EARLY CHILDHOOD INITIATIVE MIGHT BE EFFECTIVE, BUT ...

Saturday, July 19, 2003

Susan Urahn, director of educational programs for the Pew Charitable Trusts, visited the News earlier this week to talk about the trusts' initiative on early childhood education, which they call ``Starting Early, Starting Strong.'' Their goal is to promote access to ``high-quality prekindergarten for all 3- and 4-year-olds.''

Maybe that really is a good idea. It's certainly a politically attractive idea, apart from the tens of billions of dollars it would cost to add two years to the length of time children now spend in tax-supported public education. It's just that my previous encounters with Pew initiatives have led me to believe that often the best thing you can say about them is that they are embarked upon with the most excellent intentions.

There was ``Civic Journalism,'' for instance, the peculiar notion that the reason so many Americans distrusted the media was that their newspapers weren't political enough. And Pew was an early supporter of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, which may yet find a role as a useful tool for mid-career professional development, but is unlikely to prove an effective or efficient tool for identifying truly excellent teachers.

Well, never mind. Here's how Urahn lays out her case. You decide.

First, there is a steady long-term increase in the number of 3- and 4-year-olds who are enrolled in some kind of early education, and it's not just the children of mothers who have entered the labor force. According to Census Bureau figures, in 1967, less than 10 percent of children that age were enrolled, while by 1998, it was a little over 50 percent for children of working mothers and a little over 40 percent for children whose mothers were at home. The graphs track each other closely.

Many of those children are in centers whose primary focus is day care rather than education, Urahn said. Less than a fourth provide an environment that is ``developmentally appropriate,'' according to the National Association for the Education of Young Children. That contributes to the fact that 35 percent of American children come to kindergarten unprepared.

Of the children who don't know their letters and numbers when they start kindergarten, nearly one in five has to repeat the year -- not a good omen for their success in school. And while it's true that the poorest children score the worst on tests of reading readiness, the gap between them and middle-class children is smaller than the gap between middle-class and upper-class children (as measured by the parents' socioeconomic status). So the benefits of effective prekindergarten education would be broadly spread through the population.

Some demonstration programs are effective, and cost-effective as well because they reduce later academic and social problems. The National Institute for Early Education Research, established with a grant from Pew at Rutgers University, reports that half the children in the Chicago Child Parent Center program graduate from high school, compared with 39 percent of a comparable population who aren't in the program. Special education placements drop from 25 percent to 14 percent, and juvenile arrests from 25 percent to 17 percent.

The difficulty comes in scaling the programs up from dozens of children to hundreds to millions. Even if money were no object -- and it is -- who would staff these programs? And would the cost-benefit ratio be as favorable if the programs covered many children unlikely to drop out anyway?

And now that I'm back in skeptic mode, I note that there are fashions in these matters. Rima Shore, writing in the fall 2002 issue of the Pew trusts' magazine, says archly, ``by the '30s, it is estimated that nearly 40 percent of 3-year-olds in Massachusetts attended preschools . . . and I'm talking about the 1830s.'' Educational theorists of the time claimed that beginning children's formal education before they were 6 or 7 caused ``serious and lasting injury'' both to the body and the mind.

So the starting age for schooling went up for a while and then started back down with the widespread introduction of kindergarten. But that's in America. Other countries make different choices. Almost all French children are in preschool by age 3. But the same level of enrollment is reached in Japan only by age 6 (and learning to read Japanese is a much more demanding task than learning to read in any alphabetic language). Children can start sooner than they commonly do here without harm, or they can progress faster when they do start. It appears that either works.

What doesn't work, Urahn says, is a patchwork of opportunities in which the best early education often goes to the children who already have the most advantages. In that, at least, she and the Pew trusts have a point.