The Call for Universal Early Education

Excerpts from a Conversation at the Askwith Education Forum Business leaders have long held a serious stake in how our nation's education system performs. After all, public schools bear the responsibility for creating a workforce that is innovative and industrious enough to compete in the global marketplace. Whereas business-driven educational reform has largely focused on the K-12 years, recent studies, including one by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), have now shown that the quality of care infants and toddlers receive can significantly impact their cognitive and social development through elementary school—and even beyond. These findings highlight the importance of providing learning opportunities for children in their preschool years. Still, surprisingly few federal policies address the need for early education. Earlier this year, the Askwith Education Forum series hosted a discussion on the potential impact of universal prekindergarten education on child development and on our nation's competitive standing within the global workforce. Three education and policy leaders offered their perspectives. Roy Bostock is the chair of the Committee forEconomic Development (CED), a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of business leaders and educators that advocates for strong state and federal government partnerships to ensure high-quality early education for every child. (CED's efforts led to the development of the Marshall Plan in 1942.) Margaret Blood is the director of the Massachusetts chapter of Early Education for All Campaign (EEA), which is supported by business, education, religious, and labor leaders. (Last December, the organization submitted a bill to the Massachusetts state house, proposing universal early education.) HGSE professor Kathleen McCartney is one of the principal investigators in the NICHD study that tracked the effects of child care on more than 1,000 children from birth through sixth grade. An excerpt of their conversation follows. [caption id="attachment_9030" align="alignleft" width="185" caption="Roy Bostock (©2003 Andrew Brilliant)"] [/caption] Roy Bostock: In the mid-1980s, we had CEO after CEO tell us that people applying for jobs out of high school were just not prepared. So we decided to take a hard look at early education issues and how they affect the growth and development of our future workforce. What we found is that we are failing in this country to develop our most competitive resource—our people. Early education is vital for children to develop to their full potential. Research shows that 85 percent of a person's intellect, personality, and social skills have developed by age five. Not only are children who attend pre-kindergarten 50 percent less likely to need special education services than children who have not, they also have lower rates of teen pregnancy, decreased delinquency, and higher rates of employment. One research project demonstrated that for every dollar invested in early childhood education, we received back seven dollars in lower costs of remediation and other kinds of compensatory costs. Society clearly pays for the lack of early education in many ways—from lost economic productivity and tax revenues to higher crime rates and diminished participation in civic and cultural life. Having issued a call to action in the 1980s with a policy statement titled "Putting Learning First," and having called for standards and accountability in the late 1990s, the CED thought it was time to address the imperative—indeed, to throw down the gauntlet—for early, quality childhood education in this country. The business community, the number one consumer of the education system, has a large role to play in universal pre-K; it's time it acknowledges the importance of educational investments in young children. [caption id="attachment_9031" align="alignleft" width="185" caption="Margaret Blood (©2003 Andrew Brilliant)"] [/caption] Margaret Blood: In the absence of a public policy commitment, we've allowed the market to take over and provide very high-quality services to a limited number of wealthy children and, for the most part, less-than-quality services to poor children, with lots of kids stuck in between. Bostock: [Those iniquities] were the catalysts for business weighing in on this. The children who are not adequately prepared for kindergarten end up never catching up; in fact, there's a 90 percent chance a kid who is not reading by grade three will drop out of high school. From a hard-nosed business point of view, dropouts are not going to be productive for businesses. Early education should not be a privilege but a right. As it stands now, public spending on early care and education for children from birth to age five amounts to about $20 to $25 billion annually; parents put up the rest of the tab, about $55 billion. By contrast, K-12 gets about $400 billion annually, and at least $100 billion is spent on postsecondary education, including student aid. I'm a Republican, and—this surprises a lot of people—I believe we need to advocate for tax increases if that's what we need to get these programs up and running universally. [caption id="attachment_9032" align="alignleft" width="185" caption="Kathleen McCartney (©2003 Andrew Brilliant)"] [/caption] Kathleen McCartney: Part of the problem is that even though 79 percent of children under three are in child care, we still have a profound ambivalence about our reliance on child care. We seem to think that child care is all right for children from economically disadvantaged families, because welfare-reform policies require mothers to work. However, child care is also often considered a "necessary evil" for middle-class children who have greater economic advantages; we worry that it disrupts the mother-child bond and that it leads to a plethora of bad outcomes from cognitive delay to aggression. Blood: I took a close look at this same issue by putting together two statewide, nonpartisan voter polls in Massachusetts, and then by interviewing 48 top opinion leaders who have the clout to influence what does and doesn't happen at our state house and the U.S. Capitol. We found that when you talk about early childhood education to voters and opinion leaders, their willingness to support it through taxpayer dollars is significantly greater than when you talk to them about child care. They have a pretty negative opinion about child care. Their impression is that it is custodial warehousing of children and that it is, in fact, a family responsibility. Bostock: We can convert those opinions if the federal government would provide incentives for states to construct a high-quality early learning system. States ought to take the lead in designing preschool systems—with the freedom to choose their own approaches—as long as all children have access to early education, consistent with recognized standards and obtainable from a variety of providers. But there is a clear and necessary role here for the federal government to get involved with funding, setting of standards, and developing the data to monitor these important programs. The CED is concentrating on four states right now: New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Massachusetts. McCartney: I agree. We need to help child-care centers meet standards. Only 39 percent of the settings that we observed in our NICHD study met the standards for care that have been outlined by the American Public Health Association, which means that 61 percent of the children in our study are in low-quality child care. Why? Because quality child care is expensive. Blood: Powerless children need powerful friends. It's a long-term vision, a 10-year vision. We must find a way to grow the revenue base by working with business leaders and the Massachusetts administration, and to ensure that this is, indeed, the next wave of education reform. What we need to do in Massachusetts and what we need to do nationally is to find a way to create the tipping point on behalf of our youngest and most vulnerable children. Malcolm Gladwell, the author of The Tipping Point, who's actually trained as a health-care reporter, looked at the causes that turn maladies into epidemics. And there may be something in his theory that can be applied to the social sciences, to making good things happen. He has found that you can create a movement by engaging people and spreading a social good. We invite all of you to join us on behalf of early education for all young children. About the Article A version of this article originally appeared in the Spring 2003 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.