by AFT President Sandra Feldman
September 2001

High-quality early
learning opportunities
can help close the
achievement gap.

It’s September and the return of yellow school buses and back-to-school sales reminds us that a record 53 million kids are heading back to the classroom. Of those children, nearly four million will be starting kindergarten this year. The good news is that almost all of them are eager to learn, well-behaved, and healthy. And according to a major study on early childhood by the National Center for Education Statistics, most have the basic skills and knowledge they need to begin to read and count and discover more about their world.

But there is also some bad news. A small but significant percentage of our youngest children, primarily kids from low-income families, are in poor health and lack the pre-literacy, pre-math, and social skills that more advantaged youngsters have when they start kindergarten. Most of these children are perfectly capable of acquiring those skills, but they just haven’t been exposed to the kinds of experiences and informal learning opportunities that produce them.

Without those early learning opportunities, it’s hard for disadvantaged children to catch up with their more affluent peers. In fact, the study found that, while the children who had been behind at the beginning of the school year made great strides and had closed the learning gap in basic skills by year’s end, the more advantaged youngsters continued to have an edge, especially in higher order skills. In short, despite the terrific job their teachers did, they were unable to compensate for what many poor youngsters, because of their poverty, could not get outside of school.Outside influences

It is clear that a critical part of closing this achievement gap is to get it right from the start. That’s why we not only need full-day kindergarten available to all children, but also a national commitment to make high-quality, preschool education, starting at the age of three, universally available-not compulsory, but accessible and affordable to all-with first priority given to needy children.

A few communities are now doing this, but we need a national effort. We already have a foundation on which to base such a system of early childhood education: Head Start, the early learning program for disadvantaged children. It will be up for reauthorization soon. We must fully fund it so it not only covers all eligible children, but also provides them with a high-quality program and includes the health and social services and parent involvement components now present in Head Start. Evaluations tell us those features are as important to children’s success as getting them academically prepared.

But we also need to expand beyond Head Start-to create a universal program of quality early childhood learning and care. There is hardly a working family in America, whether poor or middle-class, that hasn’t experienced the anxiety of finding quality preschool and care for its children, and hasn’t been forced to leave them with relatives or even strangers, while wondering whether videos will be the children’s primary fare for the day. And families lucky enough to find a good preschool may have to defer saving for their children’s college education because of soaring preschool costs.Share the costs

We can establish a successful universal early childhood education program through cost-sharing. By that I mean first, let’s leverage federal, state, and local funds to establish the quality system we need and make it a priority to pay the costs for poor families who want to enroll their children in preschool. Second, let’s ask other families who want their children in quality preschools and can afford to pay some, or all, of the costs to do so according to a reasonable schedule of sliding-scale fees.

This would make building and running a preschool system eminently affordable. It would give poor children the access to high-quality early childhood education that they are now largely denied-putting them on equal footing with other children in those critical early years, rather than starting behind and having to play catch-up their entire lives. And working and middle-class families would get a higher-quality early childhood arrangement at less cost, something they desperately want.

Quality preschool will pay for itself in the long run, not only through increased student achievement and greater parent satisfaction, but in lower dropout and delinquency rates and greater economic productivity. Answering this common need that America’s families have would enable children of all backgrounds to learn together right from the start, and give real meaning to family and civic values. What, after all, could be more important to realizing the promise of this great democracy?