RSG | Press Page: Making the Case for Universal Preschool

When Sacramento Bee editorial writer Susanna Cooper took a year off to study early childhood education as a journalism fellow with the Public Policy Institute in San Francisco, she didn’t know the experience would profoundly change her professional life.

For years she had reported on all manner of education reform and innovation. But after spending a year visiting preschool and kindergarten classrooms, Cooper reached a startling conclusion: without quality preschool, little else mattered.

“I stood next to kindergarten teachers on the first day of school, surveying a roomful of kids, and it’s all there,” she says. “You can pretty much predict the future: which children will do well and who will fall behind. You can tell who has had preschool and who hasn’t.”

Cooper was so impressed with the transformational power of preschool, that she left her job reporting about educational change to join the reformers dedicated to making it happen.

She is now the Director of Communications at Preschool California, one of a number of public-interest groups lobbying hard to make free preschool available to every family who wants it.

“I had been writing at the Bee about the achievement gap and about the disparities in high school graduation and UC attendance among different ethnic groups,” she says, “and it seemed as if the system wasn’t addressing the issue. Raising standards and doing more testing does shine a light on the issue. But I didn’t see how middle school or high school reform was going to lift struggling kids up where they were supposed to be.”

This is especially true for children who are already lagging far behind their classmates the day they begin kindergarten. Many will never catch up.

Cooper’s Oakland-based employer is one of a growing number of children’s advocates waging a universal preschool campaign that’s slowly taking root in California. Proponents define universal preschool as free, voluntary preschool for all 4-year-olds whose families want to enroll them, regardless of their incomes. They say California must give all the children in the Golden State an opportunity to succeed in school, an opportunity that many children now lack.

Former state Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin, who made preschool a priority during her tenure, says once people understand how much preschool can help children, and by extension, society as a whole, they often become passionate about giving children this crucial boost.

“It’s like finding out that there’s an effective polio vaccine,” says Eastin, now an education professor at Mills College in Oakland, “Once you’ve seen the research, the evidence of what preschool can do for children, it becomes almost obscene not to call for universal preschool.”

The research is compelling. In study after study, the earliest dating back decades, researchers have demonstrated that children who attend preschool are more likely to graduate from high school than those who don’t. Preschool boosts children’s performance on I.Q. achievement tests, increases their earning power and decreases the chances they will get in trouble with the law. Students who attend preschool are less likely to be identified as needing special education services; children with special learning needs are more likely to get the support they need earlier if they go to preschool.

“It’s a slam dunk,” Eastin says. “We know that this works for kids.”

For decades, dedicated preschool advocates have been working to increase opportunities for California children to attend structured learning programs when they are 3 and 4 years old. But until recently their efforts have not generated much political heat.

“Presidential candidate Al Gore called for universal preschool, but The New Republic magazine complained that there were no ‘big ideas’ in his campaign,” says a still-irate Eastin. “I wrote to the magazine to object. Preschool is a ‘big idea,’ but it involves little people who don’t vote.”

In recent years, the issue has gained momentum.

A recent national survey by the American Institutes for Research found efforts to expand preschool efforts in 42 states. Five states have made what researchers called “explicit commitments to preschool for all,” including Florida, where voters approved a ballot measure to provide free preschool to all 4-year-olds by the 2005 school year.

California has made some progress toward universal preschool. One of the most well-publicized efforts has been the continuing campaign by actor/director Rob Reiner, who has made universal preschool his personal mission. He pushed a successful cigarette tax ballot measure that established a statewide network of First 5 Commissions, which are charged with allocating millions of dollars for early childhood programs, including preschool programs. Reiner, who worked with the California Teachers Association on a second measure that was eventually withdrawn, is working on another preschool initiative for the 2006 ballot.

A taskforce appointed by Eastin in 1998 called universal preschool an “urgent educational priority” and issued extensive recommendations for expanding access.

The same year, California voters approved Proposition 10, the Reiner-backed cigarette tax. Since 2001, the state’s First 5 Children and Family Commission has committed $206.5 million to a statewide school readiness initiative and in 2003, the commission earmarked $100 million for preschool demonstration projects. Many local First 5 Commissions (located in each of the state’s 58 counties) have allocated this money to expand preschool access. Local First 5 commissions have committed money toward universal preschool in tiny Alpine county, the state’s least populated, as well as in major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles and San Mateo counties. Both Los Angeles and San Francisco counties have made a commitment to make preschool available to all 4-year-olds within the next 10 years.

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation has made a multi-year, multi-million-dollar commitment to universal preschool, helping establish Preschool California to design a strategic plan for making universal preschool a reality by 2013.

California ranks 37th among the 50 states when it comes to preschool enrollment, with 47 percent of the state’s 1.7 million 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds getting access to preschool before entering kindergarten.

Earlier preschool movements, like the push to establish the Head Start program during Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, focused on the country’s poorest children and families. But the most recent preschool-for-all effort points to a growing body of evidence that shows that middle- and working-class students are also falling behind the state’s most affluent youngsters. They say all children deserve extra help getting ready for kindergarten, especially in a pressurized environment that requires 5-year-olds to master skills that used to be taught in first grade.

Cooper, a mother of two, says preschool has the potential to help all children. Two years ago, this self-described “over-educated mother” saw firsthand how a quality preschool program enriched her daughter’s life. “I saw how much she was getting out of the program,” says Cooper. “She was getting group experiences and developing independent skills that I couldn’t teach her. I don’t see why all the children in California shouldn’t have that opportunity.”

A new survey of 2,314 California children by Policy Analysis for California Education or PACE, and the University of California Linguistic Minority Research Institute concluded that there is a significant gap in kindergarten readiness between affluent and middle-class children; and between poor and middle-class children. The gap between the very poorest and the very richest kids is even larger. Middle-class, English-proficient Latino children come to kindergarten with fewer early reading and math skills than their white and Asian classmates — a statistic with obvious relevance in a state where Latino children make up the majority of public school enrollment.

PACE researchers concluded that the poorest children studied (from families with annual median incomes of $17,038) showed up for kindergarten a full six months behind in pre-reading skills like letter recognition compared with children from the richest families (with annual median incomes of $118,570). Researchers measured similar gaps between Asian-American and white children, when compared with Latino children. The gap in math skills was even larger. The study found that 90 percent of the gap in eighth-grade math scores between white and children of color is already evident before these children begin kindergarten: in other words, these children start at the bottom on the academic ladder and stay there for at least the next eight years.

The study concluded that children who attended “center-based preschool” for two years prior to kindergarten made the most progress closing the achievement gap, although children who spent less time in preschool also made measurable progress.

Other studies show that significant numbers of middle-class children are not ready for the demands of kindergarten.

A 2002 study by the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey, found that a third of middle-class children and a quarter of upper-middle-class kids entered kindergarten without key pre-literacy skills. “Preschool: The Most Important Grade,” an article published in 2003 by the Educational Leadership journal, estimated that 9 percent of children from wealthy families flunk a grade some time during their schooling, compared with 18 percent of children from poor families.

Advocates say it’s critical to reach these children early, giving them chances to “learn to learn” while their brains are still growing. The latest research on children’s brain development shows there are crucial opportunities to reach children when they are most able and eager to learn.

“If we wait until age 5 — after the preschool years and when most California children start kindergarten — we miss a critical opportunity to prepare them for success in school and in life,” says Maryanne O’Sullivan, Executive Director of Preschool California. “Our motto is literally true: ‘Kids can’t wait to learn.’ ”

The children who struggle in kindergarten are usually those who haven’t learned to get along with other kids, who don’t have experience sitting still, listening or following simple directions, who have never held scissors or used a crayon and don’t know their letters. Some don’t speak English; some come from households without books. For many of these children, as Cooper wrote in a 2003 Bee editorial, their first school experience will be a failure.

There’s no strict definition of just what constitutes “preschool.”

The category includes public programs for poor families like the federal Head Start; and California’s state subsidized preschools, which serve an estimated 145,000 3-and 4-year-olds or 10 percent of the children in this age group. Home-based childcare centers and a wide array of private nursery and preschools offer “preschool” programs. The state and federal governments have standards for Head Start and public state preschools; some preschools are accredited by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. But there is no universal standard.

Good preschool is hard to find and private programs are often very expensive. Only the poorest families are eligible for public programs. To be eligible for state preschool, a family of four can earn a maximum income of $47,820 a year. Head Start serves families that live on even less: a family of four must be living on an annual income of $18,400 or less. Nevertheless, there are waiting lists for both programs.

Working- and middle-class families often have trouble paying for private programs, which on average, cost more than tuition and fees at the California State University.

Those who can pay must often search hard for quality programs, which in the words of a recent Preschool California report, “are the exception rather than the rule.”

There are various proposals for integrating state and federal preschool programs with the many private programs that are also serving California children.

Preschool California and the state’s First 5 Commission recommends building upon the existing system of childcare and preschool programs and setting high standards for educational and social curriculum. They also suggest requiring preschool teachers to have college degrees in early childhood education, paying higher salaries and helping teachers without formal training get their degrees.

School boards across the state are taking an active interest in helping make preschool a reality for all kids and a number of districts have established programs that serve as models for the rest of the state.

The job of integrating the patchwork of public and private preschool and childcare systems and aligning preschool curriculum with public kindergarten expectations is extremely complex. But pioneering districts like Elk Grove in Sacramento County and New Haven Unified School District in Alameda County are leading the way.

Fremont school board member Guy Emanuele, who served as superintendent at New Haven Unified School District for 22 years, began investigating the benefits of preschool in the 1950s. As a project writer for New Haven Unified, he helped design a program that was a precursor to Head Start. During Emanuele’s long tenure as superintendent, New Haven Unified became the first district to begin implementing preschool for all in 2002.

With the support of committed school board members, the district has been working to expand preschool for more than a decade. New Haven Unified now contracts with a regional preschool provider to operate preschool classes at all eight elementary schools and an infant-care center at James Logan High School. The New Haven preschools are open to all children regardless of income. More affluent families pay a sliding scale; there is a waiting list for low-income slots at every site.

New Haven Unified is considered a model program because of its well-equipped school-based centers, rigorous curriculum based on state standards and highly qualified teachers. The district has a longstanding relationship with a Fremont-based organization called Kidango, a non-profit provider of childcare and preschool that operates programs at 41 sites in nine Bay Area cities.

Every Kidango preschool is staffed by two teachers: one must have at least a BA in Childhood Education and the second an Associate of Arts degree. All preschool classes use the same curriculum that focuses on building a wide range of pre-literacy and number skills as well as helping children learn to get along, solve problems, and to work independently and cooperatively.

Kidango works closely with kindergarten teachers at every New Haven elementary school to make sure that preschoolers learn what they need to make the transition to kindergarten.

Emanuele says the district relied on the expertise of Kidango and its dynamic director, Paul Miller, to make the system work. “Paul made it easy,” he said. “He handles the hiring, oversees the sites and puts together all the funding. Although school board members may be very supportive of preschool, we have to be very careful we don’t bite off more than we can chew. That’s why collaboration with an organization like Kidango is so crucial.”

Supported by a grant from the Packard Family Foundation, the California School Boards Association conducted case studies in five districts and one county office of education and found many school boards and educators favor the idea of free and universal preschool. The CSBA preschool report, based on extensive interviews with school board members, providers and staff, detailed the challenges and complexities of designing an effective system that ties together K-12 services, public preschool and the wide array of private providers.

The association’s Conditions of Children Council has met with the state’s First 5 Commission and with Reiner to ensure that the architects of any statewide preschool system understand what issues are crucial to local school districts. CSBA’s work on the the universal preschool issue is continuing with the help of a second Packard grant.

“There are so many creative examples of how districts and county offices have done their work,” says Samantha Dobbins Tran, CSBA Policy Analyst and lead author of the study. “We are learning from them and by spring of next year, we are hoping to have a free Web-based policy resource guide that will provide hands-on tools and a variety of strategies for school boards who are interested in providing or expanding access to preschool programs locally.”

The question of how to pay for a statewide system is still unresolved.

A number of California lawmakers like Sacramento Democratic Assembly Member Darrell Steinberg and fellow preschool advocate, Assembly Member Wilma Chan, D-Oakland, argue that the state must increase its financial commitment to preschool even in a difficult budget climate. But privately, preschool supporters admit that the chances are slim that the state will be able to finance a statewide system — which by some estimates will cost $2 billion per year — within the existing revenue-starved budget. Backers are looking at a number of new sources of revenue.

When Reiner and the California Teachers Association began circulating a ballot measure earlier this year that would raise property tax on business to pay for K-12 schools and preschool, the business community objected strongly. After hearing from business and a number of other critics who had problems with various aspects of the initiative, Reiner withdrew the measure. He’s working with Preschool California and other children’s advocates, including CSBA, on a revised preschool initiative.

Support from the business community is crucial, and preschool proponents say there are plenty of good reasons why universal preschool is a plus for business. Research shows that parents whose children attend preschool make better employees than parents who have less secure and dependable options for their children. One recent study concluded that every dollar invested in preschool saves $7 in welfare, law enforcement and remediation costs because children who attend preschool are so much less likely to flunk a grade, receive welfare or get arrested.

Preschool California’s comprehensive report on the issue, “Kids Can’t Wait to Learn,” includes testimonials about the value of preschool from a number of major California employers. Business leaders like Boeing Chairman Lew Platt and former Los Angeles Times Publisher Dick Schlossberg are vocal proponents.

Recently the Legislature passed a bill by Steinberg and Chan that would have authorized a workforce development plan for staffing a statewide system and a study of the potential costs. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the measure, which had been dramatically modified to satisfy the governor’s concerns, saying he does not want to commit the state to a promise it couldn’t keep.

But the governor also gave proponents reason to hope for a better outcome in the future. Saying his “commitment to comprehensive school readiness is strong,” he concluded his veto message by vowing to work with children’s advocates “to assess the infrastructure and options available in providing a statewide preschool program.”