Quality early learning pays dividends
By Todd Otis, December guest blogger
I am going to start with a story about my mother 40 years ago, sitting in a dentist’s chair in New York City, shortly after she had moved there from St. Paul. The dentist was staring into her mouth, muttering small exclamations of approval and finally he blurted out, “Louise, are you from Minnesota?” My mother said that yes indeed she was. The dentist replied, “This is the finest dental work I have ever seen. I figured you were from Minnesota.”
Apparently our dentists were (and probably still are) world class. My dream is that not too long from now people will be able to say that about Minnesota’s system of education. Not that it is just solid, but that it is the best. So Minnesota graduates on the job anywhere in the world would be identifiable by their outstanding skills and personal qualities.
Unfortunately, the Minnesota “feeder system” for higher education is facing major challenges.
The red flags for education in Minnesota include the fact that only one-half of entering kindergartners start school fully prepared for success; annually 100,000 Minnesota students do not graduate from high school on time; and Minnesota has one of the worst achievement gaps between white students and students of color in the entire United States. Minnesota, which had prided itself on major investment in education, has fallen to the middle of the pack among the states.
A startling percentage of the budget in higher education in Minnesota goes toward remediation. I am totally convinced that if all children started school fully prepared, that number would go down dramatically. K-12 will perform markedly better when all the children are “Ready 4 K.”
Minnesota needs to regroup and move again toward educational greatness, and it all begins in the youngest years. The mission of my organization is to move the needle from 50% to 100% of entering kindergartners, ready for kindergarten. It is important, because quality early learning pays dividends, both to the students and to society, for years to come. Let me share a few facts from one of the longitudinal studies, the Abcedarian Project in North Carolina, to show the impact quality early learning can make on higher education.
The Abcedarian Project was a carefully controlled study with 57 infants from low-income families randomly selected to receive high quality early care and education and 54 children from a non-treated group. The treated children received full-time high quality care from infancy through age 5. The Executive Summary of the longitudinal study found that:
- “Young adults who received early educational intervention had significantly higher mental test score from toddlerhood through age 21.”
- “Reading achievement score were consistently higher for individuals with early intervention. Treatment effect sizes remained large from primary school through age 21.
- “Those with treatment were significantly more likely to be in school at age 21 ? 40% of the intervention group compared to 20% of the control group.
- “A significant difference was also found for the percent of young adults who ever attended a four-year college. About 35% of the young adults in the intervention group had either graduated...or at the time of assessment were attending a four-year college or university. In contrast only about 14% in the control group had done so.”
The bottom line is that quality early learning has benefits that last for life. In terms of private and public benefits, economist Dr. Art Rolnick maintains that investment in quality early learning for at-risk kids provides the highest return on investment of any public investment. Period. His claim has not been rebutted.
Entering kindergartners are the “raw material” our K-12 system must work with. It is unconscionable that Minnesota permits half the children to enter without the skills and attributes they need to succeed educationally. Minnesota only devotes 1% of the state budget to what are arguably the most formative years in any person’s life. While parents are of paramount importance as their children first and most important teachers, Minnesota does an inadequate job of providing economically challenged, working parents access to quality early learning for their children.
In my next blog post I will tell you what Ready 4 K and our allies doing to solve the problem. For now let me leave you with this thought and/or question:
Why can’t Minnesota start to think of our education system as one, coherent whole, with three components that need to coordinate and cooperate better: early childhood; K-12; and post-secondary (public and private)?
Why can’t we identify milestone goals and metrics to chart progress, and then cooperatively go about meeting the goals, measuring our success? Rather than fighting one another for funding at the Capitol, why can’t the three systems work together? For example, Ready 4 K wants 100% children ready for kindergarten and Growth and Justice wants a 50% increase of Minnesota students who successfully complete higher education by 2020. To quote Paul Wellstone: “We all do better when we all do better.”
Let me know what you think.
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