Concern and complaints abound over U.S. students’ low scores on international tests compared to other industrialized countries. The favorite culprits accused of causing the disparity are, in no special order: (1) Failing schools; (2) Failing teachers; (3) Failing parents (4) Low expectations; (5) Lack of common curriculum; (6) Too much common curriculum; (7) Inadequate funding; (8) Socioeconomic inequality. I’m sure I missed a few.
But one possible culprit that doesn’t come up as often as it should is lack of opportunities for quality early childhood education. The U.S. sits near the bottom of the list when it comes to the percentage of 3 and 4 year olds enrolled in educational programs. Is that one reason for our low scores on the international tests? Maybe so, maybe no, but it should be a larger part of our national discussion, even among the privatization/”education reform” crowd, who are all about charter schools and vouchers for private schools. If they care more about education than privatization, maybe those folks should be more into promoting early childhood education.
The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) administers the PISA international student testing, and it analyzes the results as well as other relevant educational information. It recently published Starting Strong 2017, a 200 page document focusing on early childhood education and care. Starting on page 128, it compares the enrollment rates of 3 and 4 year olds in pre-primary education in 2014 in about 35 countries. In the U.S., 40 percent of three year olds were in educational programs compared to an OECD average of 70 percent. Only five countries had lower numbers. Among four year olds, the U.S. enrollment was 70 percent compared to an OECD average of 85 percent. Only three countries had lower numbers.
Other industrialized countries favor early childhood education more than we do, and they tend to score higher on international tests. I’m not saying there’s a direct cause and effect going on here, but it’s certainly an important variable we should throw into the mix when we talk about improving education.
Not surprisingly, Arizona is well below the U.S. average. A total of 55 percent of 3 and 4 year olds are enrolled in early childhood programs in the U.S. In Arizona, the number is closer to 35 percent. We lag behind the rest of the country by roughly the same percentage as the U.S. lags behind the rest of the industrialized world.
This article appears in Sep 7-13, 2017.
David, you and your tribe love to come up with ideas on the theoretical level that sound great and sell them to the public with very little understanding of what the conditions on the ground are in the area where you are proposing change. “Early childhood education” is a term that covers a range of things, from Vivian Gussin Paley’s McArthur-genius-grant-award-winning work with preschoolers at the University of Chicago Lab School, where tuition for 4 year olds is more than most pay for college tuition, to McDayCare strip mall operations where people with no relevant qualifications and inadequate infrastructure for preschool education deliver “services” that do less for children’s cognitive development than watching Sesame Street at home would do for them. We know what the crowd you run with delivers under the name of “universal public K-12”: one contemporary example in our largest local public school district would be classrooms for lower-SES neighborhoods that are staffed with outsourced, underpaid long term subs with no teaching credentials. Given the hard, unyielding real-world Arizona conditions and circumstances surrounding publicly funded “education” (which include severe education labor pool shortages, rock bottom wages for educators, and the seeming total absence of meaningful regulatory oversight that can keep some of our public institutions serving lower-SES populations from deteriorating into deep dysfunction), it seems highly likely that what you might be able to offer in Arizona under the rubric of “early childhood education” would be on the McDayCare end of the scale rather than the Lab School end of the scale. At least for lower-SES neighborhoods that couldn’t afford to engage in well-informed, well-connected, and time consuming advocacy on behalf of their children’s best interests.
Try this for a change: instead of your utopian, pie-in-the-sky “what ifs?” start with existing institutions and improve them. Find a way of delivering uniformly high quality education to K-12 students in TUSD and every other local public district, from the foothills to the south and west sides of Tucson. Then turn to the public with a solid track record of sound accomplishments and ask them to turn over their three and four year olds to your public institutions. As things stand, turning a three or four year old over to a deeply troubled public institution like TUSD and assuming that the district could be trusted to serve their best interests and make use of their time in a way that would provide the kind of actual cognitive benefit you advertise as a possibility in this blog piece would seem inadvisable and naive at best; downright negligent at worst.
Setting aside the fact that test scores are a terrible measure of our society’s success in raising young human beings, early childhood education has no effect on test scores outside of neglectful households.
The last place 3 & 4 year-olds need to be is school, unless their parents are neglectful. But that seems to be our society’s goal. Whether through forcing both parents to work because of our economic system, or through the endless goal of sending them to school or childcare at younger and younger ages, the drumbeat seems to be: get them away from their parents and into the system.
Early childhood education can be a good thing, but people who have a track record of failing to monitor and report honestly on the quality of administrative decisions and funding allocations in public K-12 institutions should absolutely not be heeded when they attempt to solicit funding for pre-K. Safier actually proposed in one of his recent pieces that giving TUSD massive grants to educate 3 and 4 year olds would be a good way to help this troubled district increase enrollment and keep it from having to sell more school sites. This blog piece is no doubt more propaganda attempting to prepare the ground for that “pitch” to the voters.
Students need SOUND education, not “whatever-kind-of-education-can-be-delivered-in-a-diseased-public-institution-that-needs-saving-so-let’s-game-the-system-in-whatever-way-we-can-to-retain-the-enrollment-we-have-and-secure-more-enrollment.” But some partisans seem to believe that benefiting TUSD by finding ways to save it from the natural consequences (declining enrollment) of its own poor governance and administrative decisions is a goal higher than the goal of ensuring that good education gets delivered to students.
These people want to block legislation that would allow parents on tight budgets to transfer per-pupil funding from troubled institutions that year after year leadership either will not or cannot improve to institutions that deliver better educational services. Some of them can be observed trying to block the transmission of valid facts about actual conditions and administrative decisions in the district. Now it seems they want to add what would in all probability be low functioning, irresponsibly administered pre-school to low functioning, irresponsibly administered K-12. (TUSD’s existing preschools, introduced under the Sanchez administration, did not get good marks from many professional early childhood educators and administrators, a fact the district’s apologists conveniently omit when promoting their latest scheme for increasing enrollment.)
An approach that put students’ best interests first would look what TUSD is in the eye and tell the truth about it. Then it would work systematically and diligently to improve it. Only once those goals had been accomplished would it turn to recruiting more students. But this “save TUSD at all costs” agenda has become a monomania with some. If they really want to “support public schools” they should interrupt their frenetic, misguided “advocacy” activity long enough to reflect on the moral soundness of what they are doing. Perhaps then they would understand that their own behavior is doing a lot more to damage the reputation and validity of public education than any so-called “privatizer” could ever do.