Kindergarten in Oregon

Momentum Builds for Public Preschool

By Anne Williams

The Register-Guard Clear Lake Oregon

Published: Monday, September 5, 2005

There's little doubt that Emily Stevenson will be a star pupil in her kindergarten classroom at Clear Lake Elementary School.

In a meet-and-greet open house at the school on Thursday, the blond, precocious 5-year-old was so excited she literally couldn't keep her feet on the floor. On a white marker board in Room 1, where she'll start school on Wednesday, she not only wrote her name, but then arranged the letters into a "word scramble" inside a flawlessly drawn heart.

"You know what, Emily? I've already assigned you to be the teacher," said Elizabeth Radke, who has taught kindergarten at Clear Lake for 10 years.

"I'll teach everyone how to write hearts, how does that sound?" the girl answered gleefully.
Radke knows, though, that there will be other children in her class of 22 - she guesses four or five - who won't recognize their own name in print, let alone be able to write it themselves.

Emily can easily count to 10 in English and Spanish, but some of her classmates may be unable to get to 3 in any language.

Emily is also well-versed in the social dynamics and structure of a classroom. A student at Bethesda Lutheran Church preschool since the age of 3, she knows how to get in a line, take turns, raise her hand, work with a team - skills that are entirely foreign to some new kindergartners.

In Oregon and across the nation, momentum is building to level the playing field, fueled by research indicating that children who begin school behind the curve run a greater risk of failure down the road. That failure, many economists say, may ultimately cost society more than would an up-front public investment in early childhood education.

Leaders in education, social services, politics and business are calling for what is often viewed as the best hope for ensuring that all children are ready for school: universal access to high-quality preschool.

In Oregon, Superintendent of Public Instruction Susan Castillo's department is working with the federal Head Start program for low-income 3- to 5-year-olds on a long-range plan to expand preschool availability, first for the state's neediest children but eventually for other children, too.
"The research clearly shows this is where we need to be putting more of our investment, and there's a huge payoff to society when we do that," said Castillo, who is also advocating full-day kindergarten in more schools. "It is absolutely part of the essential work that needs to happen if you're trying to close the achievement gap."

Independent of that effort, a statewide coalition of business, philanthropic and political leaders will spearhead a campaign this fall to raise public awareness about the importance of early childhood education, with the aim of securing more public and private dollars for the task.

During the past decade, though, Oregon has hardly been a leader in the call for expanded preschool access, in large part because of diminished funding for many state services, including education.

Funding for K-12 public schools was slashed three years ago and has stayed essentially flat since, considering inflation and rising costs for employee benefits. Meanwhile, Oregon's public investment in preschool education - nearly all of it used to amplify the federal Head Start program for children in poverty - falls behind at least 17 other states on a per capita basis, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research. It reaches only a fraction of 3- and 4-year-olds, all of them in poverty. Two states, Georgia and Oklahoma, provide free, voluntary preschool to all 4-year-olds, and at least a half-dozen other states are moving in that direction.

Head Start Connection:

While Oregon's 2005-07 state budget includes a 7 percent increase for preschool, Gov. Ted Kulongoski's original budget proposal called for an 18 percent cut. The final amount is $54.8 million for the biennium.

"We fought like heck" against the cut, said Annie Soto, director of Head Start of Lane County, which provides education and social services to 789 families of 3- and 4-year-olds.

Even with the increased funding, though, Soto's agency expects to serve only about half the county's eligible children, whose family income levels place them among the poorest of the poor.

For a family of four to qualify, the maximum annual income is $19,350.

"I strongly support pre-K for all families who want it," said Soto, but first the state must find a way to pay for the students most in need. By spring, her agency can typically have 400 students on its waiting list, all of whom meet the federal definition of poverty.

The roots of Oregon's partnership with Head Start reach back to the late 1980s, but the collaboration began in its current form in 1994, said Dell Ford, the Department of Education's Head Start collaboration specialist. Oregon recognized Head Start as a high-quality program and saw no need to reinvent the wheel in designing its own preschool program, she said. The vast majority of Oregon's Head Start programs receive both federal and state dollars.

Overall, state funding covers 37 percent of publicly funded preschool services in Oregon, federal dollars 63 percent.

Gateway to learning:

Most Head Start students are served in Head Start classrooms, but some receive full-year services in community child care centers. Head Start of Lane County works with six such centers, reimbursing them for the full-time slots, sending Head Start teachers in regularly to work with students and offering free training to center staff.

Visits from Head Start teacher Shannon Kellow have been a huge benefit for Security First Child Development Center in west Eugene, pre-kindergarten teacher Jaimie Farnsworth said. While Kellow's primary task is to work with and assess progress of the half-dozen Head Start students, she inevitably works with other students there.

Both Farnsworth and Kellow said they're confident that they're sending this year's batch of kindergartners off to school ready to learn. In a survey by the state Department of Education last year, kindergarten teachers said 80 percent of their students started school ready to learn in all of six readiness categories, and those who had attended Head Start or another preschool were ahead of their counterparts who did not.

"We hear that they typically do very well," Farnsworth said.

Kellow's charges have been regularly assessed through an exhaustive checklist called the Galileo Individual Observation Record. Kellow said she typically does it four times a year, assessing social and emotional development, approaches to learning, fine and gross motor development and skills and knowledge in nature and science, creative arts, language and literacy, mathematics and physical health.

Kasey Galyon, a single mother who teaches 3- and 4-year-olds at Security First, credited Head Start not only with preparing her now-first-grade son, Gabriel, for kindergarten, but also with detecting a vision problem that hampered his hand-eye coordination.

Fixing that problem enabled Gabriel to flourish, and he went to kindergarten knowing his alphabet and very much ready to learn.

Reasons for preschool:

Educators agree that a high-quality preschool education does more than instill a love of learning. It helps children develop the social, emotional and behavioral skills they'll need to get along in a classroom.

"There's definitely a difference when a child has been in preschool," said Elizabeth Radke, the kindergarten teacher from Clear Lake Elementary, in the Bethel district. "They tend to be better prepared academically than the kids who haven't been to preschool at all. Also, they're usually more ready to do things like sharing, paying attention, being able to wait for a turn, those sort of social things."

And a good preschool experience also helps build young brains. Research, much-publicized in the past several years, has found that as much as 90 percent of brain development occurs before a child enters kindergarten.

The early years, therefore, are an unparalleled window of opportunity and vulnerability, brain researchers say.

Dr. Helen Neville of the University of Oregon College of Psychology's Brain Development Lab is leading research aimed at characterizing brain development and changeability. Early results from a study involving Head Start students show significant changes in those who were given an extra 40 minutes a day of music, language input or attention training, she said.

She and colleagues around the state hope to share these results and other research with state lawmakers in hopes of persuading them to invest in expanded preschool access.

"We have to raise the temperature on this issue big-time," she said.

Neville also noted how many leading economists are beating the drum for early childhood education, based on studies that show dollars spent on preschool save public money by boosting school success and graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, lowering incarceration rates and court costs and producing better prepared workers with higher earnings. One such study, released in 2002 by the National Institute for Early Education Research, found that every dollar paid for a high-quality, full-time preschool program generates a $4 return to the children, their families and taxpayers.

Another study of 123 low-income black children followed them from the early 1960s through 2004, and found the half who had attended a high-quality, two-year preschool fared significantly better in school, earned more money and were arrested at a lower rate.

"There's a good economic reason to support pre-K, in addition to optimizing human development and capability," Neville said. "The evidence is all there."

Critics dispute research:

Not everyone agrees that expanding preschool access is a wise investment of public dollars. Some critics have characterized universal preschool as government-funded baby-sitting, and emphasize that family relationships are by far the greatest predictors of a child's development and success. Some researchers, as well as conservative-leaning think-tanks such as the Cato Institute, have disputed some of the research, asserting that short-term gains haven't been sustained over time, and that the biggest learning disparities emerge not in kindergarten but later in school.

But advocates say such voices are being drowned out in the growing chorus for high-quality, universal preschool.

Swati Adarkar is executive director of the Portland-based Children's Institute, a nonprofit education research group that's helping lead the Ready for School campaign.