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Closing South Dakota Preschools
May 1, 2013
I didn't attend preschool. Neither did my daughter. But I see why South Dakota needs preschool... and I see how we are shooting ourselves in the foot at the state and national level by not investing in preschool.
An article by Stanford professor Sean F. Reardon says that family income now explains more of the differences in student achievement than race. Our public schools are helping poor kids improve their academic performance, but rich kids are boosting their test scores even more, thanks to their parents' ability to invest more resources in their learning. A working family may be able to save up for piano lessons or dance lessons; a rich family can afford both, plus a good summer camp and a private writing tutor.
That education gap comes from the income gap, and as income inequality increases (it's not as bad in South Dakota as nationwide, but it's happening), ever-richer families can give their rich children ever more opportunities that give them an ever-greater edge when they grow up to compete for the spots in colleges and companies. The rich thus stay rich, and the poor stay poor. That's not the American dream of equal opportunity for all.
Reardon says restoring that equal opportunity starts with investing in good childcare and preschool programs that poor and middle-class families can afford. South Dakota is already behind that curve: we are one of eleven states that do not fund preschool, thanks in part to some strange conservative recalcitrance that seems to fear public preschool will give those darn public school teachers a chance to indoctrinate kids into godless Communism earlier.
The states that do fund preschool dropped that investment half a billion dollars during the last school year. Given the widespread and well-attested benefits of preschool, these budget cuts seem short-sighted.
The Obama Administration wants to spend more on preschool, which will be nice if the plan can get through Congress. But Congress and the President have, via sequester (the game of budget chicken where everyone loses), cut Head Start 5%. Here in South Dakota, 200 children will lose those preschool services. Deadwood loses Head Start completely; I hear from friends that Lennox and Worthing will also have to shut down their Head Start programs. Nationwide, the sequester will throw 70,000 kids out of Head Start.
South Dakota Congresswoman Kristi Noem rushed with her colleagues to undo the sequester cuts that threatened to delay their flights to and from Washington. Perhaps they can find similar political will to undo the preschool cuts that threaten our kids' equal opportunity and social mobility.
Editor's Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard every other Monday on this site.
Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and is currently teaching French at Spearfish High School. A longtime country dweller, Cory is enjoying "urban" living with his family in Spearfish.
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Comments
Sure there is income inequity. The hard workers and the lucky ( maybe the latter comes from the first) will always have more than the less ambitious among us. Only makes sense. There is also appearance inequity from which I suffer. But I don't think any sit-ins or parades or whining about my lot in life will make me tall and handsome, but it still is not fair.
Your article though Cory is food for thought, just not at the preschool level. Why not adopt your concerns at the university level? On this I would agree that no one in this country that had the desire to attend college should be turned away for lack of money. If we funded tuition for those who could not attend otherwise and required a certain GPA in order to continue their education it would separate the workers from the non-workers.
The American dream of equal opportunity for all is the dream of those who don't want to work for it.
Plenty of people are willing to work for the dream of equal opportunity. Some luck comes from work. But some luck trumps work. The recession wiping out folks' savings, kicking them out of their jobs, and leaving them working two or three shifts at much worse jobs to cover their bills was not some divine judgment that those people weren't working hard enough for the last 20-30 years.
Babysitting? Sure, that's a factor in pre-school and in what primary and secondary school does. It's inevtiable when 70-80% of South Dakota families have to send both parents out to work to pay the bills. (Again, where are all these lazy people you say aren't working hard enough?) We've got to have some kind of daycare; we might as well make sure everyone can access really good daycare that will nurture the kids brains rather than just keeping them sedated with pop-tarts and Sponge Bob. Some families can't afford more than bare-bones babysitting, and, generally speaking, that puts their kids at an educational disadvantage compared to kids whose parents can afford higher-quality daycare. That's not the kids' fault. Why punish those kids by leaving them hamstrung from the first day of kindergarten?
I came from a single parent home that was dirt poor and I managed to make it through college, get a great job and live comfortably. My mother was successful without being rich and she worked her butt off to give us the OPPORTUNITY to succeed!
We were taught that nothing worth having is easy. Maybe success is a learned behavior and maybe the desire to be successful is a greater motivator for some people.
We did without or had a lot less than other kids, but we were taught that all the material things didn't make us who we are. We had clean clothes, food on the table and were never late for school or allowed to skip. Once we were in that building we had the same OPPORTUNITY!
I told myself "I am going to get good grades, get a college degree and make a life for myself and my kids that I am proud of". That includes the desire to give my kids OPPORTUNITIES that I never had.
Not being able to go to a basketball camp is a excuse. Not getting piano lessons is a excuse. Work hard, get a little better everyday, make the most of what God gave you, be accountable for your own actions and don't make excuses!
Give me a school full of "poor" kids with desire to succeed and we will out learn, out play, and out succeed a school full of "rich" kids any day. There is nothing better on this planet than working your tail off for something and succeeding when nobody thinks you can do it!
So, lets get past the "poor me" stuff and start teaching the importance of hard work and accountablility. It doesn't matter if it is a silver spoon or a plastic one, if we don't teach them to feed themselves, they all will starve.
Several kids who would not speak a word. Another one who would not quit talking. Many who wanted to crawl into the arms of any adult who would have them. A little boy who seemed to be describing to his friends a porn movie he'd watched with his dad.
The teachers were angels, handling all of that like Michael Jordan might handle a high school basketball team. Flawlessly and patiently. I was impressed, but of course saddened by the challenges they faced.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has studied how governments can best invest a tax dollar. They decided that you get the best return by funding good pre-school programs for kids from at-risk family settings.
After an hour or two of watching a Head Start program, I could have come to the same conclusion without a study.
But we must govern by data, not anecdote. In general, money means opportunities. More money means more opportunities. And the research shows that wealth explains more of the gap in academic achievement than other factors. That's not "poor me" stuff; that's a concern for making sure the rich don't have a permanent institutional advantage that keeps the poor from having a fair shot at rising from humble beginnings to participate fully in education, economy, and democracy.
I am not opposed to funding universal preschool education. I do, however, notice other data. The sequester cut a miniscule amount from the growth of federal spending. If you think that this is a tragedy, just wait a bit. Discretionary federal spending will be increasingly squeezed by entitlement spending and interest on the federal debt in years to come. You are fooling yourself if you think that taxes on the rich can catch up or even that taxes on everyone will close the gap.
If you really care about the little ones, you will sooner or later have to speak truth to the older ones. You aren't ever going to do that, are you?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/03/05/does-head-start-work-for-kids-the-bottom-line/
On a larger scale, the total spent on K-12 education since 1970 has increased by about 180%. The number of people employed in K-12 has increased by about 80%. Yet national math, reading, and science scores have barely budged. That's data. Your belief that more money equals better outcomes is faith based policy making.
goes to show that money can't improve performance.
But I think we're asking a lot more of the schools today. Students need more credits to graduate, wasn't long ago when we had few sports for girls, Special ed is educating students that were once institutionalized. The schools of today aren't the schools of even the 1970s.
And how about the schools with numerous kids who can't speak English? We spent millions this year to help school districts deal with that issue.
"More money equals better outcomes" -- sure, on face, that seems like horsehockey. But we're not talking about just throwing a bunch of money in a mayonnaise jar and watching it abiogenesize into smarter children. Let's be concrete. Deadwood has Head Start. 33 kids get preschool services. We take away the money, we take away the useful services that Bernie describes. Some parents will be able to afford an alternative, but some will not... and that's the big point of my post. Why take opportunities away from low-income folks when they need those opportunities more than ever?
More money may not one-to-one correlate with better outcomes, but zero money correlates pretty strongly with no services, which correlates pretty strongly with no outcomes for folks who can't afford substitutes.
It's like French: Paying me $1000 more this year doesn't guarantee that I taught better this year than last. But spending no money on a French teacher would guarantee that fewer kids would learn French.
Let me back Bernie's suggestion on the cost of educating kids with an analogy to Bakken oil. Spending more on that oil doesn't make that oil produce more energy per barrel. It's just more expensive to pull that oil out of the ground. Sometimes conditions change, and you do have to spend more to get the same results as before.
Hard work, ambition, and attributes learned from parents are the motivation to put your lifestyle on an "unequal" level with those who want to rely on the government for their subsistence. Google "how to catch a wild pig" for an interesting analogy.
I will google how to catch a wild pig but I actually had quite a lot of experience with that 50 years ago.
As far as whether it translates to American society, I don't really disagree with it as a parable. I've often quoted Woodrow Wilson, who said "educate one generation of healthy, happy children and a hundred other problems of government will disapper."
And that returns us to Cory's original point. A smart investment in children makes them self-reliant and successful adults.
I pretty much agree that government should stay out of the way after that, except in the health care arena where the private sector just isn't getting it done. All the corporate subsidies are a total waste.
Nothing original--only the shape of the bland cookie changes.
("Robert" doesn't understand how the Internet works. The post is not a final, authoritative statement. It is the beginning of a learning conversation. We test ideas, discuss them further, provide additional viewpoints and evidence. We can disagree, but we can also build understanding together.)