Preschool, Performance and Politics

President Barack Obama announced his federal budget proposal in May 2009, a plan that includes substantial measures to improve and increase access to early education opportunities across the country.

The “next major reform movement in public education" -- as predicted in the piece below by the Oregonian's Bill Graves -- is now here. This piece was originally published on February 12, 2007.  Graves is a staff writer for the Oregonian and covers social issues. A former Journalism Center fellow, Graves has written for the Foundation for Child Development on the merits of PK-3 strategies that connect pre-K with primary grades.

(Editor’s Note: some of the original links in this story have been updated.)

By mid-morning, the 4-year-olds in Nancy Smith’s pre-kindergarten class in Seattle are immersed in other worlds. Two boys knead clay in the kitchen as they pretend to make cookies. Nearby, a girl with a purse over one arm prances about with a toy phone as she pretends to talk to her sister. In the blocks area, two boys lay wood tracks for a toy train. Over at the art table, a girl paints red tulips reaching for a blue sky.

It looks like play, but this is how Smith’s students learn new words, good social skills and concepts of space and number. Educators, politicians and business leaders are concluding that preschool classrooms like Smith’s provide fertile ground for closing the achievement gap, boosting student performance, producing better workers and raising earnings. University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate James Heckman estimates returns of up to $17 for each dollar invested in pre-K.

Until recently, with the exception of the federal Head Start preschool program for low-income children, government has largely left early childhood education to a patchwork of child-care centers and private preschools offering a range of costs and quality. Now, as government gets more involved in pre-K education, so must reporters.

Smith’s class is one expression of the hope leaders are placing in preschool. It is the beginning grade at The New School, a public elementary school created from scratch five years ago in a diverse, low-income neighborhood of Seattle with help from an anonymous donor. Eight of Smith’s 18 students are bilingual.

The Developmental Reading Assessment, a widely used test to evaluate primary reading levels, last spring showed 96 percent of New School first graders and 97 percent of second graders were reading at grade level – well above district averages of 74 percent and 84 percent, respectively. It is those kinds of results that make pre-K a hot issue nationwide.

A growing number of early childhood education advocacy groups, such as Pre-K Now in Washington, D.C., are pushing for pre-K expansion. So are some foundations and a variety of other organizations, including the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Committee for Economic Development. The National Center on Education and the Economy, in its (2007) report, “Tough Choices or Tough Times,” says a high-quality education for every 3- and 4-year-old is critical if the nation is to prepare all students, and not just some, to compete in the global economy.

Investing in preschool was a priority in the 2006 campaigns of 24 governors, and 31 states have increased their financial commitments, with pre-K investments up by more than $1 billion over the last two years.

“I don’t know of another education program or reform that has gotten a billion new dollars in the last two years,” says Stephanie Rubin, who monitors state programs for Pre-K Now.

More action may be unfolding at the federal level, too, as Democrats take control in Congress, says Mimi Howard, who tracks early learning for the Education Commission of the States. “There is likely to be a lot more discussion around early learning than there has been in the past,” she says.

Leaders are pushing to expand pre-K because they feel political pressure from No Child Left Behind and economic pressure to dramatically raise student performance for all children, experts say. Research – not only from educators but also from brain scientists, economists such as Heckman and think tanks like RAND Corporation – suggests Americans may reap the greatest return from their education dollars by sowing them at the pre-K level. Longitudinal studies show children who attend high-quality pre-K are not only more likely to get good jobs and pay taxes, but they also are less likely to quit school, need remediation or commit crimes. Various cost-benefit studies show a return of anywhere from $2 to $17 for each dollar spent.

“A large body of research in social science, psychology and neuroscience shows that skill begets skill; that learning begets learning,” Heckman writes. “The earlier the seed is planted and watered, the faster and larger it grows.”

Pre-K is necessary but not sufficient, some proponents say. Pre-K benefits are sustained and amplified, argues the Foundation for Child Development in New York, when preschool is connected with full-day kindergarten and primary grades in one coherent pre-K through grade 3 program. (It’s part of a growing call to align education curricula and academic expectations through college.) The Chicago Longitudinal Study, for example, showed achievement was higher for children who spent up to four years in an experimental public school program that connected pre-K to the primary grades than for peers who did not attend the program. Over the long term, the Chicago preschool graduates also had higher graduation and employment rates and lower rates of arrest.

Political and education leaders in numerous states, such as Oregon and Washington, are looking at preschool as one end of a continuum reaching through college. It appears the United States may be in the early stages of building a universal pre-K system, but it has a long way to go.

The 38 states that have state-financed preschool programs enroll less than 20 percent of the 8 million children ages 3 and 4. Most of those children in state programs are from low-income families, as are the 900,000 who attend federal Head Start pre-K.

Altogether, 57 percent of 3- and 4-year-olds attend a center-based education or care program. States collectively spent $2.8 billion on preschool in 2004-05, about 1 percent of what they spend on K-12 and less than half the $6.8 billion spent on Head Start. To put those numbers in perspective, the United States spends $72 billion a year to provide Medicare prescription benefits to at least 35 million Americans 65 and older.

Three states – Oklahoma, Georgia and Florida – now offer pre-K to all 4-year-olds and more states, such as Illinois and Massachusetts, are moving in that direction. Oklahoma enrolls the highest percentage of 4-year-olds in the nation, and a study in Tulsa shows preschool children are making significant short-term gains in pre-reading, pre-math and pre-writing skills, says William Gormley Jr., lead researcher and co-director of Georgetown University’s Center for Research on Children in the United States. “The gains are especially impressive for disadvantaged and Hispanic children,” Gormley says, “but there are gains for children across the board.” (Editor’s Note: See Gormley’s latest report from April 2009, “Social-Emotional Effects of Early Childhood Education Programs in Tulsa”)

Some academics question rosy research results on pre-K and whether benefits persist. "The fact is, the benefits of preschool are inherently temporary," says Matthew Ladner, vice president for policy research at the nonprofit Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank in Phoenix. In February 2007, Lardner published a study in Arizona showing that the academic gains children get from pre-K and full-day kindergarten are gone by the time they reach fifth grade. "It would be nice if preschool did have all these benefits that are claimed, but they fail to materialize,” he said.

The pre-K beat offers other controversies. Some social conservatives argue young children are better off with parents than in institutions. And what happens to private preschools and child-care centers when public pre-K expands? Where do public schools find space for pre-K classes? What are the qualities of a good pre-K program?

States are expanding pre-K in different ways and getting different results, giving reporters lots of comparisons for the local debates and developments they’re covering. Some states put quality first, ensuring preschool classes have no more than 20 children, teachers have college degrees, the curriculum is research based and aligned with K-12, and support services are available to children and their families. Illinois, for example, is expanding preschool spending by $40 million a year, with plans to offer pre-K to all 3- and 4-year-olds by 2011. Though Florida voters approved pre-K for all in 2002, the Legislature has failed to provide enough money to offer quality programs. Teachers, for example, are not required to have bachelor’s degrees.

“If you look at the data, it is something close to criminal negligence not to require” a college degree for pre-K teachers, says Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, which has compiled a list of pre-K quality indicators.

Probably the finest public pre-K programs operate in New Jersey, where 31 low-income districts were required by a 1998 court order to offer high-quality pre-K for all children ages 3 and 4. Union City School District complied by forming partnerships with child-care centers to develop preschool programs, and it sent child-care workers to college to earn their degrees. New Jersey districts spend about $10,000 per student for pre-K compared to the $2,600 per child that Florida spends.

Studies on the New Jersey preschools show students made higher gains in vocabulary, literacy and mathematical development than peers who did not attend the schools. In Union City, the proportion of fourth-graders meeting state standards in language arts climbed from 45 percent in 1999 to 87 percent in 2005. Most of those children attended the district’s preschools.

As on any beat, reporters will do their most revealing and vivid pre-K reporting on the ground level. And that means spending time in classrooms like Nancy Smith’s at The New School – classrooms that may be center stage for the next major reform movement in public education.

To learn more about early education:

Read Graves' related article, Covering Pre-K: Story Ideas

For studies by James Heckman, read:
The Productivity Argument for Investing in Young Children
The Case for Investing in Disadvantaged Young Children

First Focus: Impacts of Early Childhood Programs, Julia B. Isaacs, September 2008

Committee for Economic Development: The Economic Promise of Investing in High-Quality Preschool, 2006

Kellogg Foundation: Linking Ready Kids to Ready Schools, March 2009

NIEER.org:  The State of Preschool 2008  

NIEER.org:  Preschool Education and its Lasting Effects, W. Steven Barnett, September 2008