[Vision2020] When Families Fail [David Brooks, Conservative Pundit]

[Art Deco]

 [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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February 14, 2013
When Families Fail By DAVID
BROOKS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/davidbrooks/index.html>

Today millions of American children grow up in homes where they don’t learn
the skills they need to succeed in life. Their vocabularies are tiny. They
can’t regulate their emotions. When they get to kindergarten they’ve never
been read a book, so they don’t know the difference between the front cover
and the back cover.

But, starting a few decades ago, we learned that preschool intervention
programs could help. The efforts were small and expensive, but early
childhood programs like the Perry and Abecedarian projects made big
differences in kids’ lives. The success of these programs set off a lot of
rhapsodic writing, including by me, about the importance of early childhood
education. If government could step in and provide quality preschool, then
we could reduce poverty and increase social mobility.

But this problem, like most social problems, is hard. The big federal early
childhood program, Head Start, has been chugging along since 1965, and the
outcomes are dismal. Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution
summarizes the findings of the most rigorous research: “There is no
measurable advantage to children in elementary school of having
participated in Head Start. Further, children attending Head Start remain
far behind academically once they are in elementary school. Head Start does
not improve the school readiness of children from low-income families.”

Fortunately, that is not the end of the story. Over the past several years,
there’s been a flurry of activity, as states and private groups put
together better early childhood programs. In these programs, the teachers
are better trained. There are more rigorous performance standards. The
curriculum is better matched to the one the children will find when they
enter kindergarten.

These state programs, in places like Oklahoma, Georgia and New Jersey, have
not been studied as rigorously as Head Start. There are huge quality
differences between different facilities in the same state or the same
town. The best experts avoid sweeping conclusions. Nonetheless, there’s a
lot of evidence to suggest that these state programs can make at least an
incremental difference in preparing children for school and in getting
parents to be more engaged in their kids’ education.

These programs do not perform miracles, but incremental improvements add up
year by year and produce significantly better lives.

Enter President Obama. This week he announced the most ambitious early
childhood education expansion in decades. Early Thursday morning, early
education advocates were sending each other ecstatic e-mails. They were
stunned by the scope of what Obama is proposing.

But, on this subject, it’s best to be hardheaded. So I spent Wednesday and
Thursday talking with experts and administration officials, trying to be
skeptical. Does the president’s plan merely expand the failing federal
effort or does it focus on quality and reform? Is the president trying to
organize a bloated centralized program or is he trying to be a catalyst for
local experimentation?

So far the news is very good. Obama is trying to significantly increase the
number of kids with access to early education. The White House will come up
with a dedicated revenue stream that will fund early education projects
without adding to the deficit. These federal dollars will be used to match
state spending, giving states, many of whom want to move aggressively,
further incentive to expand and create programs.

But Washington’s main role will be to measure outcomes, not determine the
way states design their operations. Washington will insist that states
establish good assessment tools. They will insist that pre-K efforts align
with the K-12 system. But beyond that, states will have a lot of latitude.

Should early education centers be integrated with K-12 school buildings or
not? Should the early childhood teachers be unionized or certified? Obama
officials say they want to leave those sorts of questions up to state
experimentation. “I’m just about building quality,” Education Secretary
Arne Duncan told me. The goal is to make the federal oversight as simple as
possible.

That’s crucial. There’s still a lot we don’t know about how to educate
children that young. The essential thing is to build systems that can
measure progress, learn and adapt to local circumstances. Over time, many
children will migrate from Head Start into state programs.

This is rude to say, but here’s what this is about: Millions of parents
don’t have the means, the skill or, in some cases, the interest in building
their children’s future. Early childhood education is about building
structures so both parents and children learn practical life skills. It’s
about getting kids from disorganized homes into rooms with kids from
organized homes so good habits will rub off. It’s about instilling
achievement values where they are absent.

President Obama has taken on a big challenge in a realistic and ambitious
way. If Republicans really believe in opportunity and local control, they
will get on board.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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