[Senate Hearing 111-1133]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 111-1133
ESEA REAUTHORIZATION: EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
=======================================================================
HEARING
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON HEALTH, EDUCATION,
LABOR, AND PENSIONS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
ON
EXAMINING ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION ACT (ESEA)
REAUTHORIZATION, FOCUSING ON EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
__________
MAY 25, 2010
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and
Pensions
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COMMITTEE ON HEALTH, EDUCATION, LABOR, AND PENSIONS
TOM HARKIN, Iowa, Chairman
CHRISTOPHER J. DODD, Connecticut MICHAEL B. ENZI, Wyoming
BARBARA A. MIKULSKI, Maryland JUDD GREGG, New Hampshire
JEFF BINGAMAN, New Mexico LAMAR ALEXANDER, Tennessee
PATTY MURRAY, Washington RICHARD BURR, North Carolina
JACK REED, Rhode Island JOHNNY ISAKSON, Georgia
BERNARD SANDERS (I), Vermont JOHN McCAIN, Arizona
SHERROD BROWN, Ohio ORRIN G. HATCH, Utah
ROBERT P. CASEY, JR., Pennsylvania LISA MURKOWSKI, Alaska
KAY R. HAGAN, North Carolina TOM COBURN, M.D., Oklahoma
JEFF MERKLEY, Oregon PAT ROBERTS, Kansas
AL FRANKEN, Minnesota
MICHAEL F. BENNET, Colorado
Daniel Smith, Staff Director
Pamela Smith, Deputy Staff Director
Frank Macchiarola, Republican Staff Director and Chief Counsel
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
__________
STATEMENTS
TUESDAY, MAY 25, 2010
Page
Harkin, Hon. Tom, Chairman, Committee on Health, Education,
Labor, and Pensions, opening statement......................... 1
Burr, Richard, a U.S. Senator from the State of North Carolina,
opening statement.............................................. 2
Griswell, J. Barry, Board Member, Former Chairman and Retired
Chief Executive Officer of Principal Financial Group, President
of the Community Foundation of Greater Des Moines, and a Member
of the Berry College Board of Trustees, Des Moines, IA......... 5
Prepared statement........................................... 7
Schweinhart, Lawrence J., Ph.D., President, High/Scope
Educational Research Foundation, Ypsilanti, MI................. 9
Prepared statement........................................... 11
Pianta, Robert C., Professor of Education, University of
Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.................................. 18
Prepared statement........................................... 21
Zalkind, Henrietta, Executive Director, Down East Partnership for
Children, Rocky Mount, NC...................................... 30
Prepared statement........................................... 32
Brown, Hon. Sherrod, a U.S. Senator from the State of Ohio....... 46
Sanders, Hon. Bernard, a U.S. Senator from the State of Vermont.. 48
Franken, Hon. Al, a U.S. Senator from the State of Minnesota..... 51
Murray, Hon. Patty, a U.S. Senator from the State of Washington.. 52
Bennet, Hon. Michael F., a U.S. Senator from the State of
Colorado....................................................... 55
Casey, Hon. Robert P., Jr., a U.S. Senator from the State of
Pennsylvania................................................... 57
Prepared statement........................................... 59
Dodd, Hon. Christopher J., a U.S. Senator from the State of
Connecticut.................................................... 62
Merkley, Hon. Jeff, a U.S. Senator from the State of Oregon...... 66
Hagan, Hon. Kay R., a U.S. Senator from the State of North
Carolina....................................................... 68
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL
Statements, articles, publications, letters, etc.:
Richard (Rick) Stephens, Senior Vice President, Human
Resources and Administration, The Boeing Company........... 75
(iii)
ESEA REAUTHORIZATION: EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
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TUESDAY, MAY 25, 2010
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 2 p.m. in Room
SD-430, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Tom Harkin,
chairman of the committee, presiding.
Present: Senators Harkin, Dodd, Murray, Sanders, Brown,
Casey, Hagan, Merkley, Franken, Bennet, and Burr.
Opening Statement of Senator Harkin
The Chairman. The hearing of the Health, Education, Labor,
and Pensions Committee will come to order.
I welcome everyone to our 10th hearing on the
reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
Today's discussion will inform us about what we can do to
ensure that more young children begin their elementary school
education fully prepared to learn and succeed.
We all know that learning starts at birth, and the
preparation for learning starts even before birth. Yet over
three-quarters of children ages 3 to 4 do not have access to
the early learning opportunities they need. As a result,
nationwide, we spend billions of dollars trying to close the
gaps in student achievement that could be tempered by investing
in high-quality early learning opportunities.
By the time most children from low-income families reach
kindergarten, their achievement levels are an average of 60
percent behind those of their peers from more affluent
backgrounds. These same children also tend to possess
vocabularies only one-third the size of their middle-class
peers. We know that high-quality early learning opportunities
provided by committed, well-trained, and caring providers can
enable children to overcome these challenges and close this
gap.
A solid initial investment in young children will save us
billions in future spending on remedial education, criminal
justice, health, and welfare programs. Children who participate
in comprehensive high-quality early education programs are also
more likely, over their lifetimes, to be healthier, more
steadily employed, and earn higher incomes and, of course, to
lead more productive and fulfilling lives.
ESEA reauthorization offers an important opportunity to
help States and school districts ensure that more young
children are prepared to succeed in school. To ensure that
school leaders and teachers have the skills and resources they
need to support early learning, we have to think about how
early education programs can better align with existing K
through 12 systems.
So reauthorization of ESEA also gives us an opportunity to
clarify and strengthen current law, directing States, school
districts, and schools to coordinate title I activities with
Head Start programs and other early childhood development
programs.
We have had a lot of important hearings. This is our 10th
one in this series, but I think this one today gets it where we
have sorely been lacking in the last, pick your number of
years--20, 50, 30, 40--somewhere in there, or maybe more.
I always hold up this book at hearings like this. This is a
book called ``The Unfinished Agenda: A New Vision for Child
Development and Education,'' put out by the Committee for
Economic Development. Actually, it was a subcommittee of the
Committee for Economic Development. It was first published in
1990.
This Committee for Economic Development was established by
the business community, and the leaders are the CEOs and
chairmen of Fortune 500 companies, like Mr. Griswell who we
have here today. It is a who's who list of the great leaders in
business in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s.
They commissioned this study to better understand what we
needed to do in education so that our economic future will be
brighter, so that the economic system of America will continue
to prosper and grow.
After about 3 or 4 years of having hearings and conducting
the investigation, in 1990, Jim Renier, who then was the CEO of
Honeywell, and was the chair of this committee, and they
brought me this book. It was 1990. I was not chairman of this
committee then. I was sitting clear down there at the end, but
I was chairman of the Appropriations Committee that funded
education at that time.
They brought me this report, and the executive summary was
quite important. What they found was, basically, that education
begins at birth, and the preparation for education begins
before birth. This whole thing is just about what we should be
doing to improve the quality of and access to quality early
childhood education. The commission focused on the importance
of early learning in 1990, and we have done precious little
since then.
Here were people that said, you know, don't forget about
high school and college, but unless we go down to the earliest
ages and start investing there, we are never going to catch up.
And I think the intervening 20 years since 1990 have shown this
to be true.
I am hopeful that this panel will help us start thinking
about how we redesign ESEA to start focusing on early childhood
education, how we strengthen transitions and support
kindergarten readiness.
If I ask people to define elementary education, how would
you define it?
We could expect all types of responses. So I throw out to
all of you, maybe we ought to redefine elementary education as
beginning at birth, acknowledging that elementary education
begins at birth. And in that definition should build upon the
policies, the programs, and the supporting mechanisms around
it.
But unless we define it, if early childhood education is
not reflected in our thinking around elementary education, then
what are we doing? We are not doing anything. If elementary
education begins when you go to kindergarten or go to first
grade, well, then we are going to continue to have the same
problems we had back in the 1980s and early 1990s and that we
have had ever since. We will always be swimming upstream,
attempting to catch up.
So I'll just throw that out there for your thoughts. I am
anxious to listen to all of you today. I have read all of your
testimony. They are great testimonies.
I will yield to Senator Burr for opening statement.
Statement of Senator Burr
Senator Burr. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
More importantly, thank you for holding what I think is an
important hearing on the topic of early childhood education. I
also want to thank all of our witnesses for their time, for
their experiences, for the knowledge that they will share with
us on improving early childhood education.
I want to especially welcome Henrietta Zalkind, the
executive director of the Down East Partnership for Children.
She is here today to share the phenomenal work she has been
doing in the areas of Nash and Edgecombe Counties, I might say
some of the most challenging areas of our State and of the
country.
Quality early childhood education and childcare are
critically important to ensure that future generations of
students are prepared for the 21st century. In their early
years of development, children form cognitive, social,
emotional and physical skills that they will need the rest of
their lives, both inside and outside of the school classroom.
Quality early childhood education and childcare are
essential for ensuring that all children, regardless of their
socioeconomic status, race, or disability, enter school ready
to learn and, more importantly, ready to succeed. I am
especially proud that one of the most important studies on the
benefits of early childhood education and care was conducted in
my home State of North Carolina. The Carolina Abecedarian?
Abecedarian, am I close?
[Laughter.]
The Abecedarian Project was a controlled scientific study
of the potential benefits of early childhood education for low-
income children born between 1972 and 1977. I think that is
about the time you got here, Mr. Chairman, wasn't it?
The Chairman. Yes, that is about right.
Senator Burr. Children from low-income families received
high-quality educational interventions in a childcare setting
from birth through age 5. The children's progress was monitored
over time with follow-up studies conducted at ages 12, 15, and
21.
Children who participated in the intervention experienced
higher cognitive test scores from the toddler years to age 21
and higher academic achievement in reading and math.
Additionally, children in the intervention completed more years
of education and were more likely to attend a 4-year college.
These findings are a testament to the importance of quality
care and education for children ages birth to 5.
While I know today's topic is the reauthorization of
elementary education and that we will hear a lot about how
title I and other ESEA programs can support quality preschool,
I think it is also important that we remember the other major
Federal programs for early education and childcare, especially
Head Start, Early Head Start, the Childcare Development Block
Grant, or CCDBG, and IDEA, I-D-E-A. Rather than trying to
improve the early childhood experience solely through the
reauthorization of ESEA, I hope that the committee will also
take the opportunity to make needed improvements to CCDBG and
the Head Start programs.
While we are behind in reauthorizing elementary education,
it is important to remember that the Childcare Development
Block Grant has not been reauthorized since 1996, and there are
other critical changes needed to that block grant to ensure
infants and toddlers receive high-quality care in a healthy and
safe setting.
To ensure children age birth to 5 have the best start
possible, it is essential that all of our Federal programs--
ESEA, Head Start, the Childcare Development Block Grant, and
IDEA--work together and that all programs are pulling in the
same direction and, more importantly, toward the same goal of
all children, regardless of background, succeeding in school,
succeeding in college, succeeding in the workplace. That should
be our goal and our vision.
I thank the chair.
The Chairman. Thank you very much, Senator Burr.
Again, I thank you all for being here. I will introduce the
witnesses, and we will start from left to right.
First, we have Mr. Barry Griswell, someone I have known for
a long time. Mr. Griswell has had a long and distinguished
career in the financial services industry, most recently
retiring as the CEO of the Principal Financial Group in Des
Moines.
Beyond his professional accomplishments, his activities in
the community are just amazing. He has done much for our State
and the communities. He is president of the Community
Foundation of Greater Des Moines, which has directed
philanthropic funds and private resources to promote
collaborative initiatives that improve academic achievement
particularly for children and youth identified as low income or
at risk of dropping out or falling behind.
Next is Dr. Larry Schweinhart, president of the HighScope
Educational Research Foundation in Michigan. HighScope is a
nonprofit organization that supports research and good practice
in early childhood education. He directed a seminal study on
the Perry Preschool Program that identified long-term effects
of a high-quality preschool education program for young
children living in poverty.
After Dr. Schweinhart, we will hear from Robert Pianta,
dean of the Curry School of Education and director of the
Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning at the University of
Virginia in Charlottesville. Dr. Pianta has conducted several
large-scale studies on the effect of early childhood on
children's development and achievement and is an expert on
effective teaching and teacher professional development.
And finally, we will hear from Henrietta Zalkind, just
introduced by Senator Burr, the executive director of the Down
East Partnership for Children in Rocky Mount, NC. This is a
nonprofit organization that works with parents, childcare
providers, teachers, schools, and other human service agencies
to provide high-quality early learning opportunities to
children in North Carolina.
Again, I thank you all for joining us here today. Without
objection, all of your statements will be made a part of the
record in their entirety. We will go from left to right, I ask
that you sum up your testimony in 5 to 6 minutes? Five, I am
told.
[Laughter.]
Then we can get into a good discussion of this extremely
important topic.
So, Mr. Griswell, again, welcome. It is good to see you
here, please proceed.
STATEMENT OF J. BARRY GRISWELL, BOARD MEMBER, FORMER CHAIRMAN
AND RETIRED CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF PRINCIPAL FINANCIAL
GROUP, PRESIDENT OF THE COMMUNITY FOUNDATION OF GREATER DES
MOINES, AND A MEMBER OF THE BERRY COLLEGE BOARD OF TRUSTEES,
DES MOINES, IA
Mr. Griswell. Thank you, Chairman Harkin.
It is nice to see you all, distinguished Senators and
staff. I am honored to be able to say a few words about a topic
that I am very passionate about. My passion stems from a couple
of different perspectives.
First, I grew up in a broken home. An alcoholic father, a
mother that worked two jobs to make ends meet, and I saw it
from that perspective as a child. But that is not why I am here
today, because that is important to me. I am here today,
rather, to talk from a business perspective and just talk a
little bit about how important early childhood education is to
the business community and, therefore, to our country.
I will give you a quick story. I did not get very involved
in social issues until about 10 years ago, and I got involved
with United Way in our local community. I was so struck by all
of the needs, and I wanted to work so hard to make sure that
those needs were taken care of. I found out something that you
all know, and I was a little late coming to this understanding.
And that is the understanding that the real systemic problems
in our society around crime, around dropout rates, around
mental health, around most of the problems we have actually
stem from poor early childhood development.
I was quite amazed when I started looking at the studies
that have already been mentioned--the Perry Preschool, the
Abecedarian, and many, many others. As a business person, I
began to be made aware that these are problems that can be
addressed, problems that can be solved. And if we don't do it,
the price of unreadiness for school is just enormous.
So, I became convinced at a very real and personal level
that I needed to do what I can as a business leader to try to
spread the word to other business leaders that the real answer
to the future of our country is to make sure that every single
child goes to kindergarten ready and prepared to learn.
I learned, for example, as you all know, that 85 percent of
the brain structure is developed in the first 3 years of life.
I learned, for example, that a third of our kids today enter
kindergarten coming out of poverty, and that third that does
that go to kindergarten behind, and they typically stay behind.
By the third grade, they are woefully behind and will never
catch up.
We know that that same group actually represents the
highest rate of dropout in high school. We know that you can
actually predict incarceration rates by looking at third and
fourth grade reading levels. As a business person, I was amazed
at this, and I really wanted to rally the troops to do
something about it. I am very pleased to report that I think
the business community is stepping up.
The Business Roundtable--unfortunately, Chairman, I am
afraid we did let a lot of time lapse from that study that you
quoted. But the Business Roundtable did another study in 2003,
all the major corporations in the United States, and they, too,
found that for every dollar you invest in early childhood, you
can get $4 to $7 to $8 in return. That is a terrific, terrific
investment, and return on investment.
I think it goes beyond that. If you think about our future
as a country, if you think how are we going to compete in a
global economy that is enormously competitive, it seems to me
we will never do so without maximizing human capital. How can
you say that we are maximizing human capital if a third of our
youth are not getting through high school and college? How can
we possibly compete with the great countries around the world
that are producing great students and great workers if we don't
go back to the fundamental beginning?
If I were put in charge of a corporation today and somebody
said you are putting out a product that has poor quality, I
would not marshal all of my resources to try to fix the poor
quality at the end. I would go back to the beginning, and I
would try to re-engineer what is causing the poor quality. We
spend so much of our money on incarceration, on prisons, on
jails, on mental health. Even on post-secondary education,
which is vitally important for research, but does very, very
little if the kids go to kindergarten behind. They will never,
ever catch up.
I have just become a very convinced and avid believer that
this is an issue that we can take on, that we should take on.
In Iowa, the Iowa Business Council has worked with both
Governor Vilsack and Governor Culver to provide funding. We
need Federal help. It needs to be a collaboration between
business, State government, Federal Government, the research
institutions.
And if we do come together, if we do collaborate, I believe
we can make a big, huge difference. I think if we don't, I
think we have some very rocky times ahead of us. Whether you
are an individual, a community, a State, or, indeed, the
Federal Government, we have a great deal at stake in
reauthorizing ESEA.
Thank you, Chairman Harkin. And by the way, 27 minutes
early.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Griswell follows:]
Prepared Statement of J. Barry Griswell
summary
introduction
As an individual who has had nearly 40 years in business, including
8 years as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, I have had the experience
of evaluating many, many investment opportunities. I have found that
when one goes looking for investments with reliable predictability of
consistently high returns, none of us can go wrong with an investment
in early childhood development.
early local united way experience
In 2002, shortly after becoming CEO at Principal, I had the good
fortune to serve as chair of the United Way of Central Iowa, and as
part of the experience, I became aware of United Way efforts to build a
comprehensive early childhood initiative for central Iowa.
united way of america
Introduction of Born Learning, and expansion to affiliates
throughout the country.
business roundtable/iowa business council
Increasingly over the last decade, various business organizations
have thoroughly embraced this issue.
vilsack administration and progress made
During his terms as Iowa Governor, Tom Vilsack pursued an agenda
dedicated to the principles of opportunity, responsibility, and
security. Governor Vilsack created the Iowa Community College Early
Childhood Education Alliance to serve as an advocate to deliver state-
wide quality education and to facilitate the sharing of ``best
education practices'' in a united and seamless manner benefiting Iowa's
economy, families and children.
principal child development center
Having become a strong believer in the need for high quality child
care, I worked with my company to build the Principal Child Development
Center, a state-of-the-art facility created to offer high-quality care
and education for the children of employees of the Principal Financial
Group.
conclusion
I remain convinced that investing in early childhood education is
one of the very best investments we can make.
______
introduction
As an individual who has had nearly 40 years in business, including
8 years as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, I have had the experience
of evaluating many, many investment opportunities. I have found that
when one goes looking for investments with reliable predictability of
consistently high returns, none of us can go wrong with an investment
in early childhood development. I came upon this reality quite
serendipitously.
early local united way experience
In 2002, shortly after becoming CEO at Principal, I had the good
fortune to serve as chair of the United Way of Central Iowa, and as
part of the experience, I became aware of United Way efforts to build a
comprehensive early childhood initiative for central Iowa. In
conjunction with this effort a group of women associated with United
Way of Central Iowa developed a comprehensive business plan for early
childhood development to increase the quality of care being provided by
care centers in central Iowa, and led a fundraising effort to raise the
level of quality of care being provided in 15 specific centers around
Des Moines. The effort focused on those with a minimum of centers and
home providers whose children in their care are 85 percent subsidized
by the State of Iowa. The goal of working with the centers and home
providers was to provide incentives and resources to move them up the
continuum of a quality rating system that aims to raise quality of care
in the areas of:
professional development
health and safety
environment
family and community partnership
leadership and administration
It was through this that I began to learn about the powerful
research around brain development in the first 5 years, and how early
reading rates translate into predictors for future school performance,
graduation rates, and even incarceration rates. I learned things like:
By age 3, roughly 85 percent of the brain's core structure
is developed.
The first 5 (and particularly the first 2) years of life
are critical to a child's lifelong development. During the first years
of life, the brain develops most rapidly, establishing neural
connections that form the brain's hardwiring. These years are not only
important to language and cognitive development, they are also critical
to social and emotional development--the ability to form attachments
and to deal with challenges and stress. (``Seven Things Policy Makers
Need To Know About School Readiness'' Charles Bruner, Ph.D., January
2005)
Increasing the graduation rate 1 percent can cause a
societal savings of $1.8 billion each year, solely from reduction of
crime.
From Art Rolnick, Ph.D. and Rob Grunewald of the
Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank: Persuasive economic research
indicates that there is a very promising approach to economic
development that has been long overlooked. It rests not on a strategy
of State and local governments offering public subsidies to attract
private companies from other communities. It rests, rather, on
government support of something much closer to home--quite literally:
our youngest children. This research shows that by investing in early
childhood development (referring to investments from prenatal to age
5), State and local governments can reap extraordinarily high economic
returns: benefits that are low-risk and long-lived.
united way of america
When I served on the board of United Way of America, I began to see
these issues from an even larger perspective. For example, I was made
aware of the Abecedarian Project, a carefully controlled scientific
study of the potential benefits of early childhood education for poor
children. Children from low-income families received full-time, high-
quality educational intervention in a childcare setting from infancy
through age 5, and progress was monitored over time with follow-up
studies conducted at ages 12, 15 and 21. The young adult findings
demonstrate that important, long-lasting benefits were associated with
the early childhood program.
Several years ago, the United Way of American launched the Born
Learning program to raise national awareness of the importance of early
brain development in the first 5 years of life. Today, virtually every
local United Way has a focus on early childhood learning.
business roundtable/iowa business council
Increasingly over the last decade, various business organizations
have thoroughly embraced this issue. For example, in 2003, The Business
Roundtable and Corporate Voices for Working Families joined forces to
issue Early Childhood Education: A Call to Action from the Business
Community, which cited findings on a solid return on investment of from
$4 to $7 for every $1 spent on quality early childhood education.
At the same time, the Iowa Business Council has had early childhood
education as one of its top priorities for at least the past 6 years.
The Council worked with Governors Vilsack and Culver to get signed into
law House file 877--a bill to expand access to quality preschool to
nearly every 4-year-old in the State of Iowa. According to the
groundbreaking Economic Policy Institute report, for every dollar spent
in Iowa on universal, quality preschool, by 2050 the State would
receive $8.40 back due to decreased spending on other State programs,
higher pay for individuals and savings from reduced crime.
vilsack administration and progress made
During his terms as Iowa Governor, Tom Vilsack pursued an agenda
dedicated to the principles of opportunity, responsibility, and
security. He is recognized as an innovator on children's issues and
education, economic and healthcare policy, and efforts to make
government more efficient and accessible. Iowa is known for its strong
K-12 education system in part due to Vilsack's initiatives. He
developed aggressive early childhood programs, reduced class sizes,
created a first-in-the-nation salary initiative to improve teacher
quality and student achievement, and enacted a more rigorous high
school curriculum. His leadership also led to Iowa becoming a national
leader in health insurance coverage, with more than 90 percent of
children covered.
Governor Vilsack created the Iowa Community College Early Childhood
Education Alliance to serve as an advocate to deliver state-wide
quality education and to facilitate the sharing of ``best education
practices'' in a united and seamless manner benefiting Iowa's economy,
families and children.
principal child development center
Having become a strong believer in the need for high quality child
care, I worked with my company to build the Principal Child Development
Center, a state-of-the-art facility created to offer high-quality care
and education for the children of employees of the Principal Financial
Group.
The center serves children from age 6 weeks through pre-
kindergarten. Children of all ages benefit from the high-quality, age-
appropriate curriculum, including one that is preschool specific and
designed to prepare children for success in school. The curriculum
encourages learning through child-initiated activities. It incorporates
an emphasis on global, environmental and health and wellness themes,
while respecting and valuing diversity. In addition, all children have
the opportunity to participate in a variety of enrichment programs that
introduce them to the fine arts and physical education while supporting
and engaging various community businesses and individuals. As a bonus,
environmentally friendly practices are incorporated into the operation
of the LEED-certified center.
conclusion
I remain convinced that investing in early childhood education is
one of the very best investments we can make, whether it be as
individuals, communities, States, or indeed the Federal Government. It
would certainly be easier to make such investments when financial times
are thought to be good. The harsh reality is that in difficult times,
there is greater need and an even greater sense of urgency to make the
investment to insure that every child has the opportunity to enter
kindergarten ready to learn and develop.
The Chairman. That is pretty good. Thank you very much, Mr.
Griswell.
And personally, thank you for all you have done for our
State.
Now we go to Mr. Schweinhart. Mr. Schweinhart, welcome.
Please proceed.
STATEMENT OF LAWRENCE J. SCHWEINHART, Ph.D., PRESIDENT, HIGH/
SCOPE EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH FOUNDATION, YPSILANTI, MI
Mr. Schweinhart. Thank you.
I would like to thank Chairman Harkin and the other members
of the committee for inviting me to speak today in support of
early childhood education in the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act.
I am Larry Schweinhart, president of the High/Scope
Educational Research Foundation, based in Ypsilanti, MI. This
year, HighScope celebrates 40 years of research, curriculum
development, and dissemination in early childhood education.
Our mission is to lift lives through education, a mission that
resonates well in the homeroom of this committee.
Let us be clear that early childhood education programs
include early elementary programs in schools, as well as Head
Start, Early Head Start, and childcare programs in community
agencies. For the past several decades, the HighScope Perry
Preschool Study, which I direct, has provided a rationale for
strengthening all of these programs.
This and several similar studies have found that high-
quality early childhood education programs help children at
risk of failure reach higher levels of school and adult job
success and commit substantially fewer crimes. The economic
return to taxpayers on this investment is enormous. A simple
response to these findings is to add pre-kindergarten classes.
A more complete response is to see in them a rationale for
maintaining high quality in all early childhood education
programs in schools, as well as community agencies.
A decade ago, this Nation made its first national education
goal that all children will enter school ready to learn, and
this goal is just as important today. The National Education
Goals Panel recognized not only that we need children to be
ready for school, but also that we need schools to be ready for
all children.
The panel established a study group, which included Robert
Pianta, who is speaking here today, to clarify the definition
of Ready Schools. Subsequently, with funding from the W.K.
Kellogg Foundation, HighScope developed and validated a Ready
School Assessment tool to help school stakeholders measure the
level of readiness in their school and discuss ways to improve
their school's readiness over time.
Ready Schools smooth the transition between home and
school. They strive for continuity between early care and
education programs and elementary schools. They help children
make sense of the complex and exciting world. They focus on
approaches that have been shown to raise achievement. They are
learning organizations that alter practices and programs that
do not benefit children. They serve children in communities,
take responsibility for results, and have strong leadership.
This afternoon, I would like to focus on two research-
validated principles of Ready Schools that the new ESEA can
support--interactive child development curriculum and regular
educational checkups. We need to have elementary schools train
in and use an interactive child development curriculum. In such
a curriculum, children not only follow teacher directions, but
also initiate and take responsibility for their own learning
activities.
The goals of a child development curriculum extend to
cognitive, socio-emotional, and physical development--not just
literacy and mathematics, as important as they are. Children
develop cognitively when they learn how to think and solve
problems. They develop socio-emotionally by developing
commitment to education, a strong moral sense, and the ability
to get along with other children and adults. Children develop
physically when they learn how to keep themselves healthy and
fit.
We also need to require and support early childhood
education programs to conduct regular checkups on their
curriculum quality and its effect on children's developmental
progress not just by tests, but also by classroom observations
that give teachers the information they need to do their job
well.
With ESEA reauthorization, we have a rare opportunity to
kick off a national Ready School movement, not just the latest
educational fad, but as a well-defined program of educational
reform. We have a rare opportunity to support highly effective
early childhood programs in schools and community agencies as a
genuine investment with enormous returns to taxpayers.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Schweinhart follows:]
Prepared Statement of Lawrence J. Schweinhart, Ph.D.
summary
I thank Chairman Harkin and the committee for inviting me to speak
today on early childhood education in ESEA reauthorization. I am Larry
Schweinhart, president of HighScope Foundation, which is celebrating 40
years of research, curriculum development, and dissemination in early
childhood education.
Early childhood education programs include early elementary
programs in schools as well as Head Start, Early Head Start, and child
care programs in community agencies. For the past several decades, the
HighScope Perry Preschool Study, which I direct, has provided a
rationale for strengthening these programs. This and several similar
studies have found that high-quality early childhood education programs
help children at risk of failure reach higher levels of school and
adult job success and commit substantially fewer crimes. The economic
returns to taxpayers on this investment are enormous. A simple response
to these findings has been to add pre-kindergarten classes. A more
complete response is to maintain high quality in all early childhood
education programs.
A decade ago, this Nation made its first national education goal
that all children will enter school ready to learn, and this goal is
just as important today. The National Education Goals Panel recognized
not only that we need children to be ready for school, but also that we
need schools that are ready for all children. The Panel established a
study group to clarify the definition of ready schools. Subsequently,
with funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, HighScope developed and
validated a ready school assessment tool, based on the study group's
definition, to help school stakeholders measure the level of readiness
in their school and stimulate discussion about ways to improve their
school's readiness over time.
The new ESEA can support two research-validated principles of ready
schools--interactive child development curriculum and regular
educational checkups. We need to have elementary schools train in and
use an interactive child development curriculum. In such a curriculum,
children not only follow teacher directions, but also initiate and take
responsibility for their own learning activities. The goals of a child
development curriculum extend to cognitive, socio-emotional, and
physical development. In addition, we need to require and support early
childhood education programs to conduct regular checkups on their
curriculum quality and on children's developmental progress, not just
by tests but also by classroom observations that give teachers the
information they need to do their jobs well.
With ESEA reauthorization, we have a rare opportunity to kick off a
national ready school movement, not just as the latest educational fad
but as a well-defined program of educational reform. We have a rare
opportunity to better recognize and treat highly effective early
childhood programs in schools and community agencies as a genuine
investment with enormous returns to taxpayers.
______
I thank Chairman Harkin, Ranking Member Enzi, and the other members
of the committee for inviting me to speak today in support of early
childhood education in the reauthorization of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act. My name is Larry Schweinhart and I am
president of the HighScope Educational Research Foundation. HighScope
is celebrating 40 years of research, curriculum development, and
dissemination in early childhood education. Our mission is to lift
lives through education, a mission that resonates well in the homeroom
of this committee.
Let's be clear that early childhood education programs include
early elementary programs in schools as well as Head Start, Early Head
Start, and child care programs in community agencies. For the past
several decades, the HighScope Perry Preschool Study, which I direct,
has provided a rationale for strengthening these programs. This and
several similar studies have found that high-quality early childhood
education programs help children at risk of failure reach higher levels
of school and adult job success and commit substantially fewer crimes.
The economic returns to taxpayers on this investment are enormous. A
simple response to these findings has been to add pre-kindergarten
classes. A more complete response is to recognize in them a rationale
for maintaining high quality in all early childhood education programs
in schools and community agencies.
A decade ago, this Nation made its first national education goal
that all children will enter school ready to learn, and this goal is
just as important today. The National Education Goals Panel recognized
not only that we need children to be ready for school, but also that we
need schools that are ready for all children. The Panel established a
study group, which included Robert Pianta who is speaking here today,
to clarify the definition of ready schools. Subsequently, with funding
from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, HighScope developed and validated a
ready school assessment tool, based on the study group's definition, to
help school stakeholders measure the level of readiness in their school
and stimulate discussion about ways to improve their school's readiness
over time.
This afternoon I'd like to focus on two research-validated
principles of ready schools that the new ESEA can support--interactive
child development curriculum and regular educational checkups.
We need to have elementary schools train in and use an interactive
child development curriculum. In such a curriculum, children not only
follow teacher directions, but also initiate and take responsibility
for their own learning activities. The goals of a child development
curriculum extend to cognitive, socio-emotional, and physical
development, not just literacy and mathematics as important as they
are.
In addition, we need to require and support early childhood
education programs to conduct regular checkups on their curriculum
quality and its effect on children's developmental progress, not just
by tests but also by classroom observations that give teachers the
information they need to do their jobs well.
With ESEA reauthorization, we have a rare opportunity to kick off a
national ready school movement, not just as the latest educational fad
but as a well-defined program of educational reform. We have a rare
opportunity to better recognize and treat highly effective early
childhood programs in schools and community agencies as a genuine
investment with enormous returns to taxpayers.
highscope
HighScope Educational Research Foundation, based in Ypsilanti, MI,
is one of the world's leading early childhood research, development,
training, and publishing organizations. We envision a world in which
all educational settings use interactive education to support students'
development so everyone has a chance to succeed in life and contribute
to society. David Weikart, who died in 2003, established HighScope in
1970 to continue activities he initiated as an administrator in the
Ypsilanti Public Schools. The name ``HighScope'' refers to the
organization's high purposes and far-reaching mission.
HighScope is perhaps best known for its research on the lasting
effects of early childhood education and its early childhood
curriculum. The research has influenced public policy on early
childhood education throughout the United States and around the world.
The HighScope curriculum is used just as widely in programs throughout
North America and in South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
HighScope receives funding from local, State, and Federal
Government agencies, foundations, and individuals. From 1971 to 1993,
HighScope was a model sponsor in the federally funded National Follow
Through project of curriculum reform in cooperation with local schools.
HighScope has long been a partner with the federally funded Head Start
program, including being home to one of eight Head Start Quality
Research Centers from 1995 to 2004.
early childhood education includes early elementary grades
Early childhood is generally defined as the time of life when
children are relatively young, from birth to age 8. It is a time of
life, not a particular institution or setting. In the United States,
almost all young children live at home with their families. By age 5,
three-fifths of them have also spent time in one or more of a variety
of other settings--family, friend, and neighbor care; child care homes
and centers; public and private schools; and Head Start programs. From
ages 5 to 8, virtually all of them spend time in public and private
schools.
Young children experience some kind of early childhood education
whether they stay at home all day or experience child care and
education in other settings. Some of these settings provide children
with early childhood education on purpose. But intentionally or
unintentionally, all of them are providing young children with early
childhood education because all of them are providing young children
with experiences that affect them for the rest of their lives. These
settings vary greatly in expectations for young children, parents, and
teachers or caregivers; as well as in available resources, rules,
governance, and organization. Some receive government funding, and
others do not. Some are regulated by the government, and others are
not.
When children reach 5 years of age, society's expectations for
early childhood education become more uniform. Nearly all States
require public schools to provide kindergarten and first through third-
grade classes for 5- to 8-year-olds. But the difference in how we treat
children before and after their fifth birthday is rooted more in adult
expectations and traditions than it is in children's development.
The HighScope Perry Preschool Study reveals the promise of early
childhood education. This study, which I direct, randomly assigned
young children living in poverty to an early childhood education
program or to no program and has followed them to age 40. By comparing
the two groups, we have found evidence that the early childhood
education program contributed a great deal to children's development.
The program group had higher achievement test scores and greater
commitment to school. The group had higher high school graduation and
adult employment rates and committed only half as many crimes. The
return on public investment was enormous, better than the stock market
in the good years. But while this program focused on 3- and 4-year-
olds, its findings apply generally to the potential of early childhood
education for a wider age range of children up to 8 years of age. The
Perry study is not only a reason to invest in Head Start and State pre-
Kindergarten programs. It is also a reason to engage in early
elementary school reform.
ready schools
The idea of the ready school probably goes back to the annual task
of preparing schools for the start of a new year. The increasingly
important concept of the ready school is more recent. It grew out of
President George H.W. Bush's 1989 Education Summit in Charlottesville,
VA, with the National Governors Association. This meeting produced the
National Education Goals and the appointment of a National Education
Goals Panel consisting of State and Federal policymakers.
To the National Education Goals Panel, ensuring that children start
school ready to learn was vitally important, but ensuring that schools
were ready for children was equally important. We're talking about the
opposite, in fact, the complement, of children getting ready for
schools. We're talking about schools getting ready for children. For
this reason, the Panel established the Ready Schools Resource Group, a
group of early childhood education experts and leaders. The Resource
Group's 1998 report sought to answer the questions: How can we prepare
schools to receive our children? How can we make sure that schools are
ready for the children and families who are counting on them?
The report identified 10 key features of ready schools, as follows.
They:
1. Smooth the transition between home and school.
2. Strive for continuity between early care and education programs
and elementary schools.
3. Help children learn and make sense of the complex and exciting
world.
4. Are committed to the success of every child.
5. Are committed to the success of every teacher and every adult
who interacts with children during the school day.
6. Introduce or expand various approaches that have been shown to
raise achievement.
7. Are learning organizations that alter practices and programs if
they do not benefit children.
8. Serve children in communities.
9. Take responsibility for results.
10. Have strong leadership.
These key features are further defined in the text of the report
and capture well the concept of ready schools. But reports such as this
one have a short shelf life. Concerned with this fact, and with funding
from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, HighScope developed and validated a
Ready School Assessment tool to make the features listed above real for
elementary school teachers, administrators, and other stakeholders. We
have worked with elementary school staff around the country, especially
in North Carolina and Mississippi, to help make their schools more
ready for all the children they serve.
Participants must provide documentation to back up what they say
about their school. They can't simply check off items from a list. This
documentation makes the assessment evidence-based. It is a self-
assessment, which is much more effective in motivating action than is
having outsiders come in to rate schools. It brings school stakeholders
together to build partnerships--such as a school administrator, a
kindergarten teacher, a preschool teacher, a parent, and a community
representative. In one State, these stakeholders met every quarter, for
the first time in most communities. Then researchers work with staff to
review results and focus on school districts' strengths and weaknesses
in developing an improvement plan to address and correct the area of
need. The ready school focus fits right into school improvement plans.
I'd like to focus on two aspects of early childhood education--
curriculum and assessment--that show up in many of these features of
ready schools. Curriculum and assessment are also essential to highly
effective early childhood education programs that lead to long-term
effects and return on investment.
interactive child development curriculum
We need to have elementary schools train in and use an interactive
child development curriculum. Let's unpack all these ideas. In an
interactive curriculum, children not only follow teacher directions,
but also initiate and take responsibility for their own learning
activities. In a non-interactive, directive curriculum children learn
letters by copying A's, N's and so on using a practice sheet. In an
interactive curriculum they learn letters by writing a note to a friend
or a story about their dog. Which approach do you think gets children
motivated to learn their letters?''
The goals of a child development curriculum extend to cognitive,
socio-emotional, and physical development, not just literacy and
mathematics as important as they are. The heart of cognitive
development is that children learn how to think and solve problems for
themselves. The heart of socio-emotional development is that children
develop motivation to learn, commitment to school, a strong moral
sense, and the ability to get along with other children and adults. The
heart of physical development is that children learn how to keep
themselves healthy and fit. We have been working with economist James
Heckman and his colleagues to analyze just what factors affected by the
Perry Preschool Program led to its long-term success. We found that the
socio-emotional factors I mentioned above were even more important than
cognitive skills.\1\ Yet we direct all our attention to children's
literacy, mathematics, and other academic skills rather than these
socio-emotional factors.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ Heckman, James J., Malofeeva, Lena, Pinto, Rodrigo and
Savelyev, Peter A. (2010). ``Understanding the Mechanisms Through which
an Influential Early Childhood Program Boosted Adult Outcomes.''
Unpublished manuscript, University of Chicago, Department of Economics.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some of the evidence for using an interactive child development
curriculum in early childhood education programs comes from a
longitudinal study we conducted called the Preschool Curriculum
Comparison Study. This study involved randomly assigning young children
to three different curriculum models. In HighScope, young children
learned actively in a plan-do-review process and group times. In
Nursery School, young children learned primarily through play. In
Direct Instruction, teachers followed a script in which children's
lines were the right answers to rapid-fire questions. HighScope and
Nursery School were interactive child development curricula, while
Direct Instruction was not. We found that all three curricula improved
children's cognitive ability quite a bit, an average of 27 points. This
effect diminished over time, but was still 17 points higher at age 10.
But group differences appeared in social development as time went on.
In their school years, only 6 percent of the HighScope and Nursery
School groups required treatment for emotional disturbance, as compared
to 47 percent of the Direct Instruction group. Only 10 percent of the
HighScope group and 17 percent of the Nursery School group committed
felonies by age 23, as compared to 39 percent of the Direct Instruction
group. Only 36 percent of the HighScope group said that people gave
them a hard time, while over 60 percent of the other two groups. The
interactive child development curricula contributed more to
participants' social development than did the Direct Instruction
curriculum.
This study illustrates that the long-term effectiveness of the
curriculum models used in early childhood education should be validated
by longitudinal research. While this is the case for the HighScope
curriculum, we have not made the national investment needed to identify
other early childhood curriculum models that can achieve similar
success. We need a national program of early childhood curriculum
development and longitudinal research. This program could serve as the
linchpin of our investment in the future of our children.
Adequate in-service training is essential to the adoption of a
validated interactive child development curriculum. The U.S. Department
of Education recently invested in a program of Preschool Curriculum
Evaluation Research, but no curriculum model required more than 6 days
of initial training and follow-up coaching, and very few effects were
found. HighScope offers and expects teachers to successfully complete
20 days of curriculum training and follow-up coaching. The Department
of Education project may have seriously underestimated how much
curriculum training is actually needed for it to effectively change
teaching practices.
early childhood educational checkups
We need to require and support early childhood education programs
to conduct regular checkups on their curriculum quality and its effect
on children's developmental progress. This dual focus on curriculum
quality and children's progress is essential to highly effective early
childhood education, but Head Start and child care programs emphasize
meeting program regulations and program performance standards, while
schools emphasize children's performance on tests of their progress. We
need both in all early childhood education programs. Schools and Head
Start and child care programs should conduct regular checkups on their
curriculum quality and children's developmental progress.
To accomplish this dual-focus assessment program, we do not have to
give young children more tests. We need to use observational
assessment. To assess teaching practices, we should be using validated
classroom observation systems, such as HighScope Program Quality
Assessment and Pianta's Classroom Assessment Scoring System.
Similarly, to assess children's developmental progress, we should
be using observational assessments, not more tests. Traditional testing
constrains young children's behavior in ways they are not used to.
Further, it requires young children to answer questions that have one
right answer, each child alone without assistance. This procedure works
for knowledge and some skills in literacy and mathematics. But it
excludes much of children's development--social skills in working with
others, creativity, collaborative problem-solving, taking initiative
and responsibility, and so on. While it may be appropriate to
administer tests to samples of children, our primary assessment
procedure with young children should be to use validated observational
assessments such as HighScope's Child Observation Record and the Work
Sampling System developed by Sam Meisels.
With ESEA reauthorization, we have a rare opportunity to kick off a
national ready school movement, not just as the latest educational fad
but as a well-defined program of educational reform. We can call on all
elementary school administrators, teachers, parents, and other adult
stakeholders to make their schools into ready schools. We can provide
them with the materials, training, and coaching to do so. In doing so,
we can reap the rewards of children's greater educational success and
subsequently greater success and responsibility in their lives. We can
make ESEA a national investment in our young people that really pays
off for everyone.
Attachment
How ESEA Can Get Lasting Returns on Early Childhood Education
Investment
Larry Schweinhart, Ph.D., President
HighScope Educational Research Foundation
highscope: mission and vision
Mission--To lift lives through education.
Vision--Widespread interactive education so everyone can succeed in
life and contribute to society.
highscope: activities and audience
Activities
Evaluative research
Product and services development
Publishing and training
Audience
Teachers, caregivers, administrators and all concerned
with programs serving young children.
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
early childhood education effects found in three studies
Childhood intellectual performance
Teen school achievement
Fewer teen births
Placements in regular classes
High school graduation
Adult earnings
Fewer crimes
Up to $16 return on the dollar
(HighScope Perry Preschool Study, Abecedarian Child Care Study,
Chicago Child-Parent Centers Study)
but other studies find only modest effects
Recent studies find only modest short-term effects on
children's literacy and social skills, raising a question about whether
they have long-term effects and return on investment.
(National Head Start Impact Study, Head Start FACES Study, Early
Head Start Study, Even Start Evaluations, Five-State Prekindergarten
Study)
implicaton--to get what we got . . . do what we did that worked
Early childhood education takes place in schools and community
agencies.
Early childhood education includes early elementary, Head
Start, Early Head Start, and child care programs for children up to age
8.
All of them can be highly effective and contribute to
long-term effects and strong return on investment.
While the Perry program focused on 3- and 4-year-olds, its
findings apply to all young children.
two major ingredients of highly effective ece programs
1. Learn and use a validated, interactive child development curriculum.
2. Continuously check up on program quality and child development.
1. Learn and Use a Validated, Interactive Child Development Curriculum
Learn: Requires interactive training, study, and practice.
Validated: Evidence of effectiveness with children to be
served.
Interactive: Children and teachers design learning
activities.
Child Development: All aspects of development.
HighScope Preschool Curriculum Comparison Study--Three Curriculum
Models
HighScope--Children learn actively through plan-do-review
and group times.
Nursery School--Children learn primarily through play.
Direct Instruction--Teacher-directed script with
children's lines focused on academics.
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
2. Continuously Check Up on Program Quality and Child Development
Check on implementation of an effective program model.
Check on all aspects of children's development.
Attune teaching using these checkups.
Keep program accountability local.
Implications for ESEA
Support demonstrated quality/effectiveness in all early
childhood education programs in schools and community agencies.
Support schools working to meet the guidelines of the
National Education Goals Panel for ready schools to make more schools
ready for all children.
The Chairman. Now Mr. Pianta.
STATEMENT OF ROBERT C. PIANTA, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION,
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA, CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA
Mr. Pianta. Chairman Harkin, Ranking Member Burr, and
members of the committee, thank you for this opportunity to
speak with you today, and let me commend you on your interest
in early childhood education in the context of reauthorization
of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
It is sensible for you to seek ways of connecting early
childhood education, which, for the purposes of my remarks,
refers primarily to programs for 3- and 4-year-olds, but as has
been noted, should also include birth to 3. Learning is,
indeed, cumulative, and the skills and knowledge children
acquire early are foundational underpinnings for later success.
And with almost 80 percent of children age 3 and 4 in some form
of early education setting, the time for policy work connecting
early childhood programs in K-12 education is now.
It is abundantly clear that even the loosely organized
collection of early education opportunities to which young
children are exposed between the ages of birth and 8, including
childcare, State-funded pre-K programs, Head Start programs,
and K-3, are a point of leverage for addressing low levels of
and gaps in achievement. We see in scaled-up programs, not even
the best programs, the gap can close by almost a half in 1 year
of exposure. The challenge is that those programs are very
uneven in quality from time to time and very inconsistent over
time.
So despite significant investments and benefits, the
promise of early education as a scaled-up asset for fostering
learning is not yet being fully realized for too many children
and depends on a more complete integration of early education
and care experiences for young children with the K-3 system.
And it requires considerable reform of teacher quality and
professional development.
For example, although preschool experiences can help close
achievement gaps and have longer-term benefits, most evidence
also suggests too many holes and misalignments in the system.
In the same community, we see different approaches to teaching
literacy to young children, depending on whether they are
enrolled in Head Start, pre-K, kindergarten, or first grade. We
see different tests, different teacher qualifications,
different professional developments. Some kids are in full-day
programs. Other kids are in part-day programs.
And this doesn't even touch the other challenges, such as
summer program learning gaps that lead to loss of skills, or
the lack of effective teaching in too many classrooms. I would
argue that ESEA reauthorization should set in motion policies
that design a new entry portal into public education, one that
ensures effective, aligned educational experiences for children
from 3 to 8.
And perhaps the biggest gap or hole in early education in
the United States is the spotty nature of effective teaching.
As you do this policy work, it is critical to understand the
importance of the adults, the teachers, and the unique features
of teaching young children. What matters for children in these
younger grades and ages are the ways in which adults foster
learning and development through careful, sensitive,
stimulating interactions.
Proven effective teaching requires skillful combinations of
explicit instruction, sensitive and emotionally warm
interactions, responsive feedback, and verbal engagement and
stimulation all intentionally directed to ensure children's
learning and embedded in a classroom that is not overly
regimented or structured and, hopefully, using a clear and
educationally focused curriculum. I would like to say that
these adults are strategic opportunists.
Of even more importance for policy work--this is critical--
is that these features of teaching can be quantified. They can
be observed in a standardized manner across thousands of
classrooms and improved through effective professional
development that, in turn, closes skill gaps. You have the
opportunity to move the system.
The odds are, however, stacked against children getting the
kind of early education experiences that close gaps. My team
and others have observed several thousand teachers across the
country, and these observations indicate that young children
across the country are not exposed to the features of teacher-
child interactions in their preschool, in their pre-K, in their
kindergarten, in their first grade, or in their third grade
classrooms that produce learning regularly or close gaps.
Instructional interactions, those features that appear to
matter most for children's achievement are particularly poor in
quality. And in nearly every study that includes a large number
of classrooms, the variability of features of teacher
interactions that foster learning--variations from teacher to
teacher, from classroom to classroom, from grade to grade--is
exceptional.
This means that if you are a 3-year-old, a 5-year-old, or
an 8-year-old in the United States, being exposed to the kind
of teaching that has been shown to foster learning is, itself,
a fairly rare event, occurring around roughly half the time. It
rarely occurs in consecutive years and essentially seems like
an accident. In short, educational opportunity for young
children in the United States is not a guarantee, but a matter
of luck.
The professional development of teachers, both practicing
teachers and those in teacher preparation, to be effective in
interacting with children to produce learning could not be a
more important priority for policy. Such professional
development has to be aligned and integrated across the age
span.
That we now have proven effective approaches for improving
teaching that also improve student learning--coursework,
coaching, curricula--for these ages and grades is an
opportunity for major reform of teacher preparation,
certification, and professional development. Too many dollars,
however, and too much teacher time is spent on garden-variety
professional development that, in and of themselves, do not
contribute to effective practice or learning.
Let me be clear again. Effective teaching can be measured,
can be improved systematically, and will have benefits for
children learning, but only if we are serious about measuring
and holding teachers, school districts, programs, and higher
education to higher standards based on our knowledge of child
development and investing in the kind of professional
development and training that really works. I will say it
again. Garden-variety degrees will produce a lot of irrelevant
coursework and time spent.
The conclusions for many sensible analyses of the extant
data are fairly straightforward. First, early education
opportunities in this country are a nonsystem. Publicly
supported early education programs encompass such a wide range
of funding streams, program models, staff qualifications,
curriculum assessments, and teacher capacities that it cannot
be understood as an organized aspect of the public support for
children in this country.
But despite stunning variability and fragmentation, there
is compelling evidence that these experiences do, indeed, boost
development and learning that can close achievement gaps and
have longer-term benefits to children and learning. That
interactions and effective teaching can be assessed offers you
an opportunity.
Finally, and perhaps most promisingly, teacher skills in
children learning can be improved with specific and focused
professional development and training. We need policies that
incent and reward participation in effective, proven effective
methods.
A policy that works, that demonstrably affects support for
adults working with young children could pave the way for
tremendous positive change in outcomes for those teachers and
for the young children and our society.
Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Pianta follows:]
Prepared Statement of Robert C. Pianta
summary
The loosely organized collection of educational opportunities to
which young children are exposed between the ages of 3 and 8, including
child care, State-funded pre-K programs, HeadStart programs, K-3, is a
point of leverage for addressing low levels of, and gaps in
achievement. The time for policy work connecting early childhood
education with K-12 is now. Effective and efficient early education
interventions targeted toward learning in the 3-3d period are
essential, not only for children, but for the economic and social
health of communities. But despite significant investments and
benefits, the promise of early education as a scaled-up asset for
fostering learning is not yet being fully realized for too many
children and depends on a more complete integration of early education
and care experiences for 3- and 4-year-olds with the K-3 system. ESEA
reauthorization can set in motion policies that design a new entry
portal into public education, one that ensures effective, aligned
educational experiences for children from 3 to 8. Failing to take
advantage of this opportunity only costs more downstream.
What matters for young children are the ways teacher foster
learning and development through careful, sensitive, stimulating
interactions. The odds are stacked against children getting the kind of
early education experiences that close gaps. Observational studies
including several thousand teachers, indicate that young children are
not exposed to features of teacher-child interaction in their pre-
school, Pre-K, K, 1st and 3d grade classrooms that produce learning or
close gaps. Instructional interactions, features that appear to matter
most for children's achievement, are particularly poor in quality. And
in nearly every study that includes a large number of classrooms, the
variability in the features of teacher-child interaction that foster
learning--variation from teacher to teacher, classroom to classroom,
grade to grade, is exceptional. The professional development of
teachers, practicing teachers and in teacher preparation, to be
effective in interacting with children to produce learning, could not
be a more important priority for policy. And such professional
development has to be aligned and integrated for teachers serving
children across the age 3-3d grade span.
The conclusions from any sensible analysis of the extant data are
fairly straightforward. First, early educational opportunities in this
country are a non-system. Publicly supported early education programs
(child care, Head Start, State-funded pre-kindergarten, K-3) encompass
such a wide range of funding streams, program models, staff
qualifications, curriculum, assessments, and teacher capacities that it
cannot be understood as an organized aspect of the public system of
support for children. Second, despite stunning variability and
fragmentation, there is compelling evidence that early educational
experiences can boost development and learning, can close achievement
gaps in elementary school, and can have longer-term benefits to
children and communities. Third, interactions between teachers and
children can be observed and assessed using standardized and scalable
approaches. Finally and perhaps most promisingly, teachers' skills and
children's learning can be improved with specific and focused
professional development training and support. The challenge for policy
connecting ESEA and early childhood education is to incent construction
and delivery of scalable and effective opportunities for teacher
professional development and preparation, using new approaches to
credentialing and certification and observational assessments of
teachers' classroom performance. Recent statements by professional
organizations reflect an openness to innovation that, paired with
demonstrably effective supports for teachers, could pave the way for
tremendous positive change in outcomes for teachers serving children
from 3-8 and for those children and society.
______
Let me start by commending the committee on its interest in early
childhood education as part of the approach to ESEA authorization. The
loosely organized system of educational and developmental opportunities
to which young children are exposed in child care, State-funded pre-K
programs, Head Start programs, K-3 classrooms, and a host of other
settings (including children's homes), increasingly is viewed as a
point of leverage for addressing low levels of, and gaps in, K-12
achievement. This is sensible policy: learning is cumulative and the
skills and knowledge that children acquire early are foundational
underpinnings of what they learn later--fall behind early and stay
behind is the rule. The time for serious policy and program work
connecting early childhood education with K-12 is now.
We now know that the long-term effects of early gaps in achievement
and social functioning are so pronounced that effective and efficient
early education interventions targeted toward these gaps in the pre-
school period are essential, not only to the developmental success of
children, but to the economic and social health of communities. Both
small experimental studies and evaluations of large-scale programs show
consistently the positive impacts of exposure to pre-school. The
evidence comes from studies of child care, Head Start, and public
school programs using a wide range of research methods including
experiments. Lasting positive impacts have been found for large-scale
public programs as well as for intensive programs implemented on a
small scale, though even some of the intensive small-scale
interventions were public school programs. Overall the positive long-
term effects of pre-school education include: increased achievement
test scores, decreased grade repetition and special education rates,
increased educational attainment, higher adult earnings, and
improvements in social and emotional development and behavior,
including delinquency and crime. Obviously, if programs provide child
care they also benefit parents and can increase earnings in both the
short- and long-term. Increased income that results from providing
families with free or subsidized child care also has positive benefits
for young children's development, though these are likely small
relative to the direct benefits of high-quality pre-school programs for
children.
Who can benefit from educationally effective pre-school programs?
All children have been found to benefit from high-quality pre-school
education. Claims that pre-school programs only benefit boys or girls,
or one particular ethnic group, or just children in poverty do not hold
up across the research literature as a whole. Children from lower-
income families do tend to gain more from good pre-school education
than do more advantaged children. However, the educational achievement
gains for non-disadvantaged children are substantial, perhaps 75
percent as large as the gains for low-income children. Some concerned
with reducing the achievement gap between children in poverty and
others might conclude that pre-school programs should target only
children in poverty. Such an approach ignores evidence that
disadvantaged children appear to learn more when they attend pre-school
programs with more advantaged peers, and they also benefit from peer
effects on learning in kindergarten and the early elementary grades
when their classmates have attended quality pre-school programs.
But we must be very clear about the magnitude of effects, whether
short- or long-term. Any of the evaluations cited above indicate pre-
school programs produce modest effect sizes overall, somewhat greater
effects for low-income children, with some evidence that gains last
through early grades. Typical child care has considerably smaller
short- and long-term effects than more educationally focused programs
such as selected Head Start programs or higher-quality pre-school
programs linked to public education. And across studies and program
models/features effects range from near-zero to almost a standard-
deviation on achievement tests (the size of the achievement gap for
poor children). There is no evidence whatsoever that the average run-
of-the-mill pre-school program produces benefits in line with what the
best program produce. Thus on average, the non-system that is pre-
school in the United States narrows the achievement gap by about 30
percent.
Thus despite significant investments and obvious benefits, the
promise of early education as a scaled-up asset for fostering learning
and development of young children in the United States is not yet being
fully realized--too many children, particularly poor children, continue
to enter kindergarten far behind their peers. Results from the first
follow-up of the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal
Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B) show a gap of roughly one standard
deviation on school readiness skills for children below the 20th
percentile on family socioeconomic status. Because the wide-ranging and
diverse set of experiences in pre-schools are not, in aggregate,
producing the level and rate of skills gains required for children to
enter school ready, it is argued that simply enrolling more children in
more programs, although helpful, will not close, or even narrow in
noticeable ways, the skills gap at school entry. Rather there is a dire
need for investments and attention (in research, program development,
and policy initiatives) that enhance the positive impacts of existing
and expanding educational offerings on the very child outcomes on which
skills gaps are so evident.
How to construct delivery systems for the equitable distribution of
such experiences, ensure the training and expertise necessary to
support the value of early education, and evaluate the extent to which
the delivery system produces desired outcomes for children pose serious
challenges for scientists and policymakers. K-12 education policy and
practice is now grappling with, and relying on, early childhood
education to an unprecedented extent, the strategic use of which is
undoubtedly in the interest of America. It is quite clear that
realizing the promise of early education in the United States depends
on a more complete integration of early education and care experiences
for 3- and 4-year-olds with the K-3 system. Your opportunity, in ESEA
reauthorization, I believe, is the set in motion policies that design a
new entry portal into public education in the United States, one that
ensures effective, integrated, aligned educational experiences for
children from 3 to 8. Failing to take advantage of this opportunity
only costs more downstream.
the landscape of early education--school starts at 3, sort of
One might ask,
``How can school start at 3? Kids are at home or in child
care, and compulsory education doesn't even start at age 5 in
most States--and in some they don't even have universal
kindergarten!''
In some ways this perception is correct; from age 3 until whatever
age enrollment in the K-12 system is mandatory, children spend time in
a very loosely organized collection of settings that provide a mixed
assortment of opportunities for learning. This could hardly be
described as ``school'' if our referent point was the local elementary
school. On the other hand, parents think child care is school--in the
2000 Current Population Survey, 52 percent of parents reported their 3-
and 4-year-old children were ``in school,'' some 4,000,000 children
overall. Many parents seek out child care that is advertised as
``improving your child's school readiness'' and some purchase billions
of dollars worth of educational materials to which they expose their
children as early as the first months of life.
Early education and child care settings historically have viewed
learning and achievement as by-products of enrollment or exposure--one
could hardly describe that as a ``school.'' But in the last decade the
early education and care system has systematically re-focused and re-
organized into loose collection of opportunities to learn that are
increasingly intentional, purposeful, and driven by education policy
and standards--a virtual school distributed across various settings.
State and Federal pressure on early education and care is revealed in
voters' expectations that investments in the increasing formalization
of this system will produce ``school readiness'' in the children who
enter kindergarten and the analyses of economists who present the
financial benefits to a community of investment in early education. K-
12 education is now paying attention to the early education and care
pipeline.
Over the past four decades, the Federal Government and most States
have invested heavily in providing public pre-school programs for 3-
and 4-year-old children. The percentage of pre-schoolers in child care
increased from 17 percent in 1965 to about 80 percent in 2008. A marked
increase in publicly funded programs accompanied this overall increase;
Head Start was established in 1965 and by 2007-2008 served nearly
900,000 children in this age range. State-funded public pre-
kindergarten programs greatly expanded during the past 20 years. Now 38
States offer these programs, which served approximately 1.1 million
children across the Nation in 2007-8. By 2008, about 80 percent of
American children attended a center-based pre-school program the year
prior to kindergarten, most in private programs. Just over half
attended a center-based program the year before that (at age 3), with
two out of three of these in a private program. The combination of
increased enrollment, expansion of publicly funded pre-school programs,
and recognition of the unique role of early education experiences in
the establishment of education success has led to a current state in
which school, for all intents and purposes, starts for the vast
majority of children in the United States at age 4, and for many, at 3.
However, despite this general pattern, the fragmentation of policy and
programs is considerable.
A widely understood example of policy fragmentation and its impact
on experience is the set of regulations regarding access to K-12
opportunities. The age for compulsory school attendance in the United
States ranges from 5 to 8 (Education Commission of the States [ECS],
2000), while kindergarten attendance is mandatory in some States and
optional in others. Kindergarten lasts 2\1/2\ hours in some States, and
a full day (6-7 hours) in others and State-funded pre-K programs range
from as short as 2.5 hours per day and as long as 10 hours per day.
The situation is far worse with regard to the balkanization and
fragmentation of programs for younger children. The term ``pre-school''
encompasses a diverse array of programs under a variety of names and
auspices for children who have not yet entered kindergarten. Again we
focus here only on three broad types of programs serving children at
ages 3 and 4 linked to largely separate public funding streams: private
child care centers, Head Start, and pre-K programs in public education.
Yet the real landscape of pre-school is far broader and more complex.
Enrollment of 4-year-olds is split nearly 50-50 between public
(including special education) and private programs. Private programs
serve about 1.6 million 4-year-olds, including children receiving
public supports such as subsidies to attend these private programs.
Public programs include about 1 million children in pre-K (regular and
special education and 450,000 4-year-olds in Head Start. At age 3,
private programs predominate, serving roughly 1.4 million children.
State-funded pre-K (regular and special education) serves only about
250,000 children at age 3, while Head Start serves about 320,000 3-
year-olds. The point here is that even if we focus only on a narrow
``slice'' of the age 3-3d grade span, in this case, opportunities for
3- and 4-year-olds, we see little to no evidence of consistency in
policy or on programmatic initiatives that create the templates for
local opportunities for children and families. In thousands of
communities across the country, children, particularly the most
vulnerable, are funneled into one program at 3 and then shuffled to
another at 4, and yet another at 5--or worse they are among those who
lack access to any of these opportunities. And most have some other
sort of child care (subsidized or not) at some point in the day or
week. To be concrete, if the public schools cannot manage to offer
universal full-day kindergarten, then how does one go about
conceptualizing and designing a system of early education and care that
is aligned with it? I hope you can see the need for an age 3-3d grade
approach to policy and program improvement.
For the considerable investments of time, money and effort in early
education of 3- and 4-year-olds to pay off, a primary goal of policy
and program development must now be the alignment of the learning
opportunities, standards, assessments, and goals in early education
with those in K-12.
the workforce
Enrollment of 3- and 4-year-olds in early education programs is
pressuring the supply chain for early childhood educators and for
effective training of those educators. Universal pre-K programs for 4-
year-olds will require at least 200,000 teachers, with estimates of
50,000 new, additional teachers needed by 2020. Ninety-five percent of
the workforce currently staffing formal pre-school and early education
programs comes from 4-year and 2-year early childhood training programs
and certified teachers from the K-12 system, with some unknown number
of adults with unknown credentials staffing family-based child care and
informal care. Unlike
K-12 in which the supply chain is regulated by a single State entity
and typically requires a 4-year degree from an accredited institution
(or equivalent), training of the early education and care workforce is
widely distributed and loosely regulated. Even in State-funded pre-K
programs, rapidly ramping-up has forced many States to rely on teachers
with elementary grade certifications and teachers with 2-year degrees
``grand fathered' into certification. Growing demand has created
problems both in relation to supply of early educators who can staff
expanding programs and in terms of providing new teachers with
appropriate training, staff development, and support to ensure that
they create learning opportunities that produce achievement.
The attributes and skills of the adults who staff elementary school
and pre-school educational settings tend to be very different. At the
kindergarten level, nearly all States require a Bachelor's degree and
some level of specialized training in education for adults to be
certified to teach and over 95 percent of the teachers in kindergarten
classrooms meet both criteria. Even though many have only sparse
training in teaching your children.
In contrast, pre-school teachers vary widely in their level of
training and, on average, receive less training and education than
their elementary school counterparts. There are large differences even
among teachers in State-funded pre-K programs. Minimum requirements
range from a Child Development Associate (CDA) certificate to an
Associate's degree to a Bachelor's degree. Furthermore, some States
require that the 2- or 4-year degree be in early childhood education or
child development, while others do not specify a field of study. Even
in the fairly well-regulated domains of State-funded pre-kindergarten
programs and kindergarten, there is substantial variance in the
preparation and qualifications deemed necessary for the workforce, a
reality that seems indefensible given the developmental needs of 4- and
5-year-olds. How could fostering early literacy for a 4-year-old
require such a different preparation than fostering literacy in a 5-
year-old?
Head Start has national standards for program structure, operation
and teacher credentials, but does not require all teachers to have
college degrees. Head Start is increasing their educational standards
for teachers and educational coordinators, with aims that all Head
Start teachers will have at least an Associates (AA) degree specialized
in early childhood, and all education coordinators have at least a BA
degree specialized in early childhood by the 2011 school year. And at
least 50 percent of the Lead teachers in Head Start must have at least
a BA degree by 2013. As I will note later, there is no evidence that
garden variety educational experiences--coursework--will lead these
teachers to be more effective in the classroom.
For children enrolled in the less-regulated ecology of family- or
center-based child care, exposure to credentialed or degreed staff is
even lower. The 2007 child care licensing study was one of the more
recent and comprehensive studies of the child care workforce. Drawing
on data gathered from 49 States and the District of Columbia, in the
vast majority of States (42) directors of child care centers are only
required to have some occupational/vocational training, some higher
education credit hours in early childhood education, or a Child
Development Associate's credential. Only one State required that
directors of child care centers hold a Bachelor's degree. Similarly,
for individuals considered as teachers in licensed child care centers,
40 States required some combination of a high school degree and
experience. Only 10 States required some vocational program,
certificate or CDA, and 13 States had no requisite educational
qualification for child care teachers.
Capable early education is a complex and challenging task--teachers
need to know a lot about basic child development, far more than the
typical course--and they need to know about how to teach and stimulate
vocabulary, conversations, early literacy, knowledge of science and the
community, and early mathematics--all the while handling sensitively
the varied needs of 15-25 3-8-year-olds--and within a classroom of 3-
year-olds the range of skills can go from 2 years to 5, while in a
classroom of 8-year-olds it could range from 2-12. Imagine the training
and support required to support the developmental and educational
growth of all those children!
Clearly we have not settled on a set of minimal qualifications for
adults serving in the role of teachers of young children, whether this
teaching takes place in community child care, Head Start, public Pre-K
or K-3 classrooms. And we have not even begun to address the need to be
consistent in our regulation and training of those skills across the 3-
3d grade span.
In short, to the extent that teachers play an essential role in
fostering effective learning opportunities for young children, children
passing through the pre-school-3d grade period can expect a stunning
level of variation from year to year and setting to setting in even the
most basic features (i.e., educational level) of these personnel.
And consistent with nearly every other form of teacher training,
there is so little evidence linking pre-service or in-service training
experiences or teacher credentials to child outcomes or to observed
performance for teachers, that there is considerable debate about
whether requiring a 4-year degree is the best way to ensure early
education programs help children learn. Addressing workforce needs in
this system will require a re-thinking and re-balancing of several
factors, including incentives, the content and processes of training,
and efforts to professionalize the workforce and integrate the early
education system with K-3.
what makes for an effective teacher in pre-k-3?
Degrees are poor proxies for the instructional and social
interactions teachers have with children in classrooms. Children's
direct experiences with teachers, such as the ways teachers implement
activities and lessons; whether a teacher is encouraging and able to
assist the child if he/she is struggling; whether the teacher uses the
opportunity to engage the child in conversation are the features of
early education that are responsible for children's learning. The
active ingredient for learning is what a teacher does, and how she does
it, when interacting with a child.
Effective teaching in early education, including the elementary
grades, requires skillful combinations of explicit instruction,
sensitive and warm interactions, responsive feedback, and verbal
engagement/stimulation intentionally directed to ensure children's
learning while embedding these interactions in a classroom environment
that is not overly structured or regimented. These aspects of
instruction and interaction uniquely predict gains in young children's
achievement, have been directly tied to closing gaps in performance,
and are endorsed by those who advocate tougher standards and more
instruction and by those who argue for child-centered approaches. But
unlike for older children, to be effective, teachers of young children
must intentionally and strategically weave instruction into activities
that give children choices to explore and play, engage them through
multiple input channels, and should be embedded in natural settings
that are comfortable and predictable. The best teachers are
opportunists--they know child development and exploit interests and
interactions to promote it--some of which may involve structured
lessons and much of which may not.
Interactions with teachers determine the value of enrollment in
pre-school and contribute to closing performance gaps. As one example,
we examined whether children at risk of early school failure exposed to
high levels of observed instructional and emotional support from
teachers would display higher achievement than at-risk peers not
receiving these supports. Two groups of children were identified: those
whose mothers had less than a 4-year college degree and those who had
displayed significant behavioral, social and/or academic problems, who,
on average, were behind their peers at age 4 and further behind by
first grade. Yet if placed in classrooms in which teachers demonstrated
the type of interactions described above these gaps were eliminated:
children from low-education households achieved at the same level as
those whose mothers had a college degree and children displaying prior
problem behavior showed achievement and adjustment levels identical to
children who had no history of problems.
These results are consistent with a cluster of experimental and
well-designed natural history studies that show a return to achievement
from observed classroom quality of between a half to a whole standard
deviation on standardized achievement tests, with greater effects
accruing to children with higher levels of risk and disadvantage.
Experimental studies, although few and involving far fewer children,
show similar effects. In fact, findings are almost uniform in
demonstrating significant and meaningful benefits for enrollment in
early education settings in which teacher-child interactions are
supportive, instructive, and stimulating. Yet these ``effects'' studies
do not provide information on the prevalence and distribution of such
``gap closing'' classrooms within the system of early education and
care, or how to produce gap-closing settings.
quality is less available than you think
Unfortunately, the odds are stacked against children getting the
kind of early education experiences that close gaps. Observational
studies including several thousand settings, indicate that young
children are exposed to moderate levels of social and emotional
supports in their Pre-K, K, 1st and 3d grade classrooms and quite low
levels of instructional support--levels that are not as high as those
gap-closing, effective classrooms described above. The quality of
instructional interactions, particularly the dimensions that appear to
matter most for children's achievement, is particularly low (the
average levels hover around a ``2'' on a 7-point scale).
In addition to somewhat low levels of instructional support, in
nearly every study that includes a large number of classrooms, there is
also an exceptional degree of variability in the opportunities that
appear to contribute to increased performance. Observations that
include several thousand child care settings, pre-K, kindergarten and
first grade classrooms show that some children spending most of their
time engaged in productive instructional activities with caring and
responsive adults who consistently provide feedback, challenges to
think, and social supports. Yet for others, even in the same program or
grade, most of their time is spent passively sitting around, having few
if any interactions with an adult, watching the teacher deal with
behavior problems, exposed to boring and rote instructional activities.
In some programs, even in classrooms right next to one another that
share the same materials and curriculum, the exposure of children to
high quality learning and social supports is so dramatically different
that one would conclude the difference was planned. Children in some
classrooms may be exposed to few, if any, instances of any form of
literacy-focused activities, whereas in others children received more
than an hour of exposure to literacy-related activities, including
narrative story-telling, practice with letters, rhyming games, and
listening.
Drawing from the very large sample of State-funded pre-K classrooms
in the NCEDL study, we used the statistical procedures of multi-stage
cluster analysis to group similar classrooms together as a way of
profiling this sector of American education (the NCEDL sample
represents 80 percent of pre-K programs serving 4-year-olds in the
United States). They show that only about 25 percent of pre-K
classrooms show high levels of emotional and instructional support--the
type of classroom setting almost universally described as high quality
(this is not unique to pre-K; we find the same rates in first and third
grade). Even further troubling is evidence that the pre-schooler lucky
enough to experience a pre-K classroom likely to contribute to
achievement is unlikely to be enrolled in a similarly high quality,
gap-closing classroom in kindergarten or first grade. Rather it appears
that exposure to gap-closing classroom quality, although highly
desirable from nearly every perspective imaginable, is a somewhat
random and low prevalence event that is even more unlikely for children
in poverty.
These realities about the level and distribution of high quality
early education classrooms in the United States probably reflect the
convergence of at least three factors. First, teaching young children
is uniquely challenging and is not easy. Second, many of the publicly
funded early education programs that are included in large-scale
studies (such as Head Start and State pre-K) are composed of a high
percentage of children who live below the poverty line who can bring
with them a collection of features that make teaching even more
challenging, especially when concentrated in a classroom. Third, the
system of early education operates on a shoestring of support and is
not at all aligned with K-12--it is often less well-funded than K-12,
classrooms are housed in trailers or makeshift locations, and teachers
tend to not use the same curricula, assessments, or approaches to
teaching across these years. There is no systematic approach to
connecting pre-school--what takes place for 3- and 4-year-olds--with
early elementary school--and so we lose much of the potential leverage
for early education impacts on later learning and achievement simply by
the way the system is (not) designed.
professional development to improve teacher effectiveness and
early education impacts 3-3d
Too few of the students who are in greatest need of effective
teaching in their early education experiences receive them and the few
that do are unlikely to receive them consistently, making it unlikely
that the positive effects will be sustained for children who need
consistent supports.
These findings should spark an interest in raising and leveling the
quality of classroom supports available to young children across the
ages of 3-8--this is truly a critical period for learning skills
required later. One option is to focus on structural features of
schools and classrooms such as teacher education and certification,
class size, and curriculum and enact policies to ensure that these
proxies for quality are uniformly in place. The available data do not
provide compelling support for this option, although it should not
necessarily be discarded altogether. Another option is to aim
regulation and support at what teachers do in classrooms as they
interact with children and find ways to more directly change and
improve the dimensions of instructional and social interactions
teachers have with children in large numbers of classrooms.
A first step in that direction would be more systematic, objective,
standardized descriptions of such interactions and professional
development and training systems for teachers that actually support
them to interact more effectively with their students. Ultimately, such
systems, if based on strong and valid metrics, may be a more cost-
effective mechanism for effecting real change for teachers and children
in part because rather than focusing personal and financial resources
in the pursuit of proxies that show little relation to teacher quality
and child outcomes, such a system could be organized around direct
assessments of teacher/classroom quality shown to be related to
children's outcomes. Increasingly there are tools to help facilitate
progress toward this goal. Observational measures such as those we have
developed--the Classroom Assessment Scoring System, or CLASS--and those
used in other large-scale applications, that focus on standardized
observation of instruction, are reliable and valid measures, directly
linked to improvement in student outcomes. These tools, spanning the 3-
3d period could form the basis of strategic scientifically based
development of a new generation of professional development and policy
initiatives aimed at increasing educational opportunity by forming a
coherent and consistent view of teaching and learning across these
ages, one predicated on an understanding of how young children learn
through interactions with adults.
Others and we are innovating with technologies for conducting
classroom observation at-scale. It may be quite feasible to imagine a
system of program development and improvement teachers/classrooms can
be observed on an annual basis using an instrument that assesses
dimensions of classroom experience that contribute to child
achievement.
More important than being able to observe and measure social and
instructional interactions in classrooms is to design and test models
for improving these opportunities to learn. What is emerging, through
more systematic evaluations of professional development programs that
are closely linked to classroom practice, such as mentorship and
coaching, is that direct training and constructive feedback and support
to teachers based on observation of their interactions with children in
classrooms yield promising results for improving early education
practice and children's performance. Challenges remain in how to
further develop, validate, and scale-up such approaches, but the
science of early education holds considerable promise for advancing
these possibilities.
For the early childhood education system to move toward the goal of
active and marked advancement of children's skills and competencies,
the quality and impacts of programs must be improved through a
vertically and horizontally integrated system of focused professional
development and program designs/models that are educationally focused
(as described earlier). In short, programs themselves need to re-align
around educational aims (in key developmental domains and appropriately
articulated) and teachers must receive preparation and support to
deliver classroom experiences that foster those aims more directly.
Teaching would entail providing teacher-student interactions that
promote the acquisition of new skills, delivers curricula effectively,
and individualizes instruction/interaction based on children's current
skill level, background, and behavior. Programs require (and policy
should incent use of) proven-effective professional development
supports through which teachers would acquire the skills in effective
teacher-child interactions and implementation of curricula and
assessment in developmentally synchronous ways.
Improvement of early education impacts rests on aligning
professional development and classroom practices with desired child
outcomes. In particular, the field needs a menu of professional
development inputs to teachers (pre-service or in-service) that are
proven to produce classroom practices (e.g., teacher-child
interactions) that in turn result in the acquisition of desired skills
among children (e.g., literacy skills). Efforts to develop such a
system of aligned, focused, and effective professional development for
the wide-ranging early childhood workforce are underway through the
auspices of the Department of Education-funded National Center for
Research on Early Childhood Education (NCRECE) and by several other
investigators, which target children's early literacy and language
development, and mathematics.
Targeted intervention to improve teacher interactions with children
and instruction in academic skills such as the NCRECE My Teaching
Partner approach does increase effective teaching and children's social
and academic gains. Other research groups have demonstrated similar
results--that coaching teachers in interactions that are linked to
instructional supports for learning and good implementation of
curriculum can have significant benefits for children. Mentoring and
training are difficult to measure and to bring to scale, though
relatively ``easy'' to prescribe as the professional development
answer. One critical component of bringing mentoring to scale concerns
the ability of systems to prepare and regulate mentors; yet only three
States have defined core competencies for technical assistance
providers.
Professional development approaches optimally should be designed
for ``high-
priority'' skill targets, such as pre-school language and literacy or
math, and start with defining these targets and ensuring that there is
a curriculum in place that reflects these targets. A high priority
target for literacy or math instruction is one that (a) is consistently
and at least moderately linked to school-age achievement, (b) is
amenable to change through intervention, and (c) is likely to be under-
developed among at-risk pupils. It is clear that increasing teachers'
knowledge of developmentally relevant skill progressions can be a key
aspect of improving their instruction and child outcomes yet teachers
also require dedicated attention to implementing that knowledge through
their interactions in the classroom.
an innovative web-based professional development treatment for
improving school readiness
Because effects of organized curricula on children's skills are
mediated and/or moderated by teacher-child interactions, these
interactions must be a central focus of PD interventions aiming to
improve child outcomes. The average pre-K-3 child experiences teacher-
child interactions of mediocre-low quality, but small increments
produce skill gains.
MyTeachingPartner (MTP) Coaching focuses on improving teacher-child
interactions defined and measured by the CLASS. Because the majority of
teachers' interactions fall below the threshold levels most pre-school
classrooms do not operate in the ``active range;'' small incremental
improvements are associated with meaningful changes in children's
skills. Importantly, MTP is capable of moving teacher-child
interactions into (and through) the range in which they improve
children's readiness.
For example, the improvements yielded from MTP were substantial.
MTP coaching of teachers improved their interactions and instruction
and closed the achievement gap in literacy and language development for
poor children by almost a third. Coaching was delivered to teachers
entirely through the web; this is perhaps one of the first completely
web-based professional development approaches that is effective,
individualized, and improves teacher-child interactions across any
curriculum. And the use of the web in this and other novel and
effective approaches to professional development affords potential for
scalability and cost-savings for travel, and location is not a pre-
condition to individualized feedback to teachers. To illustrate, MTP is
among the least expensive professional development for teachers for
which cost has been documented with effects larger than those typically
reported in the literature. And MTP and other web-mediated approaches
can be aligned with training, certification, and degree requirements
for teachers.
The best approaches to professional development focus on providing
teachers with developmentally relevant information on skill targets and
progressions and support for learning to skillfully use instructional
interactions, and effectively implement curricula. These approaches
align (conceptually and empirically) the requisite knowledge of desired
skill targets and developmental skill progressions in a particular
skill domain (e.g., language development or early literacy) with
extensive opportunities for: (a) observation of high-quality
instructional interaction through analysis and viewing of multiple
video examples; (b) skills training in identifying in/appropriate
instructional, linguistic, and social responses to children's cues, and
how teacher responses can contribute to student literacy and language
skill growth; and (c) repeated opportunities for individualized
feedback and support for high-quality and effectiveness in one's own
instruction, implementation, and interactions with children. This is a
system of professional development supports that allow for a direct
tracing of the path (and putative effects) of inputs to teachers, to
inputs to children, to children's skill gains.
Again, evidence is very promising that when such targeted, aligned
supports are available to teachers, children's skill gains can be
considerable, on the order of a standard deviation. Unfortunately, pre-
school-grade 3 teachers are rarely exposed to multiple field-based
examples of objectively defined high quality practice and receive few
if any opportunities to receive feedback about the extent to which
their classroom interactions and instruction promote these skill
domains. And at present, there is also very little evidence that the
policy frameworks and resources that should guide and incent
professional development and training of the early education workforce
actually are aligned with the most promising, evidence-based forms of
effective professional development. Thus there is little wonder that
teachers with a 4-year degree or 2-year degree do not differ from one
another substantially in either their practice or students' learning
gains, or that investments in courses and professional development
appear to return so little to children's learning. It truly does
``depend'' on the nature and type of professional development and
future considerations for policy aimed to improve the quality and
effects of pre-school must very clearly address this disconnect and
make investments in professional development far more contingent on
what we know is beneficial to teachers and children as opposed to
convenient or beneficial to professional development providers.
summary and conclusions
The conclusions are fairly straightforward. First, early
educational opportunities in this country are a non-system. Publicly
supported early education programs (child care, Head Start, State-
funded pre-kindergarten, K-3) encompass such a wide range of funding
streams and targets, program models, staffing patterns and
qualifications, curriculum, assessments, and teacher capacities that it
cannot be understood as an organized aspect of the public system of
support for children. This is unfortunate because evidence is so clear
the opportunities to learn, and learning that takes place, in this age
range are simply more important than at other ages, for the long-term
well-being of individuals, families, and communities.
Second, despite this stunning variability and fragmentation, there
is compelling evidence from well-controlled studies that early
educational experiences can boost development and school readiness
skills, can close achievement gaps in elementary school, and can have
longer-term benefits to children and communities over time.
Unfortunately, the effects of various program models are quite varied,
with some rather weak and ineffective while other scaled-up programs
narrowing the achievement gap by almost half. And it is quite clear
that programs that are more educationally focused and well-defined
produce larger effects on child development.
Third, for children enrolled in pre-school, features of their
experience in those settings matter--particularly the ways in which
teachers interact with them to deliver developmentally stimulating
opportunities. The aspects most often discussed as features of program
quality regulated by policy (such as teacher qualifications or
curriculum) have much less influence on children than is desired and
their influence pales in comparison to what teachers actually do with
children. Critically important, interactions between teachers and
children can be observed and assessed using standardized and scalable
approaches (as is evident in the use of CLASS in Head Start and many
school districts). Unfortunately, when assessed in this manner, it is
evident that most early education classrooms fall short on teachers'
demonstrating gap-closing interactions. Finally and perhaps most
promisingly, teachers' skills and children's learning can be improved
with specific and focused professional development training and
support.
If effective models of professional development can indeed change
child outcomes, then the potential for scaling and building incentive
and policy structures around these models becomes an important feature
of systemic improvement and policy. The recent development and
expansion of Quality Rating and Improvement Systems in early childhood
are one such example of a set of policy initiatives that integrate
measurement of inputs and outcomes with incentives and resources for
teacher improvement.
Finally, one might also envision professional preparation and
credentialing models based on what we are learning from studies of
effective professional development and its evaluation. To the extent
that these models of support and education for teachers can be
demonstrated to produce gains in teacher competencies that produce
child outcome gains, then it seems critical to build such opportunities
for professional preparation ``back'' into the ``pre-service'' sector
and to find methods for credentialing and certifying teachers on the
basis of participation in effective professional development and
demonstration of competence. In fact, new policy statements related to
professional development and career development being suggested by the
National Association for the Education of Young Children explicitly
identify teachers' performance in classroom settings, specifically
their interactions with children, as a dimension of career advancement
that should be credentialed and tied to professional development. Such
statements by professional organizations reflect openness to innovation
that, paired with demonstrably effective supports for teachers, could
pave the way for tremendous positive change in outcomes for teachers
and children.
In an era of high-stakes testing in which even young children may
be held to uniform, minimum performance standards, it is disconcerting
to note that the system on which the Nation is relying to produce such
outcomes provides exceptional variability in the nature and quality of
actual opportunities to learn. It seems unreasonable to expect
universal levels of minimal performance for students when the
opportunities in early education are so unevenly distributed. As the
system of early education serving children from 3-8 in the United
States evolves as an integral component of the solution to a host of
problems related to schooling and achievement, serious attention is
needed to policies, particularly for teachers and their professional
development and support, that help re-design this portal into public
education in terms of aligned, effective experiences in classrooms that
indeed foster children's learning and development.
The Chairman. Thank you very much, Mr. Pianta.
Now, Ms. Zalkind, welcome.
STATEMENT OF HENRIETTA ZALKIND, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, DOWN EAST
PARTNERSHIP FOR CHILDREN, ROCKY MOUNT, NC
Ms. Zalkind. Thank you.
Thank you for having me here today. Thank you, Senator
Burr, for the wonderful introduction.
I am here today on behalf of the hundreds of people locally
who have made this work possible over the last 16 years, who
have committed themselves to not leaving any child behind.
The Down East Partnership for Children--we call it DEPC--is
committed to successfully launching every child in our two
counties as a healthy lifelong learner by the end of the third
grade. DEPC believes that the developmental period for children
0 to 8 is critical to their long-term healthy growth and
development. That is when they are learning to learn. It is
also a critical period for parents, learning to parent and
learning to engage in their child's education.
We were founded as a nonprofit in 1993 and work on a model
of services that works in collaboration with two local school
systems--Nash-Rocky Mount and the Edgecombe County Public
Schools--early care providers, human service agencies, and
other community leaders. We have a 27-member board,
representing the multiple stakeholders that you need for this
work to work in concert to build a strong foundation for
student achievement.
Annually, we bring in about $7 million of different funding
from the State, from the Federal Government, from private
sources, to either do three programs directly--a childcare
resource and referral program, a family resource program, and a
coordinated subsidy program--and then we fund 20 total
agencies, 20 programs in 10 other agencies, including the
health department, the schools, the library, the Department of
Social Services, and other area nonprofits.
And all of these different programs have to go to support
our three long-term goals--unique support for each child and
family, high-quality early care and education environments, and
access to coordinated community resources. Everything that we
do directly or that we fund through the different agencies go
through an annual bid process with annual outcomes that help us
move towards those three long-term goals.
We work off an integrated multi-agency strategic plan that
is on our Web site that has intermediate outcomes toward those
long-term goals. My testimony today really focuses on a few
major components of our system that I think bear on the
reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind and the ESEA.
First, our Family First system that provides comprehensive
services to families, including intake and assessment,
referrals to a whole continuum of services ranging from early
education subsidies to evidence-based parent education. We have
a coordinated subsidy system that works in collaboration with
the subsidy money, the CCBD--it is hard for everybody to say--
the Department of Social Services, title I preschool programs,
private childcare providers, and Head Start to maximize the use
of all subsidy funds for children 0 to 12 by ensuring that
children are served in the most appropriate early care and
education program available.
It is also our single-biggest way that we control the
quality by mandating that people who participate in that system
operate at a certain level of quality and contracting with
those people for that level of quality, that provides not only
access to the care, but it provides access to high-quality
care.
We have a system of home-school contacts that operate
through both school systems that provide transition from home
to childcare, to early education, to school--that is our
outreach system to make sure that we know all of the children
before they get to school and that we can follow them through
the third grade and that they are successfully launched by the
end of the third grade.
The thing that I will focus the most on today is our Ready
Schools Initiative, really designed to build the capacity of
the schools to meet the needs of all children so that children
are not just ready for school when they get there, but that the
schools are ready for them. And then, finally, our Ready
Communities Initiative, which wraps community leadership--
including business, faith, and community--around schools to
support them in their effort to launch every child as a
successful learner by the end of the third grade.
Five minutes goes fast.
[Laughter.]
The Ready School Initiative we launched about 5 years ago,
really works off the HighScope Ready Schools Assessment that
Dr. Schweinhart talked about. We build school-community teams
that assess the school's capacity around the Ready School
pathways, leader and leadership, transition, teacher supports,
engaging environments, effective curriculum, family-school-
community partnerships, respecting diversity, and assessing
progress.
And to date, we have done 14 out of the 19 public
elementary schools in our two districts. We have done a wide
variety of things that have really improved the school
capacity, the schools' capacity to both be ready for the
children, but to utilize their title I funding to move from
where they are in terms of being more ready for every single
child. We have seen great results around improving leaders and
leadership, transition, family-school-community partnerships,
and diversity.
Eight of those 14 schools have now gone through the
HighScope a second time with wonderful results, and that
process of building the community team, seeding it with leaders
and leadership that we have generated through our Ready
Communities process is really the thing that has worked to move
the process forward, and that is what I would really recommend
in terms of embedding in the law as you move forward.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Zalkind follows:]
Prepared Statement of Henrietta Zalkind
summary
The Down East Partnership for Children (DEPC) is committed to
successfully launching every child as a healthy, lifelong learner by
the end of the 3rd grade. DEPC believes that the developmental period
for children from 0 to age 8 is critical to their long-term healthy
growth and development.
Founded as a nonprofit in 1993, DEPC has 16 years of experience
with a model of services that works in collaboration with two local
school systems (Nash-Rocky Mount Public Schools and Edgecombe County
Public Schools), early care providers, human service agencies, and
other community leaders and organizations. DEPC has 3 long-term goals:
Unique Support for Each Child and Family, High Quality Early Care &
Education Environments, and Access to Coordinated Community Resources.
The testimony will focus on the key components of the DEPC model,
including:
Supporting a Family First system to provide comprehensive
services to families, including intake, assessment, referrals, and a
continuum of services, ranging from early education subsidies to
evidence-based parent education.
A Coordinated Subsidy system in collaboration with
Departments of Social Services, Title I Preschool Programs, private
child care providers, and Head Start to maximize the use of subsidy
funds for children 0-12 by ensuring that children are served by the
most appropriate subsidized early care and education program available.
Creating smooth transitions from home, early care
settings, and throughout elementary school through a system of home-
school contacts.
Ready Schools Initiative designed to build schools'
capacity to meet the needs of all children through assessment,
planning, and coaching.
Ready Communities Initiative designed to develop
community-based leadership to support early care and education and
connect them with their local elementary school.
Based on our lessons learned in implementing our model of early
care and education, DEPC recommends:
Increase investment in early care programs to promote
prevention rather than intervention.
Build infrastructure for Ready Schools that have the
capacity and resources to be ready to meet the needs of all children.
Promote flexible funding that will encourage innovation,
developmentally appropriate classrooms Pre-K-3, connections and
alignment with early care providers, and family engagement.
Build the capacity of teachers and administrators to
individualize instruction to meet the varying needs of children in
their classrooms.
Utilize family-school-community partnerships as a
cornerstone of the school improvement process.
Fund leadership development at all levels to support early
care and education for children birth to age 8.
______
background
The Down East Partnership for Children (DEPC) is committed to
successfully launching every child as a lifelong learner by the end of
the 3rd grade. Located in Rocky Mount, NC, DEPC serves Nash and
Edgecombe counties with nearly 18,000 children under the age of 8. The
majority of these children face risk factors for success; including
poverty, low high school graduation levels of their parents, and high
percentage of single parent households.
Founded as a nonprofit in 1993, DEPC has 16 years of experience
with a model of services that works in collaboration with two local
school systems (Nash-Rocky Mount Public Schools and Edgecombe County
Public Schools), early care providers, human service agencies, and
other community leaders and organizations. The DEPC Model of Family &
Child Services (See Appendix A) is a continuum designed to serve
children ages 0-8 and their families. The model incorporates multiple
components to meet families' diverse needs so that services are
available ``For Every Child.''
DEPC's model is intended to lead to long-term success on indicators
for child and family well-being and community success. DEPC's work is
driven by a comprehensive strategic plan developed to support the
healthy growth and development of children 0-8 in all domains of child
development.
DEPC operates 3 programs directly through its Family Resource
Center: Child Care Resource & Referral, Family Resource, and
Coordinated Subsidy. Research & Evaluation and Community Collaborative
initiatives, including Ready Schools, Ready Communities, Healthy Kids
Collaborative are also a part of DEPC's organizational model (see
Appendix B). Annually DEPC strategically invests more than $7 million
into the local economy to support 20 programs at DEPC and in 10 other
agencies and organizations, including health department, school
systems, library, departments of social services, and other area non-
profits. These programs are supported through a combination of local,
State, and private funds. All programs are funded through an annual bid
process and must demonstrate annual outcomes and how they will move
DEPC toward its three long-term goals.
DEPC is one of North Carolina's local Smart Start Partnerships and
the local administrator for the State's More at Four pre-kindergarten
program. DEPC was also one of the local demonstration sites for the
national Supporting Partnerships to Assure Ready Kids (SPARK)
Initiative funded by W.K. Kellogg Foundation to align early care and
education systems to support Ready Kids, Ready Families, Ready Schools,
and Ready Communities. As a result, DEPC has been a leader in Ready
Schools in North Carolina over the past 5 years.
The following are DEPC's long-term goals used to guide the
organizational and community efforts.
unique support for each child and family
DEPC values and respects that each child and family is unique and,
as such, has unique strengths and needs.
Children will have access to resources that support their
growth and development in the 5 domains of child development
(cognition, language and communication, approaches to learning, social
and emotional, and health and physical).
Families will have increased knowledge and access to
resources to support their child's growth and development from prenatal
through age 8.
To achieve this goal, parents gain access to information,
referrals, and services through the Family First system, including
parent education classes, support groups, child care subsidies and
other parenting resources.
high quality early care and education environments
DEPC believes that the developmental period for children from 0 to
age 8 is critical to launching them as lifelong learners. During this
time, children are exposed to a variety of environments. Each of these
environments (home, child care, and school) must be of high quality for
children to be successful.
Families will have the skills and knowledge to be their
child's first teacher by creating a high quality learning environment
at home.
Child care facilities will have formally educated staff
that can nurture and stimulate the growth and development of individual
children utilizing developmentally appropriate practices.
Schools will be able to model ready school best practices
to transition children effectively into engaging and developmentally
appropriate environments that continue to nurture and develop each
individual child's growth.
Families, child care providers, and schools will
collaborate to create effective transition strategies between
environments.
Strategies to achieve this goal focus on improving the quality of
early care and education environments across the 0-8 spectrum,
including training and technical assistance to child care providers,
parent-child playgroups to model developmentally appropriate practice
for the home environment, and the Ready Schools Initiative.
access to coordinated community resources
DEPC has been built on collaboration and the role it plays in
coordinating resources to increase availability and access to services
that meet the needs of the community.
Individuals will have the leadership skills and knowledge
to effectively advocate for resources in their community.
Service systems will be aligned to increase access to
resources based on ongoing assessments of community needs.
To achieve this goal, DEPC facilitates leadership development
through its Community Fellows program, connecting leaders and
organizations with the DEPC mission through the Ready Communities
Initiative, and supporting communication and advocacy strategies.
the key components of the depc model of services
To achieve its mission, DEPC engages on various fronts to make
system-wide change:
Ensuring availability of and access to high quality early
childhood care and education;
Supporting families to effectively parent and meet the
needs of their individual children;
Facilitating a positive transition to school; and
Building ``ready schools'' and ``ready communities'' that
can successfully launch all children as learners.
building access to quality early childhood care and education
DEPC works on both the supply and demand side of early care and
education. DEPC educates parents, businesses, and the community about
the importance of quality child care and provides referrals for parents
looking for child care. Through training, technical assistance, salary
supplements, and other support to child care centers and homes, DEPC
has increased the availability of quality child care in our two
counties.
DEPC facilitates a Coordinated Subsidy system in collaboration with
Departments of Social Services, Title I Preschool Programs, private
child care providers, and Head Start to maximize the use of subsidy
funds for children 0-12 by ensuring that children are served by the
most appropriate subsidized early care and education program available.
Subsidy providers utilize a combined early care and referral form and a
coordinated waiting list.
This system includes access to a Smart Start Scholarship program
that focuses on serving 0-3 year olds. This not only provides at-risk
children and their families with access to high quality care during the
most critical time in their development, it also serves as intake into
a system that will then connect them with additional services
throughout the rest of their early childhood period of development (or
through 3rd grade).
DEPC also administers the More at Four Pre-Kindergarten program to
provide high quality care to at-risk 4-year olds through classrooms in
public schools, Head Start, and private child care centers.
The percentage of children in high quality child care has
increased from 6 and 7 percent in 1993 in the highest quality settings
to 69 percent and 70 percent in Nash and Edgecombe counties,
respectively.
Annually, over 1,000 children access high quality care by
receiving Smart Start Scholarships (0-3 year olds) and preschool slots
through the More at Four program.
83 percent of Nash County and 81 percent of Edgecombe
County children receiving any form of early childhood education
subsidies are in 4- or 5-star (highest rated) care.
family first
DEPC recognizes that a parent is a child's first teacher and plays
a critical role in a child's development during the early years and
throughout his/her life. Throughout this phase in a child's
development, the needs of both the child and the family may vary
greatly. DEPC seeks to address this by offering a continuum of
evidence-based strategies and programs.
Trained Family First counselors conduct needs assessments with
families to determine the resources that will best address their needs.
Families may receive information on child development and parenting
issues, referrals to community resources, or access to subsidized child
care.
Families are connected with a variety of services including parent-
child playgroups that model appropriate interactions; support groups
for parents of children with special needs or teen parents; parent
education through evidence-based curricula including Parenting Wisely,
Strategic Training for Effective Parenting (STEP), or Incredible years;
additional information through a Parent Information Center or workshops
on topics such as money management, healthy eating, helping your child
have a smooth transition to Kindergarten, or effective communication at
parent-teacher conferences.
smooth transitions
DEPC has worked with both school systems to create a system of
home-school contacts that facilitate a variety of transition strategies
for children and families. Funded through title I, More at Four, and
Smart Start, these contacts provide home visits for entering
Kindergartners, coordinate with parents and child care providers to
facilitate school visits for children to spend time in a Kindergarten
classroom, and provide workshops for parents to learn strategies to
support their child's transition and healthy growth and development.
These contacts help to identify children early for Kindergarten
(over 90 percent of children are identified before the first day of
school) that not only allows for the opportunity to participate in
transition activities (65 percent of Kindergarten families participated
in three or more transition activities), but also allows the school
more planning time for student placement.
Finally, districts also invite child care providers to professional
development opportunities with school staff to promote alignment
between early care and elementary school.
By blending the funding for these contacts, they are able to not
only ensure smooth transitions into Kindergarten, which is linked with
increased school readiness, but then provide continued support
throughout Kindergarten and into the older grades. These contacts have
also been key members of the school-community teams for the Ready
Schools assessment and planning process.
impact of quality preschool programs
Through data collected on 250 children that entered Kindergarten in
fall 2009, DEPC knows that this system of early care and education is
having an impact on children's having the skills and behaviors needed
to be successful in school.
85.6 percent of these children had some type of early care
experience (More at Four, Head Start, Public Pre-Kindergarten, center-
based child care, family home) the year before Kindergarten.
Children with early care experience rated higher on the
teacher-completed Hawaii School Readiness Assessment than those with no
experience in overall readiness and in each sub-dimension (Approaches
to Learning, Literacy, Math, School Behavior & Skills, Social Emotional
Behaviors, and Physical Well Being).
Children with early care experience, including those in
More at Four or Public Pre-Kindergarten programs the year before
Kindergarten had fewer problem behaviors based on parent-completion of
the Preschool and Kindergarten Behavior Scales.
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
The Bracken Basic Concept Scales includes a school readiness
composite, which measures children's abilities on concepts
traditionally needed to be prepared for early formal education,
including colors, letter recognition, number recognition and counting,
sizes/comparisons, and recognizing 1-, 2-, and 3-dimensional shapes. It
also measures children's abilities on 5 additional sub-tests
(direction/position, self-social awareness, texture/material, quantity,
and time/sequence).
Children who attended More at Four or Public Pre-Kindergarten the
year before Kindergarten outperformed comparison children on the
Bracken Basic Concept Scales School Readiness Composite.
ready schools
Early childhood research and DEPC's own data have clearly shown
that access to quality child care has significant impacts on children's
readiness for Kindergarten and in many cases long-term success.
However, often these effects begin to ``fade out'' without continued
intervention in the early elementary grades K-3.
To build on the success of getting children ready for Kindergarten
and help ensure that by the end of 3rd grade children are launched as
learners, DEPC started its Ready Schools Initiative to increase the
capacity of elementary schools to be ready for all children. In 2007,
the NC State Board of Education endorsed the definition and Pathways to
a Ready School. Included in this recommendation was direction that
schools develop a ``ready school plan''. Ready Schools is now in 42 of
100 counties throughout North Carolina. Most recently, the Office of
Early Learning was created by DPI to strategically focus on the early
years and reform education for all NC children, pre-kindergarten
through third grade. (See Appendix C for the NC Definition of Ready
Schools, Map of Ready Schools)
In 2005, DEPC developed the Ready Schools Innovation Awards (RSIA)
process that includes an assessment, development and implementation of
a workplan, and coaching and technical assistance from one of DEPC's
Ready Schools Coordinators. To participate in the RSIA process,
interested schools bring together a school-community team that includes
Pre-K-3 teachers, administrators, early care providers, parents,
business, and other community representatives to assess their practices
in eight dimensions of Ready Schools' practices (Leaders and
Leadership, Transitions, Teacher Supports, Engaging Environments,
Effective Curricula, Family, School, and Community Partnerships,
Respecting Diversity, and Assessing Progress) using the nationally
validated, research-based High/Scope Ready Schools Assessment (RSA).
The school-community team then creates a workplan to implement
strategies based on areas of need identified. These workplans have
often focused on professional development needed for teachers and
administrators, such as Ruby Payne's Framework of Poverty training;
building effective transition strategies between early care, home, and
school and between grades; establishing family resource centers within
the school to promote a welcoming atmosphere to families to prompt
better home-school communication and family involvement; and materials
and training to increase the use of developmentally appropriate
practices and active learning centers within K-2 classrooms. Innovative
strategies have been tested using privately funded grants, but then
enhanced and/or sustained with title I funds, such as a family resource
center at Winstead Avenue elementary, in-school transition support for
K-1 children at Red Oak elementary.
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
To date, 14 of the 19 area public elementary schools in our two
districts have participated in this process.
Following implementation of their workplan, schools completed the
High/Scope assessment a second time. Schools showed improvement in four
dimensions: Leaders and Leadership, Transitions, Family, School, and
Community Partnerships and Respecting Diversity.
All schools noted the strength of this process, including coaching
as key elements of success.
ready communities
DEPC has worked with local stakeholders, including child care
providers, businesses, faith-based organizations, and community leaders
to create champions who can provide and advocate for positive change in
their community.
DEPC has a network of over 75 community leaders that have
completed either Community Fellows (a 2-year leadership development
program) or Community Voices (a 15-session leadership training series).
As a result of these learning experiences, these individuals have the
skills to be collaborative community leaders.
Investment in early childhood education, including child
care, not only helps prepare future generations of the workforce, it is
also a critical component of supporting the current economy. DEPC has
built the economic engine of small businesses by training nearly every
child care provider/owner in the two counties.
DEPC is strengthening relationships with both the faith-
based community and the Latino/Hispanic community in the two counties.
Over 50 faith-based leaders have attended recent education forums to
learn more about how to be engaged in their local schools, with the
Healthy Kids Collaborative, or on advocacy-related issues in their
community.
Healthy Kids Collaborative launched in 2008 and has over
50 partners working together to increase access to healthy foods,
opportunities for physical activity, and increasing awareness and
education on ways to address the issue with parents, child care
providers, medical providers, and the broader community.
DEPC connects leaders and resources with each area elementary
school in order to achieve the following outcomes: increased student
achievement as well as less student behavior problems; access to
resources to support students and families; increased family
engagement, including PTO membership, better attendance at school
functions, and more effective parent-teacher communication; increased
support and resources for teachers; decreased teacher turnover; and
enhanced positive regard for schools.
To establish these partnerships, DEPC has developed an intensive
process, the Ready\2\ Initiative, to wrap a network of engaged parents,
community leaders, and community resources around each participating
school.
Over 60 people are participating in the Ready\2\
Initiative with 2 elementary schools.
This process has created new community-school connections,
resulted in increased availability of family involvement opportunities,
such as mentoring for children, parent engagement workshops on behavior
and parent-teacher conferences, experiences for children provided by
community members, such as tours of museums and community locations.
Schools are discussing and clarifying the definition of
family engagement for their school.
Next Steps: Build district-level capacity/infrastructure
for family and community engagement. DEPC has created a plan with Nash-
Rocky Mount Public Schools and Edgecombe County Public schools to
continue its Ready Schools and Ready Communities work with an increased
focus on family engagement, including implementation of evidence-based
options for K-2 family support.
recommendations
Based on our own lessons learned in implementing a model of early
care and education for children birth to age 8, DEPC makes the
following recommendations as you work on the reauthorization of the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
encourage investment in early care programs
Promote access to high quality care from birth, including
community-based providers and public pre-kindergarten classrooms. Early
care should be seen as a component of the education system and
resources should be in place to ensure all children may access this
care, as well as support quality improvement of these environments.
Support joint professional development among community-
based and school-based early care providers to promote consistent
standards and alignment among Pre-K-3 classrooms.
Promote strategies that focus on prevention and early
intervention to ensure children enter school ready to succeed and have
the support they need during early grades when they are setting their
foundation for lifelong learning.
support the creation of ready schools that have the capacity and
resources for schools to be ready to meet the needs of all children
Encourage schools to assess their capacity to model Ready
Schools best practices to meet the needs of all children with a tool
such as the High/Scope Ready School Assessment. Provide coaching to
schools on implementing Ready Schools process and best practices.
Promote use of title I funding to create infrastructure
and support staff to provide coaching and technical assistance on Ready
Schools.
Encourage other States to adopt Ready Schools definition,
pathways, and Pre-K-3 State and local infrastructure.
Support the creation of innovative strategies that will
promote developmentally appropriate classrooms Pre-K-3, connections and
alignment with early care providers, family engagement, and build the
capacity of teachers and administrators to individualize instruction to
meet the varying needs of children in their classrooms.
Establish data systems to track developmentally
appropriate assessment data on children Pre-K-3 and provide
professional development to teachers on ways to effectively use
assessment data to individualize instruction. Measure schools based on
growth toward high standards and alternate outcomes, not only on end-
of-grade testing.
Increase flexibility in funding for schools to implement
strategies based on local student need for all children Pre-K-3, not
strictly economic status.
invest in support for family-school-community partnerships
Invest in coaching and infrastructure to support
development and implementation of effective and meaningful family
involvement plans.
Encourage active partnerships between schools, early care
providers, and other community resources to meet all needs of children,
including access to services for health and family support.
conclusion
Throughout our history, DEPC has learned that to create long-term,
sustainable change, there must both be the public and political will to
support the work. We need to build capacity and leadership at all
levels to implement a comprehensive early care and education system of
services for children birth to age 8, to ensure that all children will
be successfully launched as healthy, lifelong learners.
For more information on DEPC, please visit us at www.depc.org or
call 252-985-4300.
Appendix A
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Appendix B
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Appendix C
nc definition & pathways to a ready school
Listed below is the definition and pathways to a ready school as
approved by both the NC Ready Schools Task force and the NC State Board
of Education.
definition
A ready elementary school provides an inviting atmosphere, values
and respects all children and their families, and is a place where
children succeed. It is committed to high quality in all domains of
learning and teaching and has deep connections with parents and its
community. It prepares children for success in work and life in the
21st century.
pathways to ready elementary schools
1. Children succeed in school. The school sets high expectations
for all students and facilitates healthy growth and development in five
domains suggested by the National Educational Goals Panel: physical
well-being; social relationships and emotional development; learning
approaches that incorporate cultural aspects of learning styles; use of
language; and cognition, general knowledge, and problem solving.
Children acquire culturally relevant knowledge and skill sets necessary
and valuable to the functioning of a modern economy.
2. A welcoming atmosphere. The school projects an open, child-
focused, welcoming atmosphere characterized by friendliness, respect,
high teacher and staff morale, and the use of appropriate discipline.
The building and grounds are inviting and developmentally appropriate.
Children's work is prominently displayed and bulletin boards contain
family-oriented material.
3. Leadership. School leaders believe that all children can learn,
teachers and staff can develop professionally, and all schools can meet
or exceed State performance standards. The principal possesses the
skill sets necessary for leading effectively and creating a learning
community. The school connects with and garners support from the
superintendent, school board, and the NC Department of Public
Instruction. In turn, the superintendent, school board, and the NC
Department of Public Instruction provide a coherent and appropriate set
of policies and regulations.
4. Connections to early care and education and across grades. There
is ongoing communication and coordination between early care and
education (ECE) and elementary school teachers for quality assurance
from Pre-K through grade 3. Standards and curriculum are aligned
between ECE and the school at the local, district, and State levels.
The school participates in or provides a number of transition
experiences for children entering Pre-K or kindergarten such as school
and home visits, staggered entry, and orientation sessions for children
and families. Assessment data are obtained from ECE providers in order
to plan and individualize children's learning. In addition, curriculum,
instruction, and assessment are aligned and integrated within a
classroom, within a grade level, and across grade levels.
5. Connects culturally and linguistically with children and
families. The school seeks to help children from all circumstances and
backgrounds succeed. The school uses a culturally appropriate
curriculum to enhance learning. Children and families are encouraged to
share their backgrounds and experiences with other children and
families.
6. Partners with Families. The school communicates and partners
with all families in a wide range of activities from providing
information to engaging parents in policy and decisionmaking. Outreach
strategies are implemented to ensure that families of diverse
populations are welcome to participate in all school-related
activities.
7. Partners with the community. The school functions as a community
center drawing children and families from surrounding neighborhoods for
multiple activities and purposes. It partners with the community to
provide opportunities and services to children and families such as
health screening and health services, courses in the English language,
courses in other languages, and instruction in GED preparation,
computers, and parenting.
8. Uses assessment results. The school uses assessments, both
formal and informal (daily interactions with the child, communications
with parents), to plan and tailor instruction to individual needs.
There are strategies in place to improve test scores and reduce
achievement gaps. The school ensures that assessments are reliable,
valid, individual and developmentally and culturally appropriate.
9. Quality Assurance. The school strives to grow by following a
written improvement plan that includes a strategy for maintaining its
mission and goals over time. It supports staff in professional
development and consults with educational and non-educational experts
for staff training and quality assurance. Leadership uses data and
research on effective practices for decisionmaking.
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The Chairman. Thank you very much, Ms. Zalkind.
Thank you all for excellent testimony.
I will start off a 5-minute round of questioning with a
question I want you all to roll around in your heads.
We are under a lot of budget constraints around here, and
we have got to get our budget priorities in order to improve
our economy. But everything depends upon priorities. So if you
have $1 to spend on early childhood education, that is prior to
kindergarten, or elementary education or high school, all those
three, how would you spend it? How would you divide up that $1?
Think about it. We will come back to that when I have my
next round of questions.
It seems to me that we all recognize the importance of
investing in early childhood education. We have recognized for
some time, you all have attested to it, and we have had studies
like the one conducted by the Committee on Economic Development
to underscore the fact. Mr. Griswell mentioned another study
conducted in 2003. We keep hearing about the importance of
investing early, over and over again. We have got to focus more
on early childhood. Yet we just have a potpourri of different
investments out there.
There are people doing wonderful things to improve the
quality of and access to early childhood education in some
places. In other places they are not doing very much. Even if a
Federal level were investing in multiple ways. We have prenatal
care programs. We have the Childcare Development Block Grant
that is Senator Dodd's child. That is the one that he has been
champion of for so long. We also have Head Start, Early Head
Start, and Title I Preschool.
This committee provided $2 billion in funding for the
Childcare Assistance Block Grant and also $2.1 billion for Head
Start and Early Head Start, $4.1 billion. But I am not certain
that collectively these investments are resulting in optimizing
the provision of high quality, early learning services. I am
saying I don't know if there is a sufficient educational
component to these programs. That is something for us to
wrestle with. How much of the reauthorization should include
early childhood education reforms that focus on strengthening
too.
And since we are not dealing with those bills right now,
should we deal with that in ESEA? I am not afraid of breaking
new ground. I asked similar questions when the Childcare
Development Block Grant was last reauthorized in 1996. So a lot
of things have changed since then.
So I guess, for all of you, my basic question is: Should
we, in this reauthorization of ESEA, break new ground and
really move ahead forcefully in an area of early childhood
education and focus more on investigating early learning?
Rather than just focusing on elementary and secondary
education, should we focus more on pre-school education in this
bill?
And if so, how? We will just go left to right. Barry.
Mr. Griswell. Oh, that is a tough one. It is a big one. You
know, I do think that somebody, somewhere has to take a
holistic view of how we are delivering education, and I think
that view has to start at birth. And I am not sure exactly how
you do it, whether it is through this committee or through
others.
But I think if we fail to look at education as starting at
birth, we will always be fragmented. And we need leadership. We
need somebody to stand up and say this is the view of what
education looks like. Here is how we are going to try to get
organized to accomplish it. It is complicated because States
are involved, childcare deliverers are involved. But somebody
has got to create a vision that we can all rally behind.
And maybe if it is just principles, I, for one, am of the
view that the Race to the Top, some of the innovative things
that have been going on in some of the other parts of the
education system in the United States are positive. I think the
charter school movement is positive.
We need to have some of that very same focus on early
childhood, and we need to stay with it for a long period of
time. So I think I have answered your question. Yes, I think it
should be zero, and I would spend my $1--50 cents on early
childhood, probably 25 to 30 cents on elementary, and what is
left on secondary.
The Chairman. Well, thank you. That is interesting.
Mr. Schweinhart.
Mr. Schweinhart. We are kind of handed a lot of
institutions that started a long time ago. Schools pretty
clearly started at age 5 or 6 in order to take advantage of the
fact that kids were starting to learn how to read and
manipulate symbols and that sort of thing. We have come a long
way since those days, and we understand the way children
develop a whole lot better today than we did back when we
institutionalized schooling.
So we know that rather than a tight focus on reading and
mathematics, children are developing cognitively, socially, and
physically. And because that is the way they are developing,
that is the way our institutions ought to be focusing.
I am no expert in policy tools. That is what you guys do,
and it seems to me how we put those policy tools together is
largely the purvey of this committee. Whether it is Head Start
or Childcare Development Block Grant or ESEA, those are
balancing acts. I think, generally speaking, our society needs
to invest more in children's development in order to be as
healthy and powerful as it can be in the future.
Now, how we get there is a question of balancing one thing
against the other, but I think--I remember a quote from Urie
Bronfenbrenner some years ago. They asked him what age was the
most important. He said birth is the most important, and 1 is
the most important, 2 is the most important, 3 is the most
important, and 5 and 6 and 7 and 8. Every age of a child is the
most important, and that is what we have got to do.
The Chairman. OK. Mr. Pianta, should we address early
childhood education in the reauthorization?
Mr. Pianta. Yes. Break ground. I think it is time to do
that. My remarks were pretty consistent with that.
I think, Senator Harkin, you raised the issue of whether
there should be an educational component to many of the
investments that you are currently making? I would say, yes,
there should be an educational component. That we could argue
about what the nature of that component would be--there would
be a difference of opinion about that--but these environments
are--you are paying for environments that are too passive right
now.
You need environments that are actively engaging kids and
intentionally engaging kids in learning, however we would
appropriately define that for 2-year-olds or for 7-year-olds.
And I think that is the key leverage point that you have.
I think right now whether you spend $1 or $10, you are
paying for a lot of activities. You are paying for a lot of
adults. You are paying for a lot of space. And my point would
be a lot of that could be better utilized if focused more
intentionally and the goals and methods defined a little more
clearly. So those would be my points. Yes.
The Chairman. Back to that dollar.
Mr. Pianta. OK.
The Chairman. Ms. Zalkind, please, I am way over my time.
Should we address that in this bill?
Ms. Zalkind. We certainly should address that in that bill,
and I would spend my whole dollar on early childhood education,
obviously, because I think that is where you get the most bang
for the buck. That if kids are failing by the end of the third
grade, you are going to keep spending money to remediate. So if
we invest early, we get more bang for that dollar than anywhere
else.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
Senator Burr.
Senator Burr. Henrietta, North Carolina--More at Four, Head
Start, Smart Start, CCDBG. If I made the statement that I don't
think we are as successful as we could be and I were to blame
that on the lack of coordination, what would you say?
Ms. Zalkind. I would say the coordination is something that
we work on every day at the local level. I think that is
something that this reauthorization could address. I think that
if we promote a paradigm that uses a framework like Ready
Schools to coordinate all the different opportunities and
funding sources toward common ends that communities can build
on their strengths and coordinate and leverage all different
opportunities, depending on families' diverse needs.
Senator Burr. I think I heard Mr. Griswell say, we have all
these things out there, and there is nobody really driving the
train here. We are not using the assets that are in the system
as effectively, and what works for one might not work for
another. What works in this community might not necessarily be
the optimal thing.
So this is not necessarily about replicating success. It is
taking the tools that we know work and applying them
effectively, and coordination is an absolute key.
Many of you in your testimony today talked about the need
to ensure better transition between early childhood education
and elementary schools so that the positive effects of that
quality early childhood education don't fade. So let me ask
anybody that would like to talk, to expand on that just a
little bit more.
But also I would say since many low-income children enter
elementary school from a federally supported program like Head
Start or CCDBG programs, what policy recommendations do you
have for us for those two programs specifically that we need to
address in this legislation? I will let anybody who would like
to take it on.
Mr. Pianta. You could start requiring that there would be
articulation of the curriculum used across Head Start programs
and the local school system. That would be one thing. You could
start by requiring that those teachers, the adults who are
working with kids in Head Start programs, were exposed to the
same form of professional development so that professional
development occurred jointly from those Head Start-funded
programs and elementary age.
I would argue don't stop with Head Start. Try to extend
into the other kinds of settings and programs that are serving
young kids, too, so that a coherent approach to educating young
kids exists in a community.
Mr. Griswell. Senator, if I might? First of all, I would
like to thank North Carolina for being a role model in so many
ways. I know when a lot of States set out to try to figure out
what to do in early childhood, North Carolina is often brought
up as a State that is doing it better than most. So I
congratulate you on that.
I think one of the things that I would point out is this
enormous need for quality rating systems, whether it be in the
Government program or in the private sector. And it is amazing
to me how much resistance you get to quality rating systems.
People don't really want to be held accountable for having a
childcare center that meets certain standards, and you will get
a lot of pushback, well, if you did that, there will be fewer
facilities. And I think we have got to hold the line and make
sure that quality, above all else, is included in all the
efforts, whether it be Government programs or private programs.
Business is stepping up. My company, 2 years ago, developed
its own childcare center in conjunction with our company. So we
partnered with Bright Horizons. And so, we now have, as part of
the experience of working for the Principal Financial Group, we
have a 5-week to 5-year-old childcare facility right in our
complex.
So we are going to make sure that we are doing our part to
make sure that employees of the Principal--but it shouldn't be
just employees of Principal. It ought to be every child ought
to have that kind of quality experience.
Senator Burr. Tremendous. Tremendous.
In the counties of Nash and Edgecombe County, where Ms.
Zalkind is from, nearly one-third of the children between the
ages of 2 and 4 are either overweight or at risk for obesity.
These numbers represent a health crisis in my estimation.
The Down East Partnership, Ms. Zalkind, has recently
launched a wellness and prevention strategy in those counties,
in those schools aimed at instilling good ideas and healthy
lifestyles in children at a very, very young age. Let me just
ask, do you have any recommendations on how we might better
attend to the health and physical domain of children's
development across various Federal programs--school lunch,
other food programs, CCDBG, Head Start?
And as a side note, from a standpoint of the free and
reduced school meals, should we--the Federal Government--since
we fund them, set a nutritional value that might have an
influence on everything else that is served in a cafeteria? To
whoever would like to take it.
Mr. Schweinhart. Yes.
[Laughter.]
Mr. Pianta. Is there any question?
Mr. Schweinhart. But I would like to speak to the thrust of
your questioning, too. It seems to me that what could be really
helpful is clarity of objectives. The objective that I think is
particularly important here is contributing to children's
development--cognitive, socio-emotional, and physical. If we
keep a clear focus on that, a lot of stuff will flow from that
and certain kinds of policies that we have now that are not
clearly serving that end would be sort of identified as such.
A lot of our early childhood programs operate with a
confused agenda. You go back to Head Start, it was a part of
the civil rights movement as well as the child development
movement, and there are conflicts within it because of that
dual heritage. Childcare Development Block Grant clearly was
very much focused on helping families to get more people into
the workforce. And to the extent that that was the case, we are
not contributing to children's development as much as we could
with that law.
And it seems to me that Elementary and Secondary Education
Act has had various kinds of more tight focus over the years
when, in fact, a general focus on children's development across
those three laws, I think, in particular could help to clarify
what we are trying to do.
Senator Burr. Anybody else?
Mr. Chairman, thank you.
The Chairman. Thank you, Senator Burr.
And in order of appearance on this side anyway, it is
Senators Brown, Sanders, Franken, Murray, Bennet, Casey, Dodd,
and Merkley.
Senator Brown.
Statement of Senator Brown
Senator Brown. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you for the insight all of you showed. I first want
to make an observation that all of you made such compelling
cases for early childhood education and what we need to do.
My State of Ohio, the legislature just recently passed,
required full-day kindergarten. It had been half day until 2 or
3 years ago. That is the good news. The bad news is that
schools right now are asking for waivers to scale back to a
half a day, and in some cases, where school districts had half-
day kindergarten prior to the new law and half-day early
childhood, they are petitioning to eliminate--or I guess they
are not even petitioning in this case. They are eliminating
early childhood programs because of space and cost to make room
for the full-day kindergarten.
I hope that in light of the case you made--and I wish there
were more Senators at this hearing--this brings us to real
consensus on not what we do programmatically, but also on
spending the money we need on early childhood education. We are
all seeing terrible budget cuts in our States, almost every
State here, on education and on everything else.
I know that every dollar, as the chairman's question
suggests, that we spend or don't spend or cut on early
childhood education inflicts so much damage and, as Mr.
Griswell said, more time in prison, more mental health dollars,
more dropout dollars, more dropouts, all of that. That is my
observation.
But I hope, as we move on this budget coming up, as we move
on particularly Chairman Harkin's idea with spending money
directly on teachers that we will see the kind of consensus in
this Senate that we ought to see on these kinds of issues.
Question of Ms. Zalkind, if I could? The kind of
collaboration you have is what we would like to replicate in
Ohio and I think so many States, so many people, so many of us
would all over the country. I am working on legislation that
will help communities in developing better ways to coordinate
and integrate and provide services to strengthen student
achievement, ranging from early education to tutoring and
extended learning time to healthcare and social support.
Schools clearly are the best vehicle to connect children
and families to the support they need to be successful on a
whole range of issues. Tell us more about how Down East
Partnership built that collaboration. And how we can use that
and replicate that other places, if you would?
Ms. Zalkind. Well, it has been a 16-year process, and when
I ever talk about how we built it, we built it one activity at
a time where we had consensus, where we had strength, where we
had something to build on. Senator Burr is looking at our
Healthy Kids collaborative map, and we have just launched that.
But if you start where you have consensus, and that is one
of the things that I think I feel so strongly about--the Ready
Schools process--that if you bring a group of people together
and you use a validated instrument to look at where are we
strong, where can we build our capacity? And start where people
agree and build out from there, that every dollar does have to
count.
Sometimes, what you really need is the plan, and giving
people the time and the space and the process to plan where are
they? How can they move from this place to this place to this
place? To move at intermediate steps toward long-term goals.
That is another thing I think that could be integrated into
the law, that certainly we want every child doing well on the
third grade end-of-year test, but there are intermediate
outcomes to getting to everyone launched at the end of the
third grade. And doing the HighScope or any other kind of
assessment like that lets people see the visible progress
working together and also lets them see what it is that they
need that they may not have to spend money on, that they may be
able to get a church to donate, that they may be able to get a
business to sponsor.
So, really giving people the space and the time to plan
across those stakeholder groups where they can find those
consensus points and move forward and then build out from there
because everything leads back. All of the issues are
interconnected.
Senator Brown. For any of you, how do we write ESEA to
foster that kind of collaboration? Any thoughts that any of you
have on that?
Mr. Schweinhart.
Mr. Schweinhart. It is important for school folks to
recognize that there are communities beyond the schools. To the
extent that you simply make it clear that when there is
community collaboration, it involves the whole community with
representation beyond the schools, that would help a lot.
Ms. Zalkind. And to have aligned standards and joint
professional development and a curriculum that operates at a
high quality that recognizes that there are a variety of
providers at all levels from 0 to 8, from Early Head Start to
private providers, to the schools, and to State-funded programs
so that if you put the money that is coming from the Federal
Government and No Child Left Behind and title I into a context,
into a system.
We have been blessed in North Carolina to really be working
off a joint system. Now we are always working to make that
system better, but you have to keep all of those balls in the
air at the same time in terms of teacher wages and quality
standards and school articulation agreements. But you have to
envision that paradigm as a prevention paradigm and align those
standards.
And I think Dr. Schweinhart's point about there is life
outside the school, and life outside the school can help. But
schools are afraid because they have been penalized if they
don't meet those standards. So they are very focused on
teaching to the test. And so, breaking down and giving them
some other ways to show success and letting people try some
things and try some innovation and try some new ways of
reaching out, I think that dollar will go farther.
Mr. Pianta. I would add a couple points to that. So you
have the opportunity to extend data systems into the younger
ages. So the longitudinal data systems that you are investing
in from K on the way up should be extended down lower so that
the kids in programs in those lower age programs are connected
to those data systems.
Qualifications and training would be the same way. The
mention of quality grading and improvement systems, this idea
that you go in and rate and give stars to incent improved
quality in early childhood, why not do that in K-3? So I think
there are lots of opportunities in the bill.
The Chairman. Senator Sanders.
Statement of Senator Sanders
Senator Sanders. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And Mr. Chairman,
thank you very much for holding this hearing on an issue which
in no way gets the kind of attention that it deserves.
Let us be very clear, and let me not mince words. The way
we treat children in this country is an international
embarrassment, and the way we do childcare is a national
disgrace, which, as Mr. Griswell and some of the others
indicated, impacts every aspect of our lives, from our economy
to the number of kids that we have in jail.
We have, at 18 percent, the highest rate of childhood
poverty in the industrialized world, and we are all very
shocked that we end up having more people in jail than China, a
country much larger than ours, communist, authoritarian
society. We have more people behind bars than they do at
$50,000 a head.
Now the good news is, Mr. Chairman, you have assembled an
excellent panel. The bad news is that, in all due respect, my
guess is that in the last 30 years, we have had people sitting
right where you are sitting saying exactly the same thing. It
is not rocket science.
If you ignore the needs of little children, you know what?
They are going to fail in school. And if they fail in school,
you know what? They are going to do crime, and they are going
to end up in jail, and they are not going to be good employees.
It has probably been said here 800 times, and yet we have not
bitten the bullet on this issue.
So the first issue that--and then you have got absurdity
right now, as we speak, millions of kids whose parents are
working. You know, we have forgotten that this is not the
1950s, where daddy goes to work and mommy stays home and takes
care of the kids. Guess what? That is not the case anymore.
In Vermont, something like 70 percent of the children in
the State have working parents. Mom and dad are both working.
What do we do with the kids? Well, if maybe we are lucky, their
grandma can take care of them, or maybe the neighbor down the
street can take care of them who doesn't have any background at
all, or maybe we can hire somebody at $9 an hour without any
benefits.
We have got to ask some very basic questions. The chairman
talked about priorities, and he is right. And we have screwed
this up royally, and it is time that we rethought it, and it is
going to cost us money. But at the end of the day, I think we
save money.
So let me start off. There are countries around the world
which do things like say, you know what, a childcare worker is
as important as a college professor. At the very least, we are
going to train that employee, make it a dignified profession,
and pay them the same wages as other teachers get.
No. 2, the simple question--all right, we have done a whole
lot of talking here. Let us get to the root of it. Should every
child in this country, because of Federal law, have the right
to quality childcare from birth to kindergarten? That is the
$64 question. I believe that we should. Is it expensive?
Absolutely. Especially for little kids, you have to have a high
ratio of employees for the kids. It is expensive.
I think you save money down the road, as Mr. Griswell
indicated, by having kids do better in school, become better
workers, fewer people in jail. That is my first question, and
it is an expensive proposition.
We are in the midst of a recession. We have a huge national
debt. Mr. Griswell, should every kid in the--and I would like
all of you to answer. Should every kid in this country, as a
right of citizenship, be entitled to good-quality childcare?
Yes, no, maybe?
Mr. Griswell. I believe they should. I believe children of
wealthy and middle-income people get it anyway. This is about
poverty. This is about income. This is about socio-economics. I
believe they should. I believe it is a crime that they are not.
Senator Sanders. Thank you.
Mr. Schweinhart.
Mr. Schweinhart. I was just thinking about welfare reform
and how we saved money, but we didn't make any. And it is
harder to do investment because there is a delay in getting the
returns. But if we don't--in any business, if you don't make
investments, you can't cut your way to a successful business,
and it is completely analogous to the situation we have got
here.
If we don't invest as much as we possibly can in our
children----
Senator Sanders. Should every child, by right, have access
to high quality child care? Right now in the State of Vermont--
I guess each State does it differently--every kid has got to be
in school in the first grade. They get free education through
high school. Should that same opportunity be available for kids
when they are born in terms of childcare?
Mr. Schweinhart. Of course, every child deserves a good
early childhood education. The only question----
Senator Sanders. And it is the Government's responsibility
to make sure it happens?
Mr. Schweinhart. It is a question of where Government comes
in and how we balance that.
Senator Sanders. OK.
Mr. Schweinhart. I don't want to say Government has to do
it all, but we have to do it all.
Senator Sanders. Well, I am not sure who else is going to
do it.
Mr. Pianta.
Mr. Pianta. I think it is the Government's job to make sure
it happens. I am not sure it is the Government's job to provide
it for all children. I agree with Mr. Griswell. So I think we
should be absolutely paying attention to whether every kid in
this country is exposed to the kind of learning opportunities
that help them be successful.
Senator Sanders. Now I am not saying that every program has
got to be run by the Government, but there has to be the
funding there in the same way kids go to the first grade,
somebody is poor, they are going to walk into that public
school. Right now, if they are poor, they don't walk into
quality childcare. Should the Government make sure that that
happens?
Mr. Pianta. The Government should make sure that the
playing field is equal in childcare as a way of doing that.
Senator Sanders. Ms. Zalkind.
Ms. Zalkind. I would agree. Where we have come down in
terms of our planning is to make sure that every child has
high-quality early care and education environment. And to make
sure that every environment, whether that is home, whether that
is a family home childcare, whether that is a childcare center,
whether that is Head Start, whether that is a public school,
that all of those environments have adequate funds and adequate
supports to make it high quality.
So I think you have to build parent choice into the
equation, but that the Government should provide adequate
funding to make sure that all of those environments are high
quality and that every child gets a chance to succeed.
Senator Sanders. Thank you.
Mr. Chairman, I would just conclude, and it is an issue
that has not come up, and maybe Mr. Griswell wants to say a
word on this. It is not only for the children. It is not only
for their parents. It is for the economy as well.
If I am a single mom going to work, how do I do my job if I
don't know that my kid has good quality care? And I have got to
tell you in Vermont, it is very hard to find--my daughter's
middle-class baby, hard to find affordable, good-quality
childcare.
But it affects people's jobs, right?
Mr. Griswell. Absolutely. I mean, I did say in my remarks
that in a competitive global economy, we are not going to
compete if we don't solve this problem. We are wasting 25 to 30
percent of our human capital. There is no way we are going to
compete if we don't solve this problem, I believe.
Senator Sanders. Thank you all very much.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you, Senator Sanders.
Senator Franken.
Statement of Senator Franken
Senator Franken. I am going to echo what some of my
colleagues have talked about, which is the return on
investment, and I am echoing what you have talked about. And as
a Congress, we are all concerned about the deficit, but we are
most concerned about long-term deficit. And I agree with
colleagues on both sides of the aisle that it is wrong to
saddle our children with debt by allowing our long-term deficit
to spiral out of control.
But as you have all testified, quality early childhood
education programs produce high returns on investment, and we
have had Art Rolnick from the Federal Reserve in Minnesota and
James Heckman talk about the returns ranging from, I don't
know, I have heard anywhere from $3 to $17 for every $1 spent.
So if you are talking about long-term deficits, I think we are
being penny-wise and pound-foolish by not spending now on early
childhood.
I want to talk about a program in Minnesota because I think
this has to start prenatally and go through the rest of school.
In Minnesota, we have this great home visiting program called
Dakota Healthy Families. And basically, pediatricians and
social workers and obstetrician/gynecologists identify at-risk
parents. This is all voluntary.
The obstetrician/gynecologists make sure that the mom has
good prenatal care, and then they make sure that they give the
parents parenting training, which Ms. Zalkind talked about, and
then they do home visits. And they do home visits until the
child goes to preschool. They have learned this program pays
for itself simply in the number of children--in the reduced
number of child abuse caseworkers that need to be hired.
Now my daughter taught third grade in the Bronx for 3
years, the first 3 years out of college. She is now working in
the DC elementary schools. Her experience was there would be
two or three disruptive kids in the class. You can imagine that
kids who have been abused are just more disruptive than kids
who haven't been abused.
So this isn't just affecting those kids. It is affecting
every kid in the class, and it is affecting every teacher. I
guess my question is, have you looked at these kind of early
visitation programs, this kind of program like Dakota Healthy
Families, and why aren't we doing it everywhere? Anybody?
Mr. Griswell. I would just point out in Minnesota, you have
something else. You have the first early childhood program of
United Way that is called Success by 6. And indeed, I think
United Way and other organizations like that are taking a
leadership role. One of their national priorities, called Born
Learning, is to raise awareness and to share best practices on
programs like you are talking.
So I think there are a lot of those. Certainly, I would
point out United Way has been one that is doing similar
programs to what you just mentioned.
Ms. Zalkind. And clearly, home visiting is one of the
things that there are many good evidence-based--not many, but
there are good evidence-based models behind. They show great
returns on investment. And focusing on young children, 0- to 3-
year-olds is where you are going to get the most return on the
investment.
So I think that that goes back to Senator Harkin's comment,
where does Early Head Start fit into this?
Senator Franken. What the chairman was talking about was
where do we put our dollars? He had that question for you all.
And every witness we have, the ones who are talking about
adolescents said we don't spend enough in eighth grade.
And what this is, is about return on investment. And if we
are really serious, I am talking really serious about not
saddling our kids with debt--and I say this to my colleagues on
both sides of the aisle. If we are really serious about that,
we have to focus on what kind of resources we are devoting. And
we don't want to waste money, and we want to coordinate right,
and we want to do that right.
I guess we are going to do another round, but I want to
talk to Mr. Pianta about teaching, about preparing teachers,
about teaching assessment because I know that you might have
some kind of, I don't know, regime that works for assessing
early childhood teachers. Do you know of one?
Yes, just as a 10-second question.
Mr. Pianta. Yes. Yes. So we have----
Senator Franken. What is it called?
Mr. Pianta. Classroom Assessment Scoring System, that is
the one we developed. That is one of them. There is one called
the Early Childhood Environment Rating System. That is another
one. There are others.
Senator Franken. And I have run out of time. So I will
respect that.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you, Senator Franken.
I just might point out to my friend from Minnesota that in
the healthcare reform bill, there is a $1.5 billion mandatory
program over 10 years for home visiting that will inpart,
provide additional support for expectant mothers' prenatal
care.
Senator Franken. Yes. I am also talking about once the
child has been born and continuing that visitation until the
child is actually going to preschool.
The Chairman. That money can be used for that, too.
Senator Franken. Yes. OK.
The Chairman. Senator Murray.
Statement of Senator Murray
Senator Murray. Mr. Chairman, thank you so much for having
this hearing.
I have to say that after our 10th hearing on the Elementary
and Secondary Education Act, it is wonderful to see so much
passion about an issue that I think we all care about. I come
to this not just as a U.S. Senator, but as a mom who put my
kids through school, a PTA member, a school board president,
but probably most importantly, the only preschool teacher up
here on this panel.
This is a real passion of mine, and I think we know the
research and know how important it is. And as Senator Sanders
said, we keep talking about it and haven't done it. So I see
this as a tremendous opportunity for us to really make some
progress on this.
My home State of Washington has really embraced investments
in early childhood education. Back in 2006, our Governor and
the legislature, in partnership, created the State Department
of Early Learning. I think it is the first cabinet-level agency
in the country focused on this and really looking at how we can
bring together all the partners, which many of you alluded to.
You can't just do it with one agency. You need your State, your
local governments, businesses, parents, tribes, and teachers.
Everybody has to be involved in this, and I appreciate that.
My question to all of you is, every one of you talked about
high-quality early learning, and I can tell you, as a preschool
teacher, I knew the first day of class which kids came into my
classroom with some kind of high-quality childcare or education
before and which ones had not. It is essential, but we throw
that term around very loosely.
I wanted to ask all of you what do you mean by ``high
quality?'' Is it a teacher, or a curriculum, or are you talking
about parental involvement? What is it that defines ``high
quality'' for you?
Mr. Griswell. Well, I think the answer to that is, yes. One
of the programs I was involved with was we took a lot of the
inner-city daycare centers and we put a 4-year effort to try to
improve quality. In fact, everything you just mentioned, you
start with a teacher and elevating the professionalism of the
teacher and give them opportunity for development.
You look at the curriculum and make sure you have
nationally accredited curriculum. You look at the facilities.
You look at outreach to the parents to make sure that they are
engaged in the learning process. And if you change those things
dramatically and if you track the progress of the kids coming
into a system like that, you will see 60 to 70 percent
improvement over 4 or 5 years, something you already know.
Mr. Schweinhart. I actually spoke about what I think is the
heart of quality, which is good interactive child development
curriculum and regular checkups or generally making sure you
are doing the job. A couple of other things that I would have
said if I had a little more time was that we really need
qualified teachers. You all have heard of those.
And we need, what ``qualified'' means, quite simply, is
teachers who know what they are doing. There has been some
discussion about whether Bachelor's degrees are real indicators
of quality or not. The real point is that you need people who
know what they are doing. And that means you need clarity of
goals of what early childhood education is all about, and I
have tried to speak to that.
Then I want to echo what was just said, that we also need
to have strong outreach to parents so that parents are really
seen as partners with the teachers in raising the kids.
Another point I want to say in response to what you are
asking and kind of echo something that came from Senator
Franken earlier, we have really got to focus on quality control
of programs that are known to work and make sure that they are
really being the programs that work. We need to invest what it
takes into the programs themselves to make sure that those
programs are really doing what needs to be done to get the
long-term return on investment.
You can't build a luxury hotel at cut rate and expect it to
have the same kind of drawing power as if you put all the money
into it. We need to have really good programs that have solid
investments in order to get the return on investment.
Senator Murray. Mr. Pianta.
Mr. Pianta. Well, I think you already know the answer to
your question, Senator Murray, because quality is what the
adults do with kids. So it is all about the engagement of
adults in interactions that are tuned in ways to push kids'
development, whether those are conversations and language
development, whether it is comforting a kid when the kid is
upset, or whether it is pointing out to a kid the conceptual
nature of something rather than just memorization.
Those features of interactions between kids and adults can
be assessed. They can be quantified. They can even be put into
regulations. Head Start is using our measure, the Classroom
Assessment Scoring System, and has used others as assessments
monitoring tools for a large-scale program. The quality rating
and improvement systems that Mr. Griswell mentioned are also
those.
So quality is about what teachers do with children, and I
would argue, with all due respect to Mr. Sanders, that 10 years
ago, we would not have drawn that conclusion as clearly. I
think we have moved the needle. The question is whether policy
can catch up with that.
Senator Murray. Ms. Zalkind.
Ms. Zalkind. I would agree with everything that has been
said. In North Carolina, we have a five-star rating system that
focuses on teacher interactions, but also focuses on
facilities, focuses on making sure that children are
progressing in all five domains of child development. And so,
that is a standardized measure of quality, but we use the
environmental rating scale as a way to measure that.
But again, there are other factors that go into that in
terms of parent interaction. You can have a four or five star,
but if you still don't interact with the parents and still
don't deal with all five domains of child development, don't do
transitions and have a working relationship with the school so
that we can keep building out, we miss the mark. But you have
got to have some minimum standards so people are working off
the same set of benchmarks.
Senator Murray. OK. I appreciate that, and I am out of
time.
I just want to make one other comment. Whenever we have
this discussion about assessments, we get back to are we going
to have a test that we hand these kids, and if they pass, then
the teacher is doing well? I just have to tell everybody, if
you put 24 4-year-olds in front of me, and you show them a
picture of a pig, they may or may not answer that day,
dependent on their day, not yours. So we have to be really
careful of how we implement assessments.
Thank you.
The Chairman. Thank you for that lesson, teacher.
[Laughter.]
Senator Bennet.
Statement of Senator Bennet
Senator Bennet. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thanks for all of
the hearings, including this one.
And to the panel, thank you very much for your testimony.
We had some experience with this in Denver, where we passed
a sales tax, which is not the ordinary source of funding for
schools. And what we said was the revenue from that is
available to everybody, to all providers, public and nonprofit
and private providers. And that families would get more,
depending on how poor they were or what their income level was
and the quality of the program they went to.
So the higher the poverty, the better quality of the
program, the more the subsidy that you got, which I thought was
a clever way of trying to deal with the quality issue as well
as the issue of access.
I was looking at some numbers here that show that there are
roughly 19 million children served by title I dollars in this
country. And of that 19 million, there are roughly half a
million that are age 0 to 5 getting preschool services. Do you
have any idea why if it is so blindingly obvious to everybody
here that we should be investing in early childhood that only 3
percent of the children served by title I are the kids that we
are all talking about today?
Does anybody have a view on that?
Ms. Zalkind. I think we don't have a prevention paradigm in
the title I law. I think we have an intervention and a remedial
paradigm that we have to shift, and I think the time to shift
is now.
And in our local communities, that paradigm has shifted,
and they spend a significant portion of their title I money on
early education because it is worth it to them. They wanted to
know the kids who came to kindergarten before they came to
kindergarten so they spent money on the system of home-school
contacts. They spent money on staff that would staff preschool
4-year-old programs.
Senator Bennet. Dr. Pianta, do you have a view on that? You
have been seeing a lot of districts. Why aren't they spending
their money on early childhood?
Mr. Pianta. I just think there are structural issues that
prevent that from flowing. So very oftentimes, those dollars
are flowing into a K-12 system that organizes itself as a K-12
system, defines itself as a K-12 system, and early education
sits outside of that system.
Senator Bennet. So you and I, we didn't practice this, but
that is exactly where I was headed.
[Laughter.]
I think the question that I have is if you look at title I,
you look at the way ESEA works, you look at Head Start, you
look at the Childcare Development Block Grant, you can see that
these aren't even administered by the same agencies in
Washington. Even within the bureaucracies, they are
administered by a couple of places.
And I guess the question that I have is from the vantage
point of people serving kids, does that make a lot of sense, or
should we be figuring out how to drive and incentivize the kind
of cooperation and collaboration that might actually make these
dollars go a much longer way with a much more sensible set of
priorities than the ones that we seem to be chasing right now?
Doctor, I will start with you again.
Mr. Pianta. I just think that is a sensible approach, and I
think it is echoed in Senator Murray's statement about what
Washington State is doing to integrate at the State level. We
need to incent that kind of integration at all levels.
Mr. Schweinhart. I would just like to add to that. I don't
know every line in the current ESEA, but it seems to me there
are pretty clearly incentives for K to 12. We are telling them
where to put the money, and we are not incentivizing kids
younger than that. So it would be really good to take a look at
that and see if there would be a way to incentivize kids so
that we can get the biggest bang for the buck rather than
whether they are in the system or not.
Mr. Griswell. A mentor of mine one time said, you know, we
have kids being thrown in the river, and people downstream are
picking them out of the river and saving them one person at a
time. And everybody is focused on that, and it is important.
But nobody has thought yet to go back upstream and see who it
is that is throwing these kids in the river and how we can stop
them from being thrown in.
I don't think you stop it until we get organized and
coordinated. And quite frankly, I don't want to be disparaging
toward the Government, but I worry whether you have the ability
to connect all the dots because you have so many things in so
many different places.
Senator Bennet. Well, I think the question maybe is a
slightly different one because it is sort of a balance between
how prescriptive we want to be from here versus how much
flexibility we want to give people to make the right decisions
and how we make sure we don't create a set of incentives and
disincentives that don't lead people in the wrong direction or
spend their time fighting for what, no matter what we all say,
fighting for whatever very, very scarce resources rather than
beginning to focus on the child and working backwards from
there.
Mr. Griswell. I was trying to agree with you. Perhaps not
so. But I think having all of your work spread out between so
many different committees and departments, I mean, it would
seem to me you would want to have all things related to child
development and family development somehow at least coordinated
so that these programs--I mean, it is a patchwork of things
that you, that the Government--we put out there. I don't want
to blame it on you.
All well intended, but what is out there right now is a
patchwork, and I don't know how you make your way through a
cohesive view of child development when you have to go so many
places. I think States and businesses and others have to take
the lead locally, but I hope that we can somehow reach into our
taxpayer dollars that go through you to find ways to have them
better coordinated.
Senator Bennet. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. I think, Mr. Griswell, aligning these
programs and systems is one of the things we really have to
focus on. The current system is a patchwork. There is nothing
really pulling them together, this is one of our challenges.
Mr. Griswell. And I will just say this, as a business
person who walked into this field, there are more acronyms,
there are more people, there are more things going on in this.
You think it should be pretty straightforward, and you start
stirring around in this pot, and you will find the Abecedarian
and all of these research. And all of a sudden, you find there
are so many ways to go at it, and every State is going at it
differently.
In some ways, you have got to hold up the North Carolinas
and, to some extent, Georgias and other States. I think it is
the University of Vermont that has this enormous study that
they do that lists, State by State, who is doing the best job
of solving this problem, who is the most efficient. And we
ought to be learning the lessons from those.
Colorado is doing a great job with Colorado Care. We ought
to really learn from the States that are doing it right and try
to model those, I think.
The Chairman. I just asked my staff to get that study. What
is it, a Vermont study?
Mr. Griswell. I will locate it for you. I believe it is the
University of Vermont that does it. It is in Connecticut or
Vermont, Maine. But they are looked at--I am sorry----
[Laughter.]
You know, Iowa, Ohio, Idaho?
[Laughter.]
They are renowned for their annual study. Maybe some of the
colleagues know which one it is.
Senator Franken. Not that renowned.
Mr. Griswell. Apparently.
[Laughter.]
The Chairman. Senator Casey.
Statement of Senator Casey
Senator Casey. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I want to thank our panelists for your testimony and for
the work you are doing in this area.
The way I approach this issue I think is the way that
everybody in this room does in one way or the other. There are
at least two good reasons to move forward with a strategy on
early education. One, of course, is I think the obligation that
all of us feel about children, no matter whose child they are.
We believe, as a country, that every child who is born in
this country has a light inside them. And for some children
because of their circumstances, because of advantages or who
their parents are or where they were born, that light will be
incandescent. The reach of it will be blinding. But for other
children, the light will be a lot more limited. And whatever
the reach of that light or whatever the potential, we believe
we should make sure that every child realizes that potential.
In some areas, we are doing a pretty good job as a country.
In some areas, we are not. We finally moved forward with an
investment in children with regard to their healthcare a couple
of years ago. It is rather recent. In the last 15 years, we
have made progress there.
On the issue of early childhood education, we have made
very little progress if you set aside what we have done in a
very positive way with Head Start. But on a national commitment
to early education, we are a long way from getting there.
Nutrition is one way that we can have a tremendous impact on
children, and other than healthcare and early learning and
nutrition, safety or protecting our kids is probably the
fourth.
But I think the second reason that we are here is because
we believe that an investment in a child in the dawn of his or
her life, as Hubert Humphrey talked about a long time ago, not
only has positive benefits for the child and their family, but
long term for our workforce. Whether it is making sure that the
bright light in a child is realized, the potential of it is
realized, or whether we are worried about our workforce, I
think that is why we are here.
And we have a number of people on this committee who, for
many years, have been fighting this battle one way or the
other. Chris Dodd, chairman of the Banking Committee, a
longtime member of this committee. Tom Harkin, Patty Murray,
who have been here long before I got here on these issues.
But we have to take action. We have talked about it too
much or talked about it enough at least, and we haven't made
progress. One way to do it this year is to take advantage of
this opportunity, and I think that is one of the reasons we are
here.
I have a bill that gets to a lot of it. It is S. 839, the
Prepare All Kids Act. It has the elements of a research-based
curriculum, making sure the quality is there with regard to
teachers, but also making sure that if we are going to help
States do this, and a lot of them need the incentive to do it,
that they have a monitor. And it can't just be any commitment.
It has to be a commitment to quality.
And we have to measure results. We have to make sure that
we are making a full investment.
The question I have is: How do we get there in terms of
implementing this on a national scale? We have a lot of good
models. You mentioned a number of States. I would add
Pennsylvania to the list, but I know you were getting to that.
[Laughter.]
But some States need more incentives, and some States,
frankly, just need help. They have expended a lot of money and
had to fight battles. In our State a couple of years ago,
Governor Rendell had to fight long and hard to get $75 million
in a big State like that, but it was a tough fight.
So, I would ask you: What is the best way to get there?
Some would say just passing a bill like the bill we have, and I
would certainly favor that. Some would say, no, let us work it
into title I. Others would say, no, the President has an
initiative. There is a way to get it done there.
I would ask you, it is both a policy and a strategic
question, but what do you think is the best way to get there in
terms of not just getting anything done or something done, but
doing it in a way that will have an impact that will be
consistent with what States are doing already? And we have 33
seconds.
Mind if we go left to right?
[The prepared statement of Senator Casey follows:]
Prepared Statement of Senator Robert P. Casey, Jr.
Mr. Chairman, I'd like to thank you for holding this
hearing today to discuss what, in my opinion, is one of the
most critical issues affecting our Nation's children, our
continued prosperity and our position as a world leader.
As Hubert Humphrey once said,
``The moral test of a government is how it treats
those who are at the dawn of life, the children; those
who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those
who are in the shadow of life, the sick, the needy, and
the handicapped.''
As to our children, we are not doing enough. By not
providing every American child equal educational opportunities,
we are failing to allow them to seize every opportunity to
succeed.
I believe that every child is born with a bright light
inside of him or her. We can help to make sure this light
shines as brightly as possible--and, in turn, illuminates
people and places around them--by providing him or her with the
right tools and resources to shine.
High-quality education early in life will prepare all
American children--not just some, but all--for success in
academics, career, community, and beyond.
As we discuss reauthorization of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act--and how to make sure that our Nation's
children graduate ``career-'' or ``college-ready''--we need to
recognize that if we want our children to end up on the right
path, we need to start them off on the right foot.
The opportunity to educate a child, and prepare them for
success in life, does not begin when a child first walks
through the door the first day of kindergarten. It begins at
birth.
Public education is a long-standing American commitment
that provides great value for our children. The time has come,
however, to reconsider the strengths of the investments we are
making in our children and whether our current system is
adequately serving our Nation's needs in the twenty-first
century.
Many say that in light of current economic and fiscal
concerns, our hands are tied--we don't have the resources to
invest in all the things that merit consideration. I would say
that when it comes to our children--the very future of this
country--we cannot afford not to. An investment in children and
high-quality education for all is an investment in our Nation's
long-term economic and fiscal stability that will pay dividends
down the road.
The research on return on investment in early childhood
education is irrefutable. Investing in our children in their
earliest years greatly improves their life outcomes.
Conservative estimates put the savings to our economy at about
$7 for every $1 we invest. This is really about two things. It
is certainly about our obligation to our children. But it also
is about our obligation to our economy and our ability to
deliver skilled workers to compete in a world economy.
Early childhood education offers the greatest opportunity
to ensure that every American child reaches their potential. We
know that for some American children, starting in kindergarten
is already too late. For some of the most disadvantaged
children, there is an achievement gap between them and their
more privileged peers that sometimes never closes. One study
showed that before entering kindergarten, the average cognitive
scores of preschool-age children in the highest socioeconomic
group were 60 percent above the average scores of children in
the lowest socioeconomic group.
To make early childhood education a priority, I've
introduced the Prepare All Kids Act. The Prepare All Kids Act
is about investing in and preparing all kids. Not just some but
all. The Prepare All Kids Act will assist States in providing
at least 1 year of high quality pre-kindergarten to children,
focusing on those who need help the most. Pre-kindergarten will
be free for low-income children who are ready to learn, if only
given the opportunity.
As we have heard from our panelists today, it is absolutely
imperative that we don't see children in ``pieces''--that we
not create silos as we begin to focus on the kinds of
investments our children really need. The Prepare All Kids Act
would make sure that early childhood education is of high-
quality, with lasting results, by ensuring that teachers are
adequately trained and that pre-kindergarten programs utilize a
research-based curriculum that supports children's cognitive,
social, emotional and physical development and individual
learning styles.
Critically, under the Prepare All Kids Act, States will not
be able to divert designated funding for other early childhood
programs into pre-kindergarten. We want pre-kindergarten to
build upon and support other early childhood programs like Head
Start and child care. We do not want pre-kindergarten to
replace these programs in any way.
It is my deep conviction that as elected public servants,
we have a sacred responsibility to ensure that all children in
this country have the opportunity to grow in a manner where
each child reaches their potential, to live the lives they were
born to live. The Prepare All Kids Act is a big step in that
direction and I ask my colleagues to join me in supporting this
bill within the context of ESEA Reauthorization.
Our children are our future. With high-quality early
education for all, we will let them shine their brightest and
our future will be brighter for it.
Mr. Griswell.
Mr. Griswell. I am not sure why I get to go first every
time. But I think what Senator Brown said, that at the end of
the day, I think you need to take a holistic view that the
education in this country starts at birth, and you need to
build systems that address that. We need to get away from this
thinking that it is somebody else's responsibility until they
are age 5, and then it is the public's or the Government's
responsibility.
That is backward thinking. It ought to go down to zero, and
whatever it takes to get us to think about it that way. When it
comes to local States, I am a big proponent in getting the
business community involved, getting government involved,
getting the providers involved. And I think that is what they
have done in North Carolina and other States, but particularly,
as she said there on the panel, is you have got to get a
consensus and a collaboration going among all the people who
benefit from having quality early childhood.
Mr. Schweinhart. I think I would suggest we build from the
basis that we have already started to build. We have Head
Start, which has a whole lot of unmet potential that can do a
whole lot more than it has done.
I think with childcare, we need to get our priorities
straight. We need to be clear what we are trying to do, and the
fact that we haven't had a reauthorization since 1996 makes
that even more clear. Things have changed so much since then.
And the commitment, though, is still the same. How do we have a
national policy of quality childcare, and what do we have to do
to make that happen?
And I think the other thing, which is right before you
right now, is elementary schools and the fact that elementary
schools have invested more into early childhood education both
what they have always done with first, second, third grade, and
then kindergarten and then pre-K is a growing phenomenon.
Let us recognize the realities of elementary schools and do
what we can to help them become a part of this great early
childhood education movement.
Mr. Pianta. So I have mentioned a couple of things, but I
think the extension, the inclusion of early childhood policies;
and structurally, within discussion of title I, how you spend
title I money; title II, focusing on the adults and the
qualifications and the standards for the adults that are going
to work with kids is very important.
I keep coming back to whatever you can do to push
information that helps people drive decisions and policy. So
these, you know, Race to the Top with longitudinal data
systems, whatever you do--and I am sensitive to Senator
Murray's comment about not testing a lot of kids. We don't even
know where kids are right now.
The kinds of settings that kids are spending time in, the
numbers of settings, the qualities of those settings, we are
not attending to those in ways that you can make sensible
policy on the basis of that. So I think there is just a whole
lot of information investment that could go a long way.
Ms. Zalkind. I would say take every opportunity you can and
don't try to put it all in one place. So, right now, you have
an opportunity to embed the Ready Schools process in the No
Child Left Behind Act. You took an opportunity that was before
you to put home visiting in the healthcare reform. You can
reauthorize the Childcare Development Block Grant with higher
quality standards and State systems that align pre-K to 3. So I
don't think that you should miss any opportunity to shift the
paradigm, to focus and to start early and get the most bang for
the buck because they will all lead to the other eventually.
That is how you build momentum, and that is how you build
success.
It is all the same people at the local and the State level
who are looking at how to feed kids nutritious meals in
childcare and schools. They are all the same people looking at
making sure that kids have good healthcare. So take every
opportunity that you can.
Senator Casey. Thanks.
The Chairman. Senator Dodd.
Statement of Senator Dodd
Senator Dodd. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman.
There are so many things to talk to you about on all of
this. First of all, it was 20 years ago that Orrin Hatch and I
wrote in 1990 the Child Care and Development Block Grant. This
year is the 20th anniversary of when he and I wrote that bill.
And then, of course, you are right. We haven't reauthorized it
since 1996.
I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Helen Blank is
in the audience, and Helen Blank helped me write that
legislation 20 years ago. I thank you, Helen. Stand up. Be
recognized. Helen Blank.
[Applause.]
And in 1996, we did welfare reform, and there were 21 of us
here in the U.S. Senate that voted against that bill at the
time. It was a very popular idea because this was going to end
welfare as we knew it. It was going to cut off cash payments
within 5 years. And of course, the promise was that we were
going to make sure that every child after that 5 years would
get all the protection they would need and nutrition and
childcare, and of course, it didn't happen.
Today, only one in seven children who are eligible are
receiving any kind of assistance under the Child Care and
Development Block Grant program. And I say that respectfully.
We were going to end welfare as we know it. The overwhelming
majority of cash welfare recipients are children. We always
think the recipients are the families, but in fact, it is
children who depend upon it.
And the idea that you are going to eliminate the ability of
children to get the kind of assistance that they needed was
always breath-taking to me when we fail to understand that it
isn't just jobs, as I said, Mr. Schweinhart, it was also about
education. It was about providing a safe, nurturing place where
that child has a chance to develop the skill sets they need to
be ready to learn.
The achievement gap is defined by age 3. By age 3, that is
when the achievement gap is defined. So 36 months into a
child's life, that achievement gap is defined. So this notion
of waiting until they get into school or even 5 or 6 is beyond
me in many ways.
And of course, we know that every dollar we invest in early
childhood development saves $10, $1 for $10. There is no debate
about that. So just in simple math numbers, the investments we
make up front make a huge financial difference. I always say if
we weren't impressed by the ethics and the morality of it or
the decency of it, just the sheer economics of it ought to
compel you to understand what we are talking about.
So it has been a passion of mine over the 30 years I have
been in this body and sitting on this committee. And the point
that Bernie Sanders was making and others have made is that
this is the basic program. Obviously, I am a strong advocate
and have been of Early Head Start and Head Start and pre-K
programs. Again, Tom has done a great job with these hearings
including this one over the last number of months.
I apologize for not being at all of them, but we have had
other matters that I have had to attend to. But we are going to
start, with the chairman's permission, we have organized
between now and October a series of four or five hearings--I
was telling Senator Casey about it a little while ago--on the
status of the American child. And I would like, either through
the Casey Foundation or Save The Children, to start a report
card on child well-being, so we can start really making
determinations on how we're doing for children.
Only 4 percent of title I money, goes to early childhood
education, and that is an estimate because there is no data
collected on it by the Federal Government. It is an approximate
number we have. So we don't have a real number. So 96 percent
of those resources are going to elementary and secondary, which
are vitally important. But only 4 percent is going to early
childhood education, and yet we know statistically how
important those years are in people's development along the
way.
Of course, the article I read on cuts to subsidized child
care programs, I thought, was very, very good. Peter Goodman
wrote a rather lengthy piece that appeared in the New York
Times on May 23rd, which I thought was a very compelling piece.
I strongly recommend it for people to get a sense of actually
what happened with States cutting back the number of children
they cover with child care subsidies.
California's governor has proposed eliminating child care
assistance altogether. It would leave a million children
without any support. Eleven thousand children in the State of
Arizona are on the State's waiting list for child care
assistance. And you can get your numbers State by State, and a
lot of the States may surprise you as the ones that are cutting
way back, some of the States we normally associate and think of
as being a bit more progressive when it comes to caring for
children's needs.
And I understand. I am not unmindful of the budget problems
that States are facing. But I think Al Franken mentioned it. I
think everyone on this committee at one point or another in
their comments and questions have raised the issue about how
penny-wise, pound-foolish it is when we are talking about once
again recovery, getting on our feet and cutting off people.
So I guess this isn't a lot of questions, except that we
have listed a number of things here, and having been the
chairman of a committee and listening to all my colleagues with
various amendment ideas, I know Tom Harkin will be delighted to
hear about my amendment ideas.
[Laughter.]
But there are any number of them on title I data
collection, the professional development piece. Memorandums of
Understanding--Head Start is required to get it, but the
elementary and secondary schools are not. So you have no
comparative assessment as to how this is working. So I am
hopeful we can include the memorandum of understanding language
in this legislation as well and that we really do get the data
that we need to understand it.
The parental aspects of this. Again, going back to
childcare, as well as we know that Head Start requires programs
to encourage parental involvement. In the first grade parental
participation is at 33 percent, it drops down to less than 8
percent participation by seventh grade. And there is nothing
better, in my view, than linking up parents and children in the
educational process and, obviously, parents and children in the
childcare development programs.
Actually, Orrin Hatch and I went back even earlier, started
with the childcare ideas of the early 1980s, when it wasn't
terribly popular--we had magnificent childcare in this country
in World War II. I invite people who like history to go back
and look at what we did during the war years between 1941 and
1945. It was stunning, the quality of childcare.
I mean the availability of it, the cost were always major
factors. But the quality of it was remarkable. And we all
understood with the young men, most of the young men fighting
in the European and Pacific theaters, women involved in war
production, in these automobile plants and so on, turning out
airplanes and tanks. We had to have childcare. It was a
national security issue.
So we understood it, and we did it almost 70 years ago. And
yet here we are in the 21st century, and there is a disconnect
between what our parents and grandparents did, understanding
it, and we just haven't picked up on it. We dropped it. Instead
of picking up the models used where they had great healthcare
providers, good education opportunities, great ratios, and the
like.
Jerry, it is good to see you again. We saw each other when
I spent a lovely time in Iowa.
[Laughter.]
Mr. Griswell. We miss you as a resident, sir.
Senator Dodd. It was very brief. Appreciated the 99
counties, too, Jerry, and actually going by and meeting the
folks at Principal when I was there.
But if you would, again, coming to the business standpoint
in all of this, why is it we have had such difficulty? I mean,
there was incredible opposition to the Childcare Development
Block Grant program when Orrin Hatch and I wrote it. And the
business community's opposition to this was--how do you explain
that?
Mr. Griswell. I really do believe the last decade has been
a decade of enlightenment for business leaders, and I would
encourage you to take another look. As I mentioned earlier, the
Business Roundtable is onboard with this. It is one of their
primary initiatives. In Iowa, the Iowa Business Council, one of
its primary priorities is early childhood. Rockwell Collins in
our State has wonderful childcare right on their facilities.
I believe the mood has changed. I believe business now gets
it, and I would encourage all of you to re-engage business. I
believe they are ready to be engaged. I think, like me, many of
them were oblivious, I am afraid, just not paying attention to
the research and the wonderful data that is out there to
connect the dots for us. I have become a believer, and I
believe many of my colleagues have.
Senator Dodd. I hope you are. Kit Bond, who is retiring
this year, and Dan Coats, who sat on this committee and is
running for the Senate again, were my partners when I wrote the
Family and Medical Leave Act. Took us 7 years, went through 2
vetoes. Sixty million Americans have been able to take
advantage without pay of being able to be with a sick child or
parent during a crisis.
We are now trying to get paid leave because, obviously,
that is a burden. And yet, again, just as we had tremendous
opposition to that basic concept--I mean, we applaud our
colleagues here who leave the Senate, miss votes for weeks on
end to take care of a spouse or a child. In fact, they would be
in deep political trouble if they didn't do it, I would suggest
to you, and yet that same concept of it being possible for
parents and children to have that time together during these
critical issues and periods is--again, we are facing Herculean
opposition to this concept.
Yet we are only one of four countries left that I can
identify in the world that doesn't provide that basic right, it
seems to me. And again, I say to Jerry, I applaud what you are
doing, and I admire it. But kind of the same mindless
opposition at a time when productivity rates, retention rates,
loyalty, and so forth are critically important to business.
Again, completely lost on an audience, it seems to me.
Any explanation?
Mr. Griswell. No, sir.
[Laughter.]
I am telling you, we are becoming enlightened.
Senator Dodd. I am retiring. I hope you get enlightenment.
Bob Casey of this crowd takes over and moves up the table here.
Thank you.
The Chairman. Thank you, Senator Dodd.
But I would point out again, as I keep holding this book
up, as I have for many years, that the business community in
the 1980s identified the need to and benefit of investing in
quality early learning programs. This group included CEOs of
major corporations in America. Jim Renier, the CEO of Honeywell
chaired the effort. The Freeman Company, Aetna Life, Sun
Company, Pacific Mutual Life, Ciba-Geigy, Texas Instruments,
and so many other companies were involved.
This Commission, in the 1990s, said we have to rethink
education, that education begins at birth and the preparation
for education begins before birth. So if we have fallen back or
moved away from this, I don't know why.
You say that they made another attempt to communicate the
importance of investing in early learning in 2003. Is that
right?
Mr. Griswell. That is when the Business Roundtable did its
full study, which came out with its economic view that every
dollar invested in early childhood gave $4 to $7, which is a
very modest--I mean, we know some studies show $17. It depends
on what you add into that.
And there are a lot of business-education alliances out
there. There is a Business Higher Education Forum. I think you
really need to try to engage the right business leaders. I
think maybe something is askew here. Everybody I talk to
understands the importance of this.
Senator Dodd. Tom, in 1995, 9.1 million children on a
yearly average were getting assistance through the welfare
system.
The Chairman. 9.1 million.
Senator Dodd. 9.1 million, 60 percent of children in
poverty at that time. Today, it is 3.3 million children, 20
percent of children in poverty. And so, you are getting--these
are not with any kind of assistance at all or very little kind
of assistance. And here we are 15 years later, the number of
children in poverty obviously have gone up.
The Chairman. Daunting, yes.
Senator Merkley.
Statement of Senator Merkley
Senator Merkley. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
A couple of decades ago, I was listening to a radio program
where a childhood expert said that the thing you should keep in
mind is that in the first year of childhood, you should hold
your child as much as possible and talk to them as much as
possible. And after that, you should spend 15 minutes an
evening reading books and that the impact has a huge effect on
their social skills, their sense of bonding, and they almost
universally end up loving to read, which has all sorts of
educational benefits.
And I thought, boy, that is such a simple, straightforward,
and inexpensive approach. But now I have all of you here. Is
that right? And if so, should we also be talking about
investment in parents, more investment in parent education or a
national reading hour from 7 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., where parents
are encouraged to do that nightly reading, more education about
the impact of holding, talking to, and interacting with
children?
I know we are talking a lot about quality childcare, but
should this be a component equally well emphasized?
Ms. Zalkind. I would clearly say yes, and the money for
family support and family preservation is very, very hard to
come by. But those dollars spent, especially if they are spent
in concert with high-quality childcare, that maximizes the
investment. So what we have found is that when childcare
providers and parents and schools work together on a common
agenda, and they all are trained to work with the others so
that teachers have professional development about working with
parents and parents have training around how to productively
work with their schools, that is where you really see the
synergy and children thrive.
Senator Merkley. Go ahead, please.
Mr. Pianta. I guess I would just add that I couldn't agree
more that capturing those connections across the family and
childcare settings are really very important in terms of what
adults are doing with kids. But it is also important to
recognize that teaching a kid to learn how to read also
requires a fair amount of technical skill, that people involved
in those interactions have to know quite a bit about how
reading develops, how language develops.
If you begin to talk about, we haven't mentioned it at all
here, math and science. I suspect you will be worried about
that when you talk about high school, but when you talk about
promoting math skills and science skills with young kids, that
requires a fair amount of skill and technical capacity that
teachers should be trained to exercise. We would love it for
adults in the home to be able to do that, too.
So I think you are right on capitalizing on both of those
settings, but I would argue that it is not as--sometimes it is
just not as easy as sitting a kid on your knee and reading for
15 minutes every evening.
Senator Merkley. Thank you.
Mr. Schweinhart, I appreciate the work of the HighScope,
and I believe it is the Perry Preschool Study that has the 17-
to-1 statistic, if I recall right? I didn't see that in your
testimony. But wasn't it your study that had that 17-fold
return?
Mr. Schweinhart. What I think is maybe the most important
thing to say about all those dollars is that it is enormous.
That is actually what I said. But I found using numbers seems
to get people's attention better.
A $1 return on investment is enough to justify an
investment, a $1 return. And we are talking about many times
that, and I think whether it is $5 or $10 or $15, gosh, it is a
lot. It is so much that it is just really worth doing, no
matter what.
We have been doing some work with Jim Heckman to try to
identify exactly what it is, and we have come up with 150
different estimates and all that sort of thing. And that is
what makes me kind of fall back on a simpler way of saying it,
except that if people want the precision, we sure do have the
precision.
Senator Merkley. There is a piece of your study I wanted to
draw attention to, and that is what you found was that it
wasn't simply the development of cognitive skills, but the
development of socio-emotional factors. And it goes back to
what that childhood expert said about bonding with the amount
you hold your child and talk to them, and that this has a big
impact on whether people end up in prison, whether they can
function in a work environment, whether they are interested in
education, a whole series of things.
So this isn't just about training the little brains to
learn to read or count. It is also about how to interact with
others, and I know that this is where the quality childcare
comes in.
I must say every time I encounter a family where little
children are being parented primarily by sitting in front of
videos, my heart drops because I suspect that does not produce
the type of interaction that is necessary either for the
cognitive development or for the socio-emotional side.
Mr. Schweinhart. Everything about education is developing
relationships, and particularly with young children, it is all
about developing relationships. With parent education, you
can't really talk about the kind of transfer from knowledgeable
people to less knowledgeable people the kinds of things they
need to know unless you are doing it in the context of solid
relationships. So the question is always about how to develop
those relationships.
One of the things that we found with respect to the
specific prevention of crime is the developing of a strong
moral sense. And that is done in the context of learning how to
get along with other children and getting along with adults. It
is coming from what it looks like. It looks like that.
Now the cognitive stuff is important because I think,
ultimately, one of the really great purposes of early childhood
education is to teach kids how to be good students in the best
sense of that term. Not ``sit down and shut up,'' but really
becoming actively engaged in their learning.
And to the extent that they learn that, that is going to be
with them all of their lives, and it is going to lead to all
this kind of success that we have been talking about.
Senator Merkley. Thank you all very much.
Thank you.
The Chairman. Thank you, Senator Merkley.
Senator Hagan.
Statement of Senator Hagan
Senator Hagan. Thank you, Chairman Harkin, and thanks for
holding this hearing today.
I tell you, as a mother of three children, I know
personally how important it is to have early childhood
education. And as Senator Dodd said, the first 3 years of life
are critical.
I especially wanted to say thank you to Henrietta Zalkind
for being here today. I know the Down East Partnership is doing
a fabulous job. And Down East in North Carolina is a wonderful
word for a special place in our great State. So I appreciate
your being here.
I think a lot of you here know that I spent 10 years in the
State Senate, and that I was particularly involved in the
appropriations committee and, co-chairman of the budget
committee. And just so that you all here know, in 2005, we had
about $51 million going to one of the early childhood education
programs, and we ended up combining Smart Start with another
program, More at Four. And last year, that funding in our State
was about $171 million.
Mr. Griswell, we haven't met, but I particularly
appreciated your comments about North Carolina. We are
certainly doing some great things. It is certainly not that we
have it all right, but I just think we have got to be cognizant
of the impact that States and the Federal Government needs to
have on children from 0 to 3, 0 to 5, and obviously, 0 to 8. It
is just absolutely critical.
One of the things that we are trying to do is be sure that
when children go to school, they are healthy and ready to
learn. We also know that just providing a place for children to
hang out doesn't mean that they are going to have the best
quality childcare. We have got to be focused on the types of
childcare programs we offer and the education of the people who
are staffing the childcare programs also bring a lot to bear.
In North Carolina, we have implemented a star rating
program to help parents be better informed when choosing a
childcare and early education program for their children. In
our State, the programs are monitored by State officials on
three basic components--the education of the staff, the program
standards, and quality.
We actually have a five-star rating, where five is the
highest, with one the lowest. We also use some of our funding
from the State to actually help the childcare facilities
improve their star ratings, and improve the education of their
staff. We must examine ways in which childhood education can be
included in the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act, to that end. I was wondering what thoughts you
might have on ways that we can encourage all States to adopt a
quality rating system similar to the one that we have.
Ms. Zalkind, do you want to start?
Ms. Zalkind. Thank you, and thank you for those nice
comments.
I think that that quality rating system has been a key to
aligning systems across funding streams. This spring, the North
Carolina Department of Public Instruction created a new Office
of Early Learning, and all of the different programs,
regardless of where the money comes from, whether it is the
State or title I or the subsidy program, everyone is working
off that same standard.
Different States have different systems, but ours, I think,
applies to all of the different folks who are providers. It
applies to Head Start. Gives you a way to hold folks to the
same quality standards, and it focuses across the board.
Now, quality costs. And so, I think that that is one of the
things that we need to make sure that there is enough money to
make sure that people are not edged out of the system.
Mr. Pianta. They are terrific ideas. The quality rating and
improvement systems are terrific policy tools. So to the extent
that you can encourage them in all States, I think they are
great. I think you have to be very careful about what a star
means, and what you put in those systems will be what the
system produces, OK? That is the incentive structure.
So people will spend their money on those things. And if
what you put in those systems don't matter for kids' learning,
they are not going to help. So I think you have to be very
rigorous in what those standards mean and the evidence for
them.
Mr. Schweinhart. Obviously, States require response to
incentives and that is something to think about. The one thing
I would like to add to what my colleagues here have said is
that a lot of childcare takes place in homes, not in centers.
And it is important to be thinking about how to support
caregivers in homes, as well as in centers.
I think that what they need a whole lot more than rating is
support, and the question is how to give them the kinds of
educational relationships that is going to give them the
support they need to move forward.
Senator Hagan. You are talking about the parents now?
Mr. Schweinhart. Actually, I am talking about home
caregivers.
Senator Hagan. Home caregivers.
Mr. Schweinhart. There are parents at home taking care of
kids, but I am talking about people who are taking care of
other people's kids. And there is a whole lot of them,
particularly for birth to 3, and there is very little support
for them. The pay is less than even center care.
And one of the things we have done in southeast Michigan
that I want to mention is we have tried to form early learning
communities with hubs in the middle of those communities where
there are people who provide support, develop relationships
with all the caregivers in a given geographic area. And I think
that may be the kind of complement that we need to the quality
rating and improvement system, which is primarily center-based
and school-based.
Senator Hagan. Great.
Mr. Griswell. I agree with everything that has been said,
really not much to add.
Senator Hagan. North Carolina is one of a few States that
does use a portion of our title I dollars to fund early
childhood education, and I know that our title I preschool
programs serve 4-year-olds and is designed to prepare young
children before they enter kindergarten. What can be done to
increase flexibility at the State level to promote the use of
title I and other funding for children before they enter
school? Any thoughts?
Ms. Zalkind. Well, I think there are several things, and I
would give an example of the school as one of the hubs, that
you can use title I money for staff that then goes and works
with the teachers in the childcare centers to help them develop
professionally on activities that will lead to better outcomes
on EOGs, better outcomes on math scores, better outcomes on
reading scores.
And so, how you strategically use your title I money not
just for slots, not just for children going to 4-year-old
programs, but how you use it to build a system so that the
school does become the instructional hub and that people are
working off of the same system of quality. I think that that is
really important and our Office of Early Learning has been
behind--and really, the whole Ready Schools movement in North
Carolina, I gave as part of my testimony the map of the places
where Ready Schools was happening in North Carolina.
We were one of the pilot sites for Kellogg's SPARK Project,
but it is now happening in almost 40 of the 100 counties in
North Carolina, and that is really exciting. So trying to embed
those kind of processes, give people the flexibility to move
out and try some different opportunities I think has really
been a key for us.
Senator Hagan. We have a great panel.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you, Senator Hagan.
Mr. Griswell, he just hit the ball right away. When I asked
about the dollar, he was like 50 early, and then 25 and 25.
Now, of course, Ms. Zalkind said invest the whole dollar. Would
you like to revisit that, maybe 90 cents?
Ms. Zalkind. OK.
[Laughter.]
Until third grade. Maybe I will go to fifth grade.
The Chairman. We have to have resources to invest in
secondary education, you know?
Mr. Schweinhart, you have a dollar. We have early learning.
We have elementary education, and we have high schools, too.
How do you divide it up?
Mr. Schweinhart. Well, we are talking about the Federal
Government's component, not the whole system. There is State
and local spending.
The Chairman. I am only talking about the Federal
Government because----
Mr. Schweinhart. The Federal Government ought to
incentivize what works.
The Chairman. We contribute roughly 9 percent of all the
funding for elementary and secondary education.
Mr. Schweinhart. Right. So incentivize what works. Early
childhood education works.
The Chairman. But tell me. We have a dollar. How much
should we invest in early learning? Nothing? Nothing much----
Mr. Schweinhart. You really want me to give you a number,
don't you?
The Chairman. Yes, I really----
[Laughter.]
The Chairman [continuing]. I want to know what your
priorities are, how do you prioritize?
Mr. Schweinhart. Half.
The Chairman. Pardon?
Mr. Schweinhart. Half. Let me give you a longer answer
because I think it is a better answer. It seems to me that
right now our funding formulas are focused on the kids that are
in the schools. Suppose we were to get our funding formulas to
focus on the kids who are in the communities from birth, and we
tracked the money not to the kid as much as we are tracking it
now because I have a feeling what is happening is people are
saying we have got this much money for this kid, and so we have
to give the service to this kid.
But if instead, we said what is the best way to serve this
child throughout the child's life? Then you maybe could get
freed up from that grade-by-grade focus, and I think maybe that
is a better way to come up with a way of spending ESEA so that
it works really well and is not so tied to serving kids.
You know, it is like there is different interest groups--
5th graders, 6th graders, 9th graders, 12th graders. Your
question sort of assumes that. But they are all the same kids.
It is just a year of age. So if a child gets funding at 3 and 4
that works better than funding at 9 and 10, of course, you
should spend the money at 3 and 4. Why would you wait until 9
and 10?
The Chairman. That is a nice discourse; however, I don't
know that it really gets to the heart of investing and
prioritizing.
Mr. Schweinhart. I already said half.
The Chairman. Sometimes when we vote around here, I mean,
we have got to say how much money we invest, being clear about
how we focus our efforts? This committee and the Appropriations
Committee, I chair, don't focus very much on early childhood
education. We make some investments, like in Head Start, but I
am really talking about investing more in the educational
component of early childhood.
Head Start, that is under Health and Human Services, not
the Department of Education. So, from an educational standpoint
of the dollars we spend, what would be the priority because I
assume you would say 0 to 1. I am just talking about preschool,
elementary, and secondary education.
Mr. Pianta.
Mr. Pianta. Put the dollar in preschool.
The Chairman. Pardon?
Mr. Pianta. Put the dollar in preschool. I mean, you
already know that you are going to get the dollar back later
on. Put the whole thing in.
The Chairman. You are with Ms. Zalkind, but that is kind of
impossible.
[Laughter.]
Mr. Pianta. Well, it is--you know?
The Chairman. Well, because we have other things we must
also invest in terms of teacher quality and a lot of other
things that we are doing in ESEA.
Ms. Zalkind. Well, I still would say put the dollar in
preschool. But I think if you flip the paradigm around and
spend a larger majority on early education and then as you go
up, in middle school and high school, graduate those
percentages down, not up as the way it is currently configured.
The Chairman. Well, I think I got the answer I was seeking
and that is that the vast majority of you believe that most of
the money ought to go into early childhood education. Right
now, it is not, of course.
Mr. Griswell. I think it is a system----
The Chairman. It is, what, 2.8 percent? Now Senator Dodd
said 4 percent. That is the number of kids. Four percent of the
kids being served by title I preschool, but of the money, it is
only 2.8 percent of the title I? Yes, 2.8 percent of kids. That
is right. That is what I said are served.
Did you have something to say?
Mr. Griswell. No, I was just going to make the point we are
upside down. We are spending the most money at the most
inefficient time, and the next most money at the next. It is
absolutely upside down.
The Chairman. Yes. Aside from the money thing, the other
thing that you have all spoken about and I thought about as I
read your testimonies yesterday, almost all of you kind of hit
on this one way or the other, and that was aligning the
preschool programs with the elementary programs.
Now we are going to make some changes in the elementary
program. We are going to change No Child Left Behind. I think
we have a consensus among all of us here to change it. So give
me a little bit deeper answer on how to align the programs
and--in other words, we have got to make sure that whatever
education programs we use, early childhood fits into so that
these kids can go right into kindergarten prepared to succeed.
Is that what you are telling me? Yes?
Ms. Zalkind. That there are smooth transitions from home to
childcare, from childcare to school, and that there is a
vertical alignment that people are working off of curriculums
that are developmentally appropriate for each different age and
stage of a child's healthy growth and development.
And these experts know far more than I about how that
happens, but there is a natural progression of how children
learn, and right now, it is not synched.
Mr. Schweinhart. We almost have a cultural collision
between early childhood education and the schools, and what we
need to do is recognize that that is coming from us adults and
not from the children's needs. And so, we need to minimize the
most discrepant areas of that culture so that kids are--just
having childcare and Head Start and other early childhood
educators meeting with kindergarten, first grade teachers would
be a really great thing to do, and it doesn't happen very
often.
Mr. Pianta. You have got the mechanism of standards. You
have got the mechanisms of assessments. You have got the
mechanisms of teacher qualifications. All those are points of
contact that I suspect you can point people in the right
direction to get themselves aligned.
The Chairman. Right. Right. I believe that is a very
important aspect of what we are going to do.
The second thing has to do with qualifications. Now we are
dealing a lot with that in elementary and secondary education.
But as Mr. Pianta said, only one State requires that directors
of childcare centers hold a Bachelor's degree. And you pointed
out here, that at least 50 percent of the lead teachers in Head
Start must have a B.A. degree by 2013 and then you said only 10
States required some vocational program certificate or CDA, and
13 States had no requisite educational qualification for
childcare teachers.
Quoting you further, you said capable early education is a
complex and challenging task. Teachers need to know a lot about
basic child development, far more than the typical course, and
they need to know about how to teach and stimulate vocabulary,
conversations, early literacy, knowledge of science, the
community, all the while handling sensitively the varied needs
of these kids.
So have we done enough to, again, try to promote, provoke,
prod States to develop better criteria, qualifications? We need
to do more of that is what you are telling me?
Mr. Pianta. Yes. And I think we need to do more in a couple
of different ways. So I would not--I don't think it is going to
be sensible to send everybody off to get degrees and coursework
unless we know that is going to help those kids that they are
teaching. So I think we need to do a much better job of
articulating the behaviors, what are the behaviors we want to
see teachers demonstrating in classrooms, and what are the
kinds of knowledge base that they need to have to do what I
just described that you quoted?
I think we have a lot of evidence in place now to be able
to make fairly clear statements about those features of
qualification. Then the issue is how do we create policy that
incents participation in the kind of professional development
that gets teachers to those places? Whether that occurs in a
university, whether that occurs in a local community kind of
training, or whether the State does it, I think we can be
agnostic about that. We just need to incent people to be
participating in things that we know are effective.
I think this is something we know now that we didn't know
10 or 15 years ago.
Ms. Zalkind. And tying the funding to that is a way to
incentivize that. So, for instance, our State More at Four
program, which is our public pre-K program for 4-year-olds, you
have to be B-K certified by a certain time. You can teach in
that classroom, but you have to take 6 semester hours a year
toward your B-K, and I think it is by the end of the third
year, you have to be B-K certified or else you have got to get
a waiver.
It is hard, but it is also, I think, one of the
recognitions that childcare--the childcare industry itself is
an economy, and there are people working and employed in
childcare that you don't want to push out. You want to add
value and add skills to that knowledge base, but there are
things that happen in formal education that are necessary to do
a good job, especially when you are dealing with 4-year-olds,
many of whom who have not been in childcare before. So that
takes a skill level that you learn at school.
Mr. Griswell. I would like to just agree 100 percent with
what Bob Pianta just said because--and be clear that I was
certainly strongly in favor of seeing more teachers with
Bachelor's degrees in Head Start. But what I am more concerned
with is having teachers in Head Start and other early childhood
programs who know exactly what they are supposed to do and do
it.
And to the extent that we have dollars that are difficult
to decide priorities on, we need to focus on making sure they
know how to be good teachers.
The Chairman. Well, this has been stimulating. I can't tell
you how much I appreciate it.
I really wanted this panel.
[Laughter.]
I really am determined to do something in this ESEA on
early childhood education, and we are talking about that here.
I think what you have done here today in your testimony and
your written testimony has added a lot to, again, giving us the
wisdom you have gained through your work in this area.
I would just ask each of you if you would--we will keep the
record open for 10 days if somebody has any questions. But
beyond that, I just hope that you will also continue to be
available to us and to our staff for any kind of questions,
suggestions, or advice. As we move ahead in this, I would
certainly appreciate that.
And if there is anyone else in the audience who has any
ideas on this, we are open for that. We have a specific e-mail
address. It is called [email protected].
So [email protected], and we invite you to
submit suggestions.
Well, again, thank you all very much, and the committee
will stand adjourned.
[Additional material follows.]
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL
Prepared Statement of Richard (Rick) Stephens, Senior Vice President,
Human Resources and Administration, The Boeing Company
Chairman Harkin, Ranking Member Enzi, members of the committee,
thank you for the opportunity to provide this statement to the record
in support of the reauthorization of the Early and Secondary Education
Act that you are currently considering.
I know you have already heard from a number of others on this
matter, but it is important to me both personally and as a
representative of Boeing, one of the Nation's largest exporters and
employer of many thousands of technologically gifted Americans, that
our Nation take all necessary steps to maintain the technological lead
that we have enjoyed for many years. Reauthorizing this legislation is
an important step in that direction.
Before I explain why--at least from our perspective--let me take a
moment to talk about Boeing's long-standing commitment to improving
education. The Boeing Company was founded in 1916 and made its first
education-related investment outside the company in 1917--to the
University of Washington's engineering department.
In the years since, we have expanded our investments into K-12
programs. Back in 2000, the company reviewed the results of its K-12
investments and discovered that we weren't seeing the results we
wanted. It wasn't that the kids weren't intelligent, and it wasn't that
the teachers weren't trying. Unfortunately, we discovered that children
were showing up at kindergarten up to 3 years behind their peers who
had access to quality early learning experiences.
So in 2001, Boeing launched a number of investments in early
learning--primarily from birth to 5 years old. We focused on social,
emotional and cognitive readiness, and we reached out both to parents--
the child's first and most important teachers--and to formal caregivers
like childcare workers, as well as informal caregivers like families,
friends and neighbors to provide them with tools and strategies to aid
children's educational readiness.
As you know, Mr. Chairman, the lack of readiness is a big deal. You
have reviewed the same research we have--all of which indicates that
kids who start kindergarten behind their peers tend to stay behind
them, and that nearly all schools lack the considerable resources
required to catch those kids up with their peers. It isn't impossible
for them to catch up, but it requires a substantial investment to
compensate for not capitalizing on the profound learning that occurs
early in life.
Authorities across the country recognize the importance of
investing in early childhood development. The Federal Reserve Bank in
Minnesota, for instance, found that early learning is one of the best
economic development engines out there--providing up to a 17 percent
return on every dollar invested. They note that quality early learning
experiences result in lower remediation, reduced incarceration, more
stable employment, lower teen pregnancies, higher educational
attainment, higher salaries and the higher income tax revenues they
bring, and other benefits.
Nobel Laureate James Heckman also studied the rates of return on
investments made at various points in the education system. His
conclusion was similar to the Federal Reserve's--that the highest
investment returns are on funds invested in the early years of
education.
There is, of course, a clear and compelling business case for
Boeing's efforts on this front. We need to help develop and prepare the
future technological workforce that will help Boeing, our industry and
our Nation remain competitive in our increasingly global economy. To do
that, we need students who are excited about and engaged in learning,
and that attitude has to be formed early.
It won't surprise you, Mr. Chairman, to hear that companies like
Boeing are having trouble filling all the positions we have that
require people with skills and experience in science, technology,
engineering and mathematics.
We view the deficit as a skills shortage, not a people shortage.
Simply put, there aren't enough people graduating with the right skills
to meet the needs of our economy.
While the numbers of U.S. graduates in engineering and the sciences
are flat or declining, emerging nations like China and India are
intentionally funneling many of their best and brightest into those
areas--by some accounts doubling their output of technologically
advanced graduates in recent years.
We in the United States need the same commitment to our children,
but it is often too late to reach them in junior high or high school,
because apathy towards education or poor study habits are already
deeply ingrained in students by then. Students who start in the system
behind their peers remain behind and that contributes to their apathy.
From our perspective, reaching children at the earliest stages
helps not only Boeing, but all our Nation's industries, because getting
kids fully engaged in education allows them to dream big dreams and
achieve them, but it also allows our Nation to benefit from the amazing
innovations that those dreams fuel. It would be a shame to lose, for
instance, the one idea that would revolutionize air travel just because
we didn't catch the kid who had that idea early enough to keep her
engaged in the sciences long enough to pursue it.
We're not just asking the Federal Government to assume full
responsibility for this effort. Companies like Boeing are part of the
solution too. Here are some of the things we're doing to support early
childhood education as part of our broad approach:
1. We challenge parents of young children to take an active role in
creating an environment that nurtures creativity and learning, because
we know that parents are the key to helping children reach their full
potential. And we provide parents and caregivers with resources to
strengthen their roles as children's first teachers.
2. We work to ensure that U.S. colleges and universities produce
enough qualified teachers. When teachers at any level are neither
proficient nor inspiring, too many of our young people miss
foundational instruction, fall hopelessly behind and lose interest in
school. The price our Nation pays in that scenario is a steep one.
3. We believe that improving education isn't just about fixing
schools. It's not that some schools don't need work--they do--but we
must take a broader look at solutions. We must establish a symbiotic
relationship between educators, students, business and industry, and
the media.
One way we're doing that is by bringing together what I call a
coalition of coalitions--a diverse group of organizations from the
public, private and non-profit sectors, all of whom are either
specifically focused on, or have a vested interest in, improving our
educational system. The Business and Industry Science, Technology,
Engineering and Math Education Coalition (BISEC), consisting of nearly
30 business and industry associations representing 20 million
employees, has three main goals:
a. Identifying activities that work to improve student
outcomes and understanding how to scale those efforts that make
a difference.
b. Aligning and leveraging information and resources so others
can learn about successful efforts and deploy them more
broadly.
c. Partnering with main stream media to change the predominant
negative view parents and students have about science,
technology, engineering and mathematics.
BISEC's effort is focused specifically on science, technology,
engineering and mathematics, but the model it represents is an entirely
appropriate one for improving early childhood education too. This
approach is a natural extension of the aerospace industry's systems
engineering expertise--the ability to view large, complex systems as
integrated wholes--to bring people together, particularly those who
fund complimentary efforts, to enhance public/private partnerships and
expand the reach of the most effective programs.
Boeing has a long and strong commitment to improving education.
It's one of the reasons we feel it is so important for us as a company
to weigh in on early childhood education matters like this.
This effort is critical to our Nation's future, and it requires the
best ideas from the public and private sectors. It requires us to
cooperate with and support each other. In short, it requires the best
of each of us. Our children and our Nation deserve nothing less than
that.
As you noted in your opening statement, Mr. Chairman, ``ESEA
reauthorization offers an important opportunity to help States and
school districts ensure that more young children are prepared to
succeed in school.'' We at Boeing strongly agree with that statement,
and we strongly support your committee's efforts to reauthorize this
important legislation.
Thank you again for the opportunity to express that support.
[Whereupon, at 4:17 p.m., the hearing was adjourned.]