More Than Just Cute Kids

Abstract

THERE is a well-known adage in print journalism that a picture is worth a thousand words. If a cuddly baby or shyly smiling youngster is part of the picture, the value goes up immensely. It is this automatic appeal that helps explain to me why it has been much easier to develop a nationwide commitment to early childhood education than to a school-to-work transition. Little children mug for cameras with politicians. It is difficult to get a surly teenager even to look grateful. There are deeper reasons, of course, for such a stark contrast in policy. The collaboration needed to put together a nationwide school-to-work transition system for youths is far more complex and uncontrollable than the one needed to design a system for the care and education of very young children. Many policy makers and advocates for youths have worked on the issue for decades, and in the 1994 education legislation crafted by the Clinton Administration and Congress, the pieces seemed to be coming together. Standards were set for all students, states received seed money to establish better systems of transition from high school, and a national skills board provided goals for students. Once the five-year seed money program was used up, however, only a handful of states maintained the initiative. The movement to reform high schools is reusing a few planks from the structures developed under school-to-work programs, but, generally, states did not make transition programs permanent. By contrast, many states are absolutely gung-ho on early childhood education, although the Bush Administration seems to want to disinvest in it. (The Administration proposed cutting $200 million from Head Start and other early education programs this year.) Several recent leaders of the National Governors Association have put young children on a priority agenda, but even before that the Committee on Economic Development (involving business and higher education leaders), celebrities such as Rob Reiner, and the whole field of research on brain development combined to ensure broader public support for investing in young children. And it isn't just because they are cute. If regular schooling is going to be successful with all children, the playing field should be as level as possible from the beginning. The fact that a substantial gap in readiness for learning exists in kindergarten and that it stems primarily from income and race is a stark challenge for the best-intentioned teachers and school leaders in the primary grades. Policy makers who look at bottom lines recognize that this gap costs the education system a lot. A study released in September, for example, estimated that for every $1 Wisconsin spent on education programs for 4-year-olds, the state would save 68 cents later on by avoiding expenditures on special education and teacher turnover. Similarly, a RAND study of the impact of preschool for 4-year-olds in California predicted eventual savings of $2 to $4 for each dollar spent. The program costs would be recouped by the time the 4-year-olds reached age 14, it said. The longest study of the effects of preschool--the High/Scope Perry Preschool study--shows that, at age 40, the low-income children who participated in the project as 3- and 4-year-olds were still benefiting from it--and so was society. The program participants had higher incomes, were more likely to be employed, and were more law-abiding citizens than same-age members of the control group. The project's researchers estimate that the public saved $17 for every $1 it invested in the program. …