Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 1, No. 3 | Early Childhood Education: Distance Learning For Teachers Adds A New Dimension, page 3

As research keeps raising the bar on what children need to thrive in preschool, the nation’s child-care programs look worse and worse. Only one-in-eight child-care centers was considered good-to-excellent in a recent study. Most were ranked as mediocre-to-poor, and some even provided less than the minimal care necessary to safeguard children’s health, safety and development. Infants and toddlers tend to be the most neglected, with 40 percent of their programs providing less than minimal services in a four-state survey in 1995. More than one-third of family-based child-care services put the children’s well-being in jeopardy, and only one-in-eleven of these programs was considered good, researchers said in 1994. Unfortunately, the children who are most in need of an enriching mix of care and education—those from low-income families—tend to be enrolled in lower-quality programs from birth.

Most programs operate on shoestring budgets, in part, because many states have not raised their reimbursement rates for years and, in part, because families can’t pay the higher fees that are needed to sustain high-quality private programs. A 1998 survey of urban child-care costs by the Children’s Defense Fund found that the average costs for four-year-olds in child-care centers exceeded $3,000, rising to more than $5,000 per child in 17 states. In 15 states, child-care costs were more than the annual tuition at a public college. The Census Bureau reports that one-out-of-three families with young children earns less than $25,000 a year; if both parents work full time at the minimum wage, their income is about $21,400 a year.

Not only does inadequate public funding contribute to the poor quality of child-care programs, inadequate state standards for caregivers and preschool teachers encourages mediocrity. To put the situation in perspective, hairdressers in more than 40 states are required to have between 1,000 and 2,100 hours of training at an accredited school to obtain a license, yet most states only require that professional child-caregivers and teachers be high school graduates. A 2000 study done at Wheelock College reports that most states do not require any pre-service training in child development for caregivers and teachers. State requirements for annual in-service professional development training for staff are also minimal—ranging from zero hours in Michigan to 24 hours in Maine.

Because caregivers are teachers, they should have a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education, according to the National Research Association, an operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences. Research has closely linked program quality to teaching quality—and that is directly related to the level of the teachers’ own education.

College graduates, however, have little economic incentive to work in preschool. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, child-care workers earn an average of $7.42 an hour, or about the same as parking lot attendants; preschool teachers earn an average of $9.43 an hour, or about $3 an hour less than the average animal trainer. Kindergarten teachers, by comparison, earn an average of $24.51 an hour.

Not surprisingly, child-care centers throughout the country report staggering turnover rates that range between 30 and 40 percent a year, according to the Center for the Child Care Workforce, an advocacy organization in Washington, D.C. In a recent study, done with the Institute of Industrial Relations at the University of California at Berkeley and funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the center analyzed turnover rates in 75 child-care centers in California. The average turnover rate of the centers was 30 percent, but that masked much higher rates in individual centers. In one year, six centers reported losing all of their assistant teachers and nine centers reported losing all of their master teachers. Turnover among child-care staff is a particular problem for young children, as research indicates that their ability to learn is diminished when they lack strong and stable attachments to their teachers.

“The question of who will teach our children is as pressing at the preschool level, if not more so, as for higher grades,” says Marcy Whitebook, the study’s director and a senior researcher at the Institute of Industrial Relations. “Without a skilled and stable workforce, efforts to provide growth-enhancing experiences for children are severely constrained. Compensation for those who care for young children must be increased dramatically and quickly.”

Preschool Reform:
Moving Beyond Lip Service

Even before the latest research, of course, the benefits of enriching preschool programs like Head Start for children of poor families were widely known—and almost as widely ignored. In general, the nation has been long on lip service to children’s needs and short on cash for their programs. The Congressional Budget Office reports, for example, that federal spending on all programs for children in the mid-1990s was about one-fifth of the spending on programs for people 65 and older—even though poverty affected twice as many children as older Americans.

At the moment, preschool reform has grabbed the political spotlight, if not the public budget. During the presidential campaign last year, George W. Bush repeatedly promised to “leave no child behind,” borrowing a trademarked slogan from the mission statement of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF).

Yet after President Bush introduced his first budget, Marian Wright Edelman, CDF’s founder and president, criticized the budget for leaving many children behind. She noted, among other things, that the Bush budget cut $220 million from programs that provide care and education for young children and that the budget also abandoned the goal of enrolling one million children in Head Start preschool programs by 2002. Currently, Head Start serves 860,000 3-to-5-year-old children from families living below the federal poverty level, or only 43 percent of the children eligible for the program; and because of long waiting lists in many areas, most children are only allowed to enroll in one or two nine-month, part-day sessions. “We must not let the words ‘leave no child behind’ become a fig leaf for unjust political and policy choices that, in fact, will leave millions of children and the poor behind,” Edelman says.

For now, the most persuasive reason to consider preschool reform as a real possibility is the simple fact that the public—and the economy—increasingly demand it now that most mothers of young children are in the workforce. Most families—and more politically important, three-out-of-four middle-class families—have come to rely on programs that care and educate their preschoolers.

The most recent government statistics show that, in 1995, 13 million children under age 6, or nearly 60 percent of this age group, were receiving some form of non-parental care, including that delivered by child-care centers, family child-care providers, in-home caregivers and relatives. Children whose mothers work outside the home spent an average of 35 hours a week in daycare and children whose mothers do not have outside jobs average 20 hours a week in daycare.

Since 1990, when the percentage of America’s children in daycare passed the halfway mark, the cultural debate about daycare versus maternal care became moot. “Child-care research has moved from asking whether child-care is detrimental to attempting to understand how variations in quality affect children’s development,” notes a study done at Mathematica Policy Research in 1996.

For children from low-income families, in particular, the long-term benefits of attending preschool programs are significant, according to W.S. Barnett’s review of 36 studies done prior to 1995. The research review concluded that children who attended good preschools were less likely to be held back a grade, less likely to be placed in special education classes and more likely to succeed in school and to graduate than their peers who did not attend preschool.

Now, preschool reform is widely seen as the only way the nation can meet its number one educational goal, set at the 1989 Education Summit in Charlottesville, that “all children start school ready to learn.” As it is, one-in-three children—and possibly up to two-in-three children in poor urban areas—arrive in kindergarten or first grade ill-prepared to learn. Academically, they lack the most basic knowledge about numbers and letters and are unfamiliar with scores of skills (print reads left to right) and concepts (numbers represent quantity) that are prerequisites to learning to read and do math. A disproportionate number of children from disadvantaged families fall behind in kindergarten, and many never catch up. About 40 percent of children, for example, do not learn to read with fluency and comprehension, a deficit that undermines their ability to learn anything in school.

Preschool reform, which includes open access to preschool programs, promises to narrow this intransigent achievement gap between affluent and poor children—a gap that is widening along with the influx of poor, non-English-speaking immigrants. Census reports indicate that one-in-five Americans speak a language other than English at home; in the federal Head Start preschool program, 22 percent of the children speak Spanish at home and four percent speak a total of 139 other languages.

Experts say that preschools’ popularity, track record and promising educational advances have reached a critical mass, giving preschool reform a life of its own. In its forecast, this year’s report from the National Research Council concludes: “Looking to the future, there can be little doubt that the United States is on its way to universal, voluntary, preschool attendance, not as the result of government mandate or expert recommendation, but as a consequence of parental demand and a myriad of private, state and federal initiatives that are continuing to extend early education throughout the country.”

It remains to be seen whether or not the United States will ultimately follow every other modern industrial nation in supporting a universal preschool program, but many experts say that the pressure for major preschool reforms can only increase as a new revolution in early childhood education rolls around the country. So, nearly 20 years into the K-12 school reform movement, the end is not in sight, but the beginning has suddenly snapped into focus: It’s preschool reform.

Michael deCourcy Hinds is the Corporation’s chief writer. Previously, he was a national correspondent for The New York Times and he also wrote citizens’ guides to social issues at Public Agenda, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research organization.