Does ‘Issue 44’ Help Poor Kids?
By Katharine B. Stevens
BLOG
November 7, 2016
On November 8, Cincinnati voters will decide on “Issue 44,” which asks whether the city should increase property taxes for five years in order to raise an additional $33 million per year for Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) and $15 million to fund preschool programs for four-year-olds. Described by the supportive national teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, as “one of the most widely watched education ballot initiatives in 2016,” Issue 44 has been vigorously promoted as giving the city’s neediest children a strong start.
Opponents argue that it places an excessive tax burden on homeowners. The real reason Cincinnati voters should reject Issue 44 isn’t higher taxes, though. They should vote “no” because it will do little to nothing for Cincinnati’s neediest children.
While the preschool part of the proposal has been widely emphasized, the lion’s share of new funds will actually be used to boost CPS spending by $33 million annually — about 6% of the district’s current $543 million budget. But a small new infusion of cash is very unlikely to improve the district’s dismal performance educating disadvantaged kids.
Less than one third of the district’s African American and low-income students meet performance expectations in math and barely a quarter meets expectations in English Language Arts.
On the state-issued 2015-16 School Report Card, Cincinnati received an “F” on Gap Closing, which rates how well it’s educating the most vulnerable students. Less than one third of the district’s African American and low-income students meet performance expectations in math and barely a quarter meets expectations in English Language Arts. Just 76% of CPS students graduate within five years. Six years after graduation in 2009, a mere 20% of the class had completed college.
Furthermore, CPS expenditures already total $15,500 per student in 2016-17, at current enrollment of about 35,000. Issue 44 would add a little over $900 extra per student. But the district is spending barely a third of its total budget on classroom instruction anyway, and the state ranks Cincinnati 13th of Ohio’s 14 largest school districts in efficient spending. It’s hard to see how funneling a little more money into such an underperforming, inefficient system will result in the “high quality” schools promised by Issue 44 promoters.
Nor will sending four-year-olds to preschool help them much. Even if children start out on track, they still face year after year of inadequate education in the schools they’ll be attending for over a decade. In fact, children’s performance often declines as they move through CPS. While 46% of third graders passed the state’s English Language Arts test in 2015-16, for example, only 37% of sixth graders passed. In math, 54% of third graders passed the state test compared to just 39% of sixth graders.
It’s true that early childhood is the most crucial period of human development. However, preschool for four-year-olds — or even three-year-olds — is woefully insufficient to prepare the most disadvantaged kids for kindergarten. Indeed, the outcomes found in preschool research stressed by advocates have much less “real world” significance than most people realize. For example, an often-cited study in North Carolina found that poor third graders who had attended pre-K did score slightly better on math and reading tests than children who hadn’t. Yet that study also found that pre-K came nowhere close to closing the achievement gap: just 70% of poor third graders who’d attended pre-K scored proficient or above in math, compared to 89% of non-poor children who did not attend pre-K. And only 42% of poor third graders who attended pre-K scored proficient or above in reading compared to 73% of non-poor third graders who didn’t attend.
Gaps between disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers in fact emerge long before pre-K. Stanford University researchers recently found that “[b]y 18 months of age, toddlers from disadvantaged families are already several months behind more advantaged children in language proficiency.” By age two, they’re six months behind. And by age five, they score as much as two years behind on language development tests. In another study, researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley found that by age four, vocabulary gaps between children from different socioeconomic backgrounds are so large that “even the best of intervention programs could only hope to keep the children in families on welfare from falling still further behind.”
The bottom line is that pre-K is simply too little, too late to provide a strong start for the most disadvantaged children. While age four seems early from a school’s point of view, it isn’t early at all in a child’s development. Eighty percent of a pre-kindergartner’s life occurs before he turns four, laying fundamental groundwork for all that follows.
Happily, Cincinnati already has one of the best in-home parenting education and support programs in the country: Every Child Succeeds, founded in 1999 by Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati-Hamilton County Community Action Agency and United Way of Greater Cincinnati.
The way to advance children’s healthy early development is to improve the environments they’re in, starting at birth. And home is by far the most significant. Happily, Cincinnati already has one of the best in-home parenting education and support programs in the country: Every Child Succeeds, founded in 1999 by Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati-Hamilton County Community Action Agency and United Way of Greater Cincinnati.
Every Child Succeeds helps first-time low-income parents create a nurturing, healthy environment through regular home visits from pregnancy through the child’s third birthday. The program currently meets 25% of the city’s need, serving 3,000 families on an annual budget of just $9 million. An additional $27 million per year would enable Every Child Succeeds to serve every needy family in Cincinnati — a much smarter investment than increasing CPS’s budget by 6% and sending 4-year-olds to school.
Ensuring that disadvantaged children are ready for kindergarten and have access to high quality public schools is essential to breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty. But Issue 44 will raise taxes while accomplishing neither. Expanding Cincinnati’s proven home visiting program to give the city’s disadvantaged children a truly strong start is a much more promising strategy for helping the children who need it the most.
PRE-K K-12 SCHOOLING STATE & LOCAL POLICY EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
See Also
Report ~ September 21, 2020
Op-Ed ~ March 11, 2018
Video ~ January 30, 2020