Closing the Achievement Gap Before It Starts
By Katharine B. Stevens
BLOG
February 4, 2019
For decades, we’ve been relying on K-12 to level the playing field and ensure that every child has an equal opportunity at the starting gate. But after years of “school reform,” along with public spending that now totals roughly $700 billion annually, large achievement gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged children persist. It’s increasingly clear that one core problem is this: School can’t give children an equal opportunity at the starting gate because children’s start doesn’t occur in school. Indeed, a substantial body of science strongly suggests that the foundation for educational opportunity is laid not at age five — or four or three — but beginning at birth.
The 2015 reauthorization of the Elementary Education and Secondary Education Act of 1965 — the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) — reflects this growing understanding. ESSA highlights the preschool years as crucial to the goal of ensuring equal educational opportunity and closing persistent school achievement gaps. For the first time in the law’s half-century history, ESSA acknowledges a birth-through-K–12 education continuum, emphasizing the importance of development starting at birth.
ESSA explicitly encourages state and local education agencies to collaborate with early childhood programs such as childcare and Head Start. It specifies “establishing or enhancing” preschool programs for children from birth through age 5 as an allowable use of federal education funds. It includes the first dedicated early childhood funding stream in the law’s history: a new $1 billion grants program, the Preschool Development Grants Birth Through Five, which aims to help states improve the school readiness of disadvantaged children by increasing their participation in high-quality early learning programs, both public and private, from infancy to kindergarten. ESSA also stresses the role of non-school environments in children’s education, recognizing child care as an essential early learning program, requiring schools to coordinate with a wide range of community programs and services, and emphasizing the importance of schools’ active, ongoing engagement with families.
Although ESSA clearly describes “early childhood education” as birth through kindergarten entry, the 15 states currently planning to include early learning as a strategy for improving school performance are overwhelmingly focused on adding pre-K for 4-year-olds. That’s unfortunate because ESSA provides an unprecedented opportunity for schools to heed the science clearly underscoring the years from birth to age 3 as especially important for school readiness.
Even as states appear stuck in the pre-K rut, a new project in New York City is providing an exemplary, concrete model of the innovative collaboration possible under ESSA. Public Prep, a network of New York City charter elementary schools, and the Parent-Child Home Program have just launched a unique partnership to provide school-readiness-focused home visiting to the younger siblings of Public Prep students, from 18 months of age to school entry. The collaboration aims to “go upstream” in the education process: improving school performance by strengthening the early language and literacy skills of future students, rather than waiting to remediate deficits once children have started school.
This Wednesday, Ian Rowe from Public Prep and Sarah Walzer from the Parent-Child Home Program will join us at AEI to describe their new project, aimed at laying the early learning groundwork for children’s future academic success. Their presentation will be followed by a panel discussion on the promise and challenge of K–12 collaboration with early childhood, and the opportunities — as well as the risks — of including birth-to-kindergarten in federal education law.
Good schools are crucial to children’s success. But education really means human development, not schooling. And the educational opportunities that children most need to succeed begin not in school but before they can walk. That’s why “going upstream” makes sense: ensuring that children enter school ready to learn and succeed, instead of trying to “close the achievement gap” — whether in sixth grade or third grade or pre-K — years after it emerged in the first place.
See Also
Blog ~ April 22, 2019
Event ~ February 6, 2019
Blog ~ October 15, 2018