NBC News' Education Nation campaign launched this week with teachers, business pioneers, a former president and other leaders gathered in New York City to engage in a dialogue about education in America today. The event spans all of NBC's news programming and also convenes a three-day Summit on education issues.
Education Nation is not only an effort to amplify the conversation about education in America, it's also about changing the conversation.
We were honored to participate in Education Nation Monday -- on The Today Show and on a panel at the Summit -- talking about an issue that is too often left out of the debate: the power of early childhood education.
Simply put, early childhood education is essential to teaching kids how to learn. It's about developing key cognitive, social and emotional skills that determine a child's success in elementary school and beyond. It's about the simple acts of learning things like how to sit still and listen, recognize the alphabet and the importance of sharing with other kids and even adults.
What may surprise some people is that early childhood education comes down to everything Americans are anxious about today. Indeed, now, more than ever, Americans are deeply concerned about the future, not just next year and the year after, but 10, 20 and 30 years down the road.
From breaking the cycle of poverty that is gripping Americans -- particularly kids -- at historic levels to igniting innovation that can drive our global economic leadership, the scientific and economic data on early childhood education is clear cut.
- A meaningful investment in high-quality early childhood education -- such as enrolling the 40 percent of kids under five who don't attend any sort of preschool program -- would add $2 trillion to the gross domestic product within a generation.
- Early childhood education is proven to reduce crime, domestic violence and high school drop-out rates.
- And, in rural America, where the poverty crisis has gripped families and communities for generations, it is one of the keys to breaking that cycle once and for all. The War on Poverty, led by Mark's father Sargent Shriver, included significant investments in early childhood education, reducing poverty rates among kids from 25 percent in the mid-1960s to 15 percent 10 years later. Tragically, today, they've increased back to nearly 25 percent.
Members of Congress and the president are currently engaged in a deep and delicate battle about how to slice up the federal budget. There is no question that investing in early childhood education is a slice of the pie. The difference is that that early childhood education can create an even bigger pie of growth, investment and security for generations to come.
John Merrow: Some Thoughts on Education Nation
Programs serving this vulnerable population sit on the budget chopping block. And we all lose when these babies grow up lacking the early childhood experiences and environments they need to thrive. Wonder who really cares?
We must make all private schools illegal. The government, and only the government, should dictate where children go to school and what they learn. At a very very early age children shall be instructed by a teacher who is an employee of the government.
We must create government run day care. The children will not relinquish their individuality to the collective unless we start early.
We must teach the young one that total submission to the state is required.
We must end individual thought and work toward enhancing the collective.
To me, this is the key sentence in this article. It's HOW to learn, not WHAT to learn. The what-to-learn comes second, and the entire community needs to be in on the curriculum.
That's where education went off the track in this country: Unscrupulous people with their own agendas began injecting their own opinions and distorted (lied about) versions of history, and on and on. Next came the dumbing down, whereby it was okay to be essentially a poor student; an improperly educated citizen.
Pre-schooling was hijacked by many nefarious people. Mark Shriver and Jennifer Garner surely have their eyes on that, and have plans to change it.
http://www.heckmanequation.org/
That's a bold claim, so I actually read the full paper. Like most sociological projections, the methodology is laughable. It's basically saying that kids who go to early education earn more money, so everyone gets early education, then everyone will earn more money! The same argument used to be made about college. But now that more people are going to college, what we're actually seeing is the dilution of the value of a college education. No reason to believe that same won't happen with early education.
To put it another way: its easy to say that kids who get a head-start in education make more money in the long run. But if everyone gets an early education, then that defeats the entire advantage of having a head-start.
Granted, the $2 trillion is undoubtedly a very fuzzy number and that very optimistic values were assumed in order to get it.
But you're equating a college education, which is (presumably) advanced training in a specific subject area, with pre-K education, which is focused on fundamentals such as how to learn and how to behave among others. To take a conclusion about college and blindly apply it to pre-K is just as methodolically suspect as what you accuse the article's authors of.
Then there's "if everyone gets an early education, then that defeats the entire advantage of having a head-startÂ." Are you really serious? The fact that college degrees have become devalued because of the large number of college graduates may undermine the argument that attending college is a good investment based solely on increased individual income. It DOES NOT "defeat the entire advantage of attending college". So you don't even have a valid premise, let alone anything approaching a valid conclusion.
I appreciate the sentiments you express. Early childhood experience is a prerequisite for later success. Where I worry, and worry deeply, is that the Education Nation crowd views preschool and kindergarten as places to accelerate academic work, which is precisely what children don't need.
Universal preschool availability is lovely, but I surely wouldn't entrust it to the crew assembled by NBC. For another look at this issue you might check out my soon-to-be-posted piece, "The Land of Opportunity - An American Fairytale."
You claim causality as an assumed fact. It isn't. The burden's on you to prove it.
Your turn.
The organization I work for, Horizons for Homeless Children, offers NAEYC-accredited ECE for young children living in homeless shelters, ensuring they're kindergarten-ready and able to compete with their housed peers. Check out our website! www.horizonsforhomelesschildren.org
All we (as a society) can do is try to make them suffer as little as reasonably possible. And, hopefully, when they reach adulthood, they'll able to help their children more than their parents were able to help them.
Unfortunately, since there's no way that the public education can do *everything* that a parent should be doing, there have to be some tough decisions made. IMO, most of the decisions being made these days (and for the past decades) have been not to do enough. But we need to accept up-front the fact that the public school system will only be able to do so much - regardless of the amount we fund or regulate it.
The *biggest* thing that every American student needs is the critical thinking skills that they can use as adults to make sane decisions about our country's policies (because those skills are blatantly absent from the populace these days).