Preschool News -- June 2006

The California State Conference NAACP wants every child in California to have the opportunity to attend high-quality preschool.

Preschool should be accessible to all California children, as all children deserve the same ducational opportunities and the same start at life. A child’s socioeconomic background should not hinder them from the benefits of a preschool education.

Join us in the campaign to give every California child the opportunity to attend high-quality preschool. It’s for our children’s future. It’s for California’s future.

Thank you.

Governor Increases Preschool Funds

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has boosted preschool spending by millions of dollars in next year's state budget. His decision comes just three weeks before Californians vote on a ballot initiative for universal preschool. By the 2008/2009 budget year, the amount of new preschool money will be $145 million a year, said the Governor.

Scott Hammerstein, deputy education secretary, said the timing is unrelated to the preschool initiative. Bersin and Schwarzenegger have repeatedly said they support preschool programs targeted to the neediest children, together with strong, high-quality family literacy.

Recent findings from Oklahoma’s voluntary, universal preschool program, similar to the one proposed in California, exhibit that participating children from all income groups built stronger pre-reading skills and other skills compared with similar children who did not participate. Poor and Latino children made the biggest gains, thus narrowing the achievement gap. But all racial, ethnic, and social economic groups experienced statically significant improvements.

Professor Edward Zigler, founder of Head Start and Director of Emeritus of Yale’s Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy, believes making preschool available to all is the fairest policy, and the only way to reach the most vulnerable. The notion of targeting preschool to children with particular characteristics is offensive and counterproductive. “Why is it wrong to separate children by race but Ok to separate them by socioeconomic status?” asked Prof. Zigler.

Californians need a universal preschool program for all — irrespective of social, economical, political, and racial backgrounds. Quality preschool is essential to helping all children become the adults they deserve to be.

Universal Preschool will Strengthen California's Schools

According to Ms. Alice Huffman, California State Conference NAACP President, universal preschool will provide minority members and all California families with free high-quality preschool education for their children. "Our kids will be taught by trained and credentialed teachers," said Huffman. "Teachers know first hand that kids with a quality preschool education start school ready to learn, and that such readiness is the key to improving our state's education system."

LAUP Identified Areas of Greatest Need

LAUP-Network will soon expand as hundreds of providers (who applied for funding to increase preschool capacity in areas of the county that need it most) are set to join. More than 370 applications were received during this round, including 226 applications for facilities funding to create brand new classrooms, 88 applications to fund operations in licensed but empty classrooms, and 59 applications to fund increased capacity for 4-year-olds in Family Child Care homes.

LAUP staff is currently out in the field conducting initial site visits of many of these applicants, with the first provisional contracts to be awarded later this month. Much work remains to be done, but the potential impact from this round of funding is great—not just in the number of children new LAUP classrooms will be able to serve, but also in the difference additional resources will make for many of those preschools and communities.

LAUP shows L.A. County's commitment to create more quality preschool spaces, especially where there is little or no existing early education infrastructure. "We are working to build capacity where none exists, improve and expand it where it does, and share best practices across different areas to help us all learn from one another," says Graciela Italiano.

LAUP is just getting started. This year, more than 5,000 children will be enrolled in LAUP programs. To achieve their goals, LAUP will require significant further commitments of time, money, and talent. With the inspiring example of Edison State Preschool and others that Dr. Italiano visited recently, the continued support of county leaders, and a lot of hard work, LAUP and its partners will produce tangible results that all of California can point to and say, "we want that for our children, too."

Doctors for Universal Preschool

According to a series of research briefings by Docs for Tots (physicians on early education), there is evidence of long-term benefits of quality preschool programs. According to Docs for Tots, early education offers several levels of positive impact on children, families, and society at large. The short-term benefits include increased school readiness among pre-kindergarten graduates, and improved academic achievement in early grades. Medium term effects (within a decade) include reduction in special education and grade repetition, as well as substantial cost-savings to taxpayers. Long-term impacts include increased likelihood of high school graduation and college enrollment, higher lifetime income, lower welfare dependence, and reduced involvement in crime.

Universal preschool's big payoff

From the Los Angeles Times

By David L. Kirp, DAVID L. KIRP, a public policy professor at UC Berkeley, is writing a book, "Before School," about the universal preschool movement.

It has long been an American article of faith that early schooling for poor children can work wonders. A word-rich classroom gives poor 3 and 4-year-old kids the basic tools for learning and for sharpening their talents for solving problems. A nurturing environment teaches children, many of them from worlds in disarray, how to work and play well with others. Such an experience can create something close to a level playing field, not only in kindergarten but for an entire lifetime.

That idea is the underpinning of Head Start, the 40-year-old federal program for children whose parents have below-poverty incomes. It's also the consistent finding of research that followed the lives of poor children who attended model preschools.

The landmark study of Perry Preschool tracked a group of poor African American youngsters from when they attended pre-kindergarten in Ypsilanti, Mich., in the early 1960s until they were well into middle age.

The findings are astonishing: a $17 return to the individual and society for every dollar spent on their early education. Those who went to Perry were considerably more likely than children who didn't attend preschool to have graduated from high school and married, significantly less likely to have gone to prison multiple times and to have been on welfare. They're earning an average of $20,800 a year. That's 25% more than similar children who lacked the preschool experience — enough of a difference to lift them above the poverty line.

These days the rallying cry is preschool for everyone, not just poor children. This idea — on the California ballot next spring — is attracting a broad constituency. Polls show that parents overwhelmingly embrace it because they know firsthand what the neuroscientists have learned: that all children are ready and eager to learn. Teachers see preschoolers arriving in kindergarten better prepared, both academically and socially.

The movement transcends the red state-blue state divide. The leading states are Oklahoma and Georgia, not generally known for their progressive social policies. Forty-one states provide some support for preschool, and even as state governments were forced to trim their budgets this year, spending on pre-kindergarten grew by more than $600 million.

The California preschool initiative has attracted such ardent supporters as big-city chambers of commerce and police chiefs. The most convincing fact for politicians and business leaders has been the argument that pre-kindergarten for everyone is a shrewd outlay — that spending tax dollars to educate 3 and 4-year-olds will yield big benefits.

Yet the model programs served only poor youngsters, and so relying on their results to support pre-kindergarten for all children is something of a stretch.

There is, of course, a strong moral case for treating every child alike, and it's also smart politics to give middle-class families a stake. But there has been no proof coming straight from the classroom that universal preschool is a smart investment — until now, that is.

A study released this week by the National Institute for Early Education Research, the leading think tank in the field, makes the case. The research examined the effect of a good preschool experience on the academic skills of children entering kindergarten in five states representing a cross section of the country. Its findings are eye- opening.

On vocabulary tests, children who attended state-supported preschools scored 31% higher than a similar group of youngsters who didn't participate — the equivalent of three months of learning. On tests of early math skills, the state preschoolers outscored their peers by 41%. A recent study of state pre-kindergarten classes in Tulsa, Okla., showed essentially the same result.

By contrast, a recent evaluation of Head Start reports much more modest gains. Head Start typically differs from state preschools in two critical ways. The state initiatives place greater emphasis on preparing children for a kindergarten experience that, in this "No Child Left Behind" era, increasingly stresses reading and arithmetic. And though most state preschool teachers have bachelor's degrees, many with majors in early childhood education, fewer than a third of Head Start teachers have graduated from college.

The message of the five-state study is that these differences matter. Whether preschool has a significant effect depends crucially on its quality.

Moreover, all children, not just poor youngsters, benefit from the preschool experience. What's more, in states where every child can participate, poor youngsters (those eligible for free and reduced-price lunches) do essentially as well as those kids from better-off families.

These state preschools aren't extra special, but they are good enough for children from varied backgrounds to learn a lot. That's excellent news to those who favor universal preschool.