Oklahoma

This is really a wonderful article. If you don't have time to even skim it, look at the three highlighted lines. They are the key to the fights for and against 4K.

All children do benefit from some kind of early education simply because they want to know, and it would be nice to provide a program nation wide for any child, but the funds are simply not available, and when they are found, the project is so big, it never gets done anyway. And lastly, and most importantly, day care was not set up to teach. Mostly because the job of "day care" was originally thought to be a brainless unimportant job. Over the years, people like me have said, "Wake up. If you put a child with a brainless person at the time when a child's mind is keenest to learn, what do you suppose the outcome will be or do you care?"


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THIS STORY
4-K: Should all kids go?

Some argue that early education should restrict its focus to the needy
By JOEL DRESANG and SARAH CARR

Tulsa, Okla. - At a bagel-and-coffee rally to support a $162 million school bond referendum, one speaker holds up an article from Fortune magazine challenging America's capacity to improve its education system and keep pace with India and China.

Early Education: What's It Worth?

Sarah Carr, an education reporter, and Joel Dresang, who covers work force development, researched this story through a Journalism Fellowship in Child and Family Policy. The University of Maryland program is funded by the Foundation for Child Development.

In the front row at the chamber of commerce event, Jim Graber nods his head and raises his hand when someone asks which employers are having a hard time finding workers with technical skills.

Graber is a commercial architect, a Tulsa native, a Tulsa resident and a Tulsa employer. And he stands among a broad corps of business leaders supporting education - including pre-kindergarten - as a long-term investment.

"It all starts in the schools," says Graber, whose lapel pin says "Do it for the Kids." "You've got to have the people in the business community buy into the schools."

Oklahoma leads the country in early childhood education, with 69% of the state's 4-year-olds attending state-funded pre-kindergarten programs.

As the nation's hotbed for 4-K, Oklahoma offers insights into the escalating movement to start school earlier. Proponents and skeptics are watching to see whether the successes that researchers have found in experimental early education programs can be taken to a statewide scale. They're debating whether it's better to target the children most at risk from poverty or to make early education available to any family that wants it. They're looking for the impact on those currently tending to preschoolers at home or in day care centers.

Pre-kindergarten in Oklahoma took off in the 1990s, partly out of concern for high rates of impoverished children; partly out of recognition of rising demand for out-of-family child care; and partly out of awareness of brain research suggesting the importance of early childhood development.

"We had a real mission, and it wasn't totally altruistic. The goal was that you really wanted to improve this community and get businesses here," says Len Eaton, retired president of the Bank of Oklahoma, who in 1990 led a Tulsa Metro Chamber task force on early childhood education that sparked a campaign statewide.

From the get-go, the Tulsa chamber has marshaled resources for early education, even bankrolling a one-week trip to Yale University's child development center for Tulsa's business, social service and school leaders. The chamber also funded half the salary of a public school director for planning the expansion of early learning programs.

"We really believed that given the way this city was set up, given the way we were educating our children, we were not building an educated citizenship, and it was holding this city back," Eaton says.

Bill Doenges saw the long-term effects of poor education on the quality of job applicants at his Ford dealership, but he also figured it was eating away at the ability of his customers to earn a living. In his 40 years in the business, Doenges found a dwindling share of car buyers qualifying for traditional financing, which not only limited the vehicles they could afford but narrowed their ability on trade-ins later.

"Number one, it's job-related. But to me, if you look behind that, it's education," says Doenges, a former Tulsa chamber official now on a statewide council for school readiness.

While Oklahoma is ahead of the curve on state preschool, it's behind most states on overall school spending. A survey by the National Education Association ranked Oklahoma 44th among the states in per- pupil spending in 2003-'04; Wisconsin ranked 13th.

Like many Oklahomans, Ellene Palmer is surprised to hear of her state's national prominence in early education. She is at a loss to explain why.

For 25 years, Palmer has been teaching pre-kindergarten at the Early Childhood Development Center, a 250-student public school for 4-year-olds on Tulsa's north side. The ECDC, as it's called, began with federal funding in 1971 and has served as a model as 4-K has spread across Oklahoma in the last decade.

Standing tall and collected among her students, Palmer points out several who are second-generation children. She taught some of their parents when they were 4.

Alisia Myers, whose son, Justis, is in Palmer's room, is visiting the class during her lunch break.
"So many of my family members have come through ECDC. It's like a legacy," Myers says. "It gives children a great introduction to what learning can be like and that school can be fun."

Not far from the ECDC is A Loving Environment Childcare, a clean, spacious, well-equipped center that's licensed by the state to care for up to 30 children.

Sherri Herndon, who owns and operates the center, figures her break-even point as far as making enough money to cover her expenses is 18 children. Since school started last fall, though, Herndon has averaged about 13 children. This particular morning she has nine.

Child advocates here who pushed for early childhood education had hoped to improve the learning environments of child-care centers. Instead, as businesses and educators have gotten involved, child-care providers say, their preschoolers have been siphoned off by the public schools, which nearly doubled 4-K enrollments statewide since 1998.

"It took off like wildfire," says Jan Figart, associate director of the Community Service Council of Greater Tulsa.

One researcher who has been studying the impact of pre-kindergarten in Tulsa is William Gormley, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University. He formerly was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he kept tabs on early education in Milwaukee.

Gormley's research team has found that Tulsa's state-financed 4-K - which is available to any 4-year-old whose parents want it - prepares all children for kindergarten, with greater gains for children from poor families and households where English isn't spoken.

"All children benefit, but disadvantaged children benefit the most," Gormley says. Advocates of such universal pre-kindergarten are heartened by Gormley's findings. But some early education supporters contend that limited government resources should be focused just on children from poor families with higher risks of being behind and never catching up.

James Heckman, Nobel laureate economist at the University of Chicago, says most evidence supports targeted programming for poor children, not pre-kindergarten for all.

"You know, it would be wonderful if all children could have infinite resources, but we don't have that," Heckman says. "We should prioritize. And the priorities are such that disadvantaged children are the ones that really need the most attention. That's where all the evidence is. The rest is speculation."

A universal approach has more political appeal, though. Proponents tout the benefits to the middle class, saying that well-off parents already can afford learning opportunities for their preschoolers and that government programs such as Head Start cover poor families. Some contend that universal programs would engage greater numbers of children in need and that those children learn more when they're alongside children who can set examples.

Partly because of the support of the business community, the expansion of early education for all in Oklahoma has few critics anymore.

"All the philanthropists and advocates and activists are pushing the 'pro' side," says Brandon Dutcher, research director of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, a conservative think tank.

"It seems like a real David-and-Goliath situation."

John A. Wright, a Realtor and Republican state representative from just southeast of Tulsa, says offering school to younger children overlooks the importance of early moral development, which he says parents need to teach at home. Plus, to the extent that pre-kindergarten raises taxes, Wright says, it could force more parents to have to work outside the home.

"The application of this solution may create consequences that everyone has not thought through," Wright says.

Even Figart, an advocate, worries about unintended consequences.

"Remember, child care was not intended to be a school readiness program. It was intended to be a work support program, and people lose sight of that," Figart says.

Dick Clifford, an early education expert at the University of North Carolina, sees pervasive pre-kindergarten as inevitable state by state, nationwide. It's not a matter of if, he says, but when. That notion has sent Clifford and other researchers scrambling to study how best to serve the youngest students.

The key studies cited most frequently by proponents of earlier education tend to be based on narrow experiments involving expensive, high-quality programs - including small class sizes, specially trained staff and parent involvement. But when Clifford and other researchers assessed a wider array of programs in schools and child-care centers, they concluded that most existing preschool programs are merely mediocre.

"We are having trouble going to scale on this," Clifford says. "But that doesn't mean we should stop doing it."

Still, Arthur Reynolds, a child-development authority at the University of Minnesota, has shown through his studies of the Chicago Child-Parent Centers that there is potential for larger-scale early childhood programs to reap long-term economic benefits.

Reynolds tracked more than 1,500 low-income children attending the public centers over several years, and found that the average participant spent 1 1/2 years in the program at a cost of $6,692. Researchers calculated the total benefit to be nearly $48,000 per participant - $25,800 of which went to the public as a result of participants paying more in taxes, needing fewer special education services and getting arrested less.

Meanwhile, Gormley and his research team are heading back for further studies on Tulsa's 4-K. They're seeking clues for the most effective ways to teach preschoolers. And they will continue tracking the students' progress.

"The gains that we have seen in Oklahoma for state-funded pre-kindergarten are little short of astonishing," Gormley says. "We want to know whether those effects persist."