Renewed interest in public education for prekindergarten raises familiar questions about taxpayer costs, teacher credentials, and the sociopolitical implications of government-funded schooling for toddlers.
Although it's been more than four decades since the newest generation of grandparents attended elementary school, their grandchildren still do not have universal access to prekindergarten education. The debate over whether the United States ought to mandate education for 3- and 4-year-olds has bounced around since Project Head Start was conceived in 1964.
Education professionals, neuroscientists, economists, psychologists, and policymakers cover the spectrum of views for and against publicly funded universal preK. Most neuroscientists believe that the pre-adolescent brain should be nurtured early and stimulated frequently (Wolfe, 2003). In a 2005 PBS interview, Jay Giedd, chief of the National Institute of Mental Health's Brain Imaging Child Psychiatry Branch, referred to the critical stage of pre-adolescent brain development as "pruning." He cited a "use-it-or-lose-it" hypothesis in discussing the importance of early childhood education.
In addition to scientific arguments favoring early childhood education, advocates say it makes good economic sense to provide universal preK for children whose parents have full-time jobs and leave their toddlers to the care of noneducators.
Summarizing the arguments on behalf of universal preK, Maryland's Montgomery County Public Schools Superintendent Jerry Weast believes the American public must focus on providing full access to preK. "There is ample research out there to support it," Weast says. "Early childhood education is not only a good idea, it's a must-do, and it happens to coincide with our findings that children are natural learners at that age" (interview, May 29, 2007).
Point, Counterpoint
One of the strongest arguments against mandatory public education for 3- and 4-year-olds is that taxpayers already subsidize the nation's Head Start program, which Congress recently reauthorized at an estimated cost of $7.4 billion for fiscal year 2008 (Goldfarb, 2007) and which President George W. Bush supported in his 2007 budget proposal at a cost of $6.8 billion (Office of Health and Human Services, n.d.).
Pre-K Now, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization, estimates that state spending on prekindergarten nearly doubled between 2005 and 2007, from $2.4 billion to $4.2 billion. Several states have expanded public preK education in varying but considerable degrees, ranging from legislated, free preschool for all 4-year-olds in Georgia (Barnett & Hustedt, 2003), to mandatory court-ordered prekindergarten services in New Jersey (Jacobson, 2007), to voter-mandated voluntary preschool for all 4-year-olds in Florida (Wat, 2007).
According to the Education Commission of the States, other states have taken significant steps toward adopting or expanding universal prekindergarten programs including Arizona, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Oklahoma, Vermont, and Virginia.
Europe Versus United States
In addition to free-market advocates' aversion to education subsidies, civil libertarians argue that universal preK is a form of socialism, whereby the "state" becomes a caregiver for U.S. toddlers. One organization that takes a skeptical view of mandatory universal preschool programs is the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research in New York. "U.S. students, while better prepared than most of their international competitors up to third grade, slip in performance in public schools as they progress through the elementary grades. . . . Why combine a currently effective pre-K solution with an often ineffective K–12 system?" (Goldsmith & Meyer, 2006).
Mary Ellen Freeley, a recent past-president of ASCD, takes issue with the notion that the U.S. preschool system is superior to government-funded programs in Europe and other advanced countries.
"In order to meet the needs of every child, preK education cannot be left to the private sector," Freeley says (interview, May 29, 2007). "It must become part of the fabric of our public educational system and become available as part of a free public education. If other countries can make this commitment, then we must as well."
Indeed, it's widely accepted that Italy has among the best early childhood education programs in the world. Although Germany's Friedrich Wilhelm A. Froebel, the founder of the Universal German Educational Institution, is credited with conceiving kindergarten in the mid-19th century (Froebel Foundation USA, 2001), it was a group of parents in the Italian village of Reggio Emilia that began exploring progressive approaches to teaching very young children. Founded by Loris Malaguzzi in 1963, the Reggio Emilia philosophy promotes equal partnerships among children, parents, and teachers. Children are encouraged to exchange ideas with teachers and parents and to provide feedback about their own education (The Innovative Teacher Project, 2007).
Finland is another country on the leading edge of early childhood education. In the early 1970s, Finland changed its education system, moving away from a vocational either/or academic focus toward a comprehensive approach that integrates students of all intellectual abilities and socioeconomic levels; in other words, an egalitarian approach to education for all Finnish children from grades 1 through 9. Preschool is optional, but it is free (Moore, 2007).
U.S. News & World Report boasts that in 2003, "Finland ranked first among 40 industrialized nations in reading literacy, first (with Japan) in science and second in math" (Moore, 2007, p. 54).
Freeley wrote a column on the benefits of early childhood education in the March 2006 issue of Education Update in which she noted that the research she incorporated into her essay demonstrates the positive impact of preK schooling. "Clearly, the goals of early childhood education should include helping children to make decisions, solve problems, and get along with others. Early education for the whole child cannot be reduced to teaching facts and skills" (p. 4).
Today Freeley says, "The biggest obstacle is the will power to do it. Universal prekindergarten must become a priority on the political front if it is to succeed. The multitude of presidential candidates should have it on their agendas, and all of us in the trenches should be advocating for it."
Dribbling with Politics
Democratic presidential candidates Senator Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) have incorporated universal preK into their platforms, and Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) supports early childhood public education programs. By comparison, none of the Republican candidates appear to advocate universal publicly funded prekindergarten.
Kucinich introduced the Universal Prekindergarten Act of 2003, which is still in committee. "By providing students with early educational opportunities, we can help lay the foundation for future academic success," Kucinich stated in a 2003 press release accompanying his House bill. "We must make the education of our youth a top priority" (Gordon, 2003, para. 3).
Clinton announced during a speech that if elected president, she intends to establish universal prekindergarten (Goldfarb, 2007; Healy & Cooper, 2007). In 1997 she cohosted a symposium titled, "White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning." During the conference, President Bill Clinton turned to the U.S. military to share its experiences with day care for the children of personnel.
The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) claims the U.S. military has a commendable recent history of implementing high-quality child care standards. These include systematic accreditation and oversight of centers; unannounced inspections of facilities and enforcement of standards; mandatory and rigorous training for personnel; and relatively sufficient funding.
"The [U.S.] military operates the nation's largest employer-sponsored child care program, serving more than 200,000 children daily," the NAEYC declared in an article titled "Lessons from Military Care" (Howe, 2000, para. 2). "Anyone interested in raising the quality of child care and other early education programs should consider how military child care has been improved" (para. 3).
Cradling Old Concepts
Before the notion that it takes a village—or a military base—to raise a child, Americans believed it took two civilian parents. Many still believe that toddlers aren't emotionally ready for school until they're at least 5 years old, despite evidence to the contrary.
More than 20 years ago, Betty M. Caldwell recalled the opposition she and her colleagues faced in 1964 to improve the plight of "young children who were known to be growing up in somewhat chaotic family circumstances" (Caldwell, 1986, p. 35).
"The idea of bringing infants together in groups was totally unacceptable," Caldwell wrote in a 1986 Educational Leadership article, "Day Care and the Public Schools—Natural Allies, Natural Enemies."
"The common fear was that even short-term separation of infants from their mothers would be tantamount to creating ‘institutional’ rearing conditions" (p. 35).
Caldwell was a founding staff member of the Kramer Project, a day care center in Little Rock, Ark., that was launched in 1969 and served children from 6 months through 5 years old. The project operated successfully through 1978. Caldwell's article addressed most of the challenges and concerns that still surround early childhood education. These include continuity between grades and from programs like Head Start and private day-care centers; personnel training and credentials; and integration of preK instructors with elementary school teachers—some of whom hold critical views of kindergarten and preK staff and don't necessarily embrace the notion of toddlers enrolling in elementary schools.
"Early childhood teachers often accuse elementary teachers of being concerned with subjects rather than children and of neglecting the whole child," Caldwell wrote in 1986 (p. 36).
Expanding Time
A vital aspect of incorporating preK—and kindergarten—into the U.S. public education system entails accommodating children for more than a few hours each day. This is particularly critical in a 21st century society composed largely of dual-income households.
"The most important component of the Kramer Model," Caldwell wrote in her Educational Leadership article, "was the conversion of the entire school to an extended day school [that] officially began at 6:45 a.m. and closed at 6:00 p.m. year round" (p. 36). Caldwell called traditional school starting and ending times "anachronistic," noting that "once we fully understand today's demographic realities, the question of whether schools should provide day care will become totally obsolete" (p. 37).
Leaping forward to the current school year, Montgomery County's school district expanded its 2007 kindergarten classes to full days, and Superintendent Weast lists this as a top priority for preK classes as well. "In the past 50 years, we haven't changed time at all in school," says Weast. "We can't run with my father's school schedule. It's not working."
Weast notes that each of the past four decades has brought increased demands for more credits and harder curriculum. "By the 1990s," Weast points out, "colleges became more selective and they implemented stricter entrance-exam requirements. By the 2000s, the types of courses changed from algebra to precalculus and other AP-level high school classes."
"When you back-map that," he continues, it begs the question, "What does a kid need to know at 4 years old to hit that [college] trajectory?"
Weast speaks with frustration when he compares the collective thinking of Americans to Europeans and citizens of certain Asian nations like Japan and South Korea. "We are the only industrialized, developed country that doesn't have early childhood [public] education. If other countries are doing this, then we obviously need to change our attitudes."
Addressing assessment mandates purported to level the playing field for all U.S. students of all races and all family-income levels, Weast says, "There is ample evidence that children whose parents are unable to afford preschool are falling farther behind."
Laura Kohn, executive director of The New School Foundation, says: "Low-income and even middle-income families cannot afford to pay sufficient tuition to access high-quality preK programs. The gap between families' ability to pay and the cost of quality is too wide" (interview, May 30, 2007).
Kohn reports that the foundation provides a $1.3 million grant to Seattle's New School, which offers public prekindergarten through 4th grade for students who are taught by fully certified teachers and paraprofessionals. Kohn says the New School uses the High/Scope framework and "follows a child-centered, child-directed approach to early education."
"Public education should continue to increase its role in prekindergarten education," Kohn states. "This does not require the elimination of private-sector options for preK, but we must create more publicly funded preK options if we wish to increase participation rates by low-income families."
Requiring Credentials
Seven years ago, 71.9 percent of Head Start instructors did not have college degrees (Resnick & Zill, 2000), compared to an estimated 86 percent of preK teachers in public schools who hold bachelor's degrees (Smith, Kleiner, Parasa, & Farris, 2003). In addition to the challenges of recruiting and retaining credentialed preschool teachers and providing appropriate training for teachers interested in pursuing preK careers, a bachelor's degree requirement could motivate private day-care instructors without sufficient credentials to attend college.
Goldsmith and Meyer (2006) contend in "Pre-K: Shaping the System That Shapes Children" that "moving 4-year-olds to government schools will be financially crippling for many families," because "a state program that provides early education only in the public schools will draw 4-year-olds into ‘free’ government schools" (Current Efforts, para. 2). This, they argue, will put a lot of private care centers out of business, thereby reducing the supply of day-care providers and resulting in significant cost-per-student increases for 3-year-olds and infants, who require significantly lower staff–child ratios.
Despite such costs, the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) contends degrees are necessary. PreK teachers with degrees "respond more sensitively to children's needs; are more actively engaged with the children they teach, [and] give children more positive feedback and encouragement" (2003, p. 1). The result, NIEER found, is that children in classrooms taught by teachers with bachelor's degrees play more imaginatively and creatively and score higher on language tests.
Freeley says she has no reservations about mandating that public prekindergarten teachers hold degrees: "Every preK teacher should not only possess a bachelor's degree but the degree should be focused on early childhood education, child study, and child development. In other words, the teachers need to be experts in the education of young children."
Weast points out, "Your instructors must have a level of understanding of pedagogy and child psychology that requires university-level training—and [preK teaching] needs to pay more."
Paying Market Value
One of the biggest challenges of incorporating universal preK into public schools is raising salaries for prekindergarten teachers. Requiring that preK teachers have college degrees will necessitate higher state expenditures if preK teachers are to be paid equitably.
Recently, the annual mean salary for public preschool teachers (exempting special education instructors) was $37,130, according to the U.S. Department of Labor's (2007)Occupational Employment Statistics: May 2006 report. Other elementary school teachers earned, on average, $48,730, while individuals who work for private day-care services were paid an average of $21,740.
The New School Foundation's Kohn addresses the subject of pay scales with candor: "PreK teachers paid at that level are very unlikely to deliver the level of quality that produces the positive outcomes we're looking for. Low-paid workers are usually low-skilled workers—underpaid high-skilled workers are unlikely to stay in their jobs for long. High-quality preK requires a stable, highly trained professional teacher corps."
As evidence that higher salaries for preK teachers produce better results, educators and policymakers should examine the Chicago Child–Parent Centers (CPC), which opened in 1967 and are still operating as Title 1 schools for 3- and 4-year-olds.
"The CPC pre-K program is of very high quality and features teachers with bachelor's degrees and certification in early childhood education who are paid on par with K–12 teachers" (Wat, 2007, Overview, para. 1). A study of 1,539 children born in 1979 and 1980 (989 of whom participated in at least one year of the CPC preK program) found that "attendees had higher reading and math achievement scores through 9th grade than did the children in the comparison group" (Main Findings, para. 2).
The longitudinal study also found that preK program participants were less likely to be arrested as juveniles (The Innovative Teacher Project, 2007; Reynolds, Temple, Dylan, & Mann, 2002). Pre-K Now concluded that two significant factors contributed to the better performance of CPC participants: credentialed teachers and adequate compensation.
Superintendent Weast believes higher salaries will be offset by the economic benefits to society. "We cannot afford to put people on the streets who are not educated. Early childhood education will produce extra capital that we need to run our country. If we don't do [universal preK], we will increase social costs such as prisons.
"I think what's at risk are our future leaders and the next generation of workers who will be taking care of us as we retire," Weast declares. "We have to think about what is collectively good for our country. We have to stop thinking, ‘I, me, mine.’
"We've got to start dreaming again as a country," Weast says softly. "We've got to start caring about our kids and our grandchildren."
