
are in some form of early childhood education each day for
some part of the day. This could be Head Start, a state or
locally funded pre-kindergarten program for three and
four-year-olds in a public school, a family child care
setting in the home of a licensed provider, or a for profit
or nonprofit child care center. Because
child
care is expensive, and because public programs are
underfunded, the type of setting families use is often due
to luck or chance.
Regardless of the name over the door,
these settings vary in quality, in funding and in other
resources for children. They may not have enough books,
toys, qualified teachers or other staff. Or, they may
provide developmentally appropriate services that help
support children across the learning continuum by supporting
cognitive, emotional, social and physical development while
also addressing family needs.
Yet when each of these children get to
kindergarten -- regardless of whether they have been in a
program of sufficient quality and funding -- public
policymakers increasingly want to know if they are
"ready". When they fail -- often on cognitive
measures alone that may be inappropriate for their age,
stage of development or home language and culture --
programs like Head Start and Early Head Start are held
responsible. We hear that programs are expensive and that we
are not getting the outputs we need.
What the public rarely hears is that
high-quality programs do help young children succeed by
building the real skills needed to thrive in school and
society. James Heckman, a Nobel Prize winning economist,
notes
that we must "develop cognitive skills, social skills
and physical well-being in children early-from birth to five
when it matters most." Kindergarten teachers agree
that
self-regulation and other social and emotional constructs
are the most important skills for children to have for
school.
The
Association
of Small Foundations has a similar point of view:
"School readiness is more than just reading, writing,
and arithmetic. School readiness encompasses a child's 1)
physical well-being and motor development; 2) social and
emotional development; 3) approaches to learning; 4)
language development; and 5) cognition and general
knowledge."
Further, Heckman notes that the
long-term rate
of return for investments in programs that work -- such
as Head Start and Early Head Start -- is six to 10 percent
per year.
What does all of this mean? It means
that as a nation, we should commit to providing Early and
Periodic Screening, Diagnosis, and Treatment (EPSDT) for all
vulnerable children, fully funding Head Start and Early Head
Start, promoting home-visiting programs for families at
risk, and helping families at or below 200 percent of
poverty get help paying for child care that is of sufficient
quality to support their children's development while they
go to work. We can take the best from what we know about
early childhood education from thoughtful research and
evaluation and make improvements to these programs by
implementing higher program standards, especially for
infants and toddlers, providing health and other supports to
help children develop across the full range of domains, and
paying for well-trained and well-compensated teachers for
every young child in early childhood programs.
In short, it means, as Brookings and
NIEER suggest, truly "Investing in Young
Children."
