August 27, 2010
As the recession drags on, it becomes ever-more-obvious the ABC (across-the-board cuts) approach to controlling government expenditures is harming our chances for a robust economy in the future. That’s because ABC looks at everything as a cost, ignoring investments in areas like early childhood education that are critical to future economic growth. ABC has been in especially heavy use at the state level. Over the past two years, some states have spared pre-K from ABC while others have not. Other early childhood programs have suffered from ABC, as well. Next year could see more of the same.
These cuts come at a time when evidence continues to mount on the critical importance of investments in children before they reach school. For budget deciders who may be considering future cuts and may not be not up on the latest findings, I offer three important, easy-to-understand pieces of research that have turned up just this year. Each looks at different impacts of investments on young children and underscores the importance of prioritizing investments in early learning and development.
1. Poverty’s Negative Effect on the Very Young. A University of California study tracking the lives of children born between 1968 and 1975 found that poverty during the period when children are infants to age 5 has a lasting detrimental impact on outcomes related to attainment such as earnings and hours worked. Negative impacts from poverty during this early period could be measured as late as age 37. Subsequent periods of poverty, when children were older, had fewer detrimental effects.
2. Why Good Teachers for Young Children Pay Off. Harvard economist Raj Chetty and colleagues have made public findings from a yet-to-be-published study of the life paths of children who were part of Tennessee’s 1980s-era Project Star. Chetty says students who learned more in kindergarten were more likely to attend college than kids with similar backgrounds and more likely to save for retirement and earn more. Here is his Power Point presentation: http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/STAR_slides.pdf.
3. Negative Early Experiences Last a Lifetime. A research paper just out from Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child presents evidence on how children’s early experiences become integrated into their response systems, leading to long-term effects in areas such as their overall physical health and ability to respond to stress and achieve. The authors call for, among other things, improving the quality of child care and preschool education.
Steve Barnett
Co-director, NIEER
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Child Development, Economics, Outcomes, Research, Teachers | 
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August 13, 2010
In this era of Tea Party discontent, a group of Floridians who have had it up to their eyeballs with the way Florida treats its children is kicking off its own series of Milk Parties to register their determination to elevate children on the state’s list of investment priorities. Officially launched earlier this week, the new group is called The Children’s Movement of Florida. Its leaders are children’s advocate David Lawrence, Jr., and Roberto Martinez, Florida board of education member and former U.S. attorney for South Florida. For many in early education, Lawrence needs little introduction. He’s president of The Early Childhood Initiative Foundation, founding chair of The Children’s Trust, University Scholar for early childhood development and readiness at the University of Florida, and retired publisher of The Miami Herald. We decided to ask him some questions about the new group, its mission, and how they intend to accomplish it.
Q: Could you fill us in a little about the new organization?
A: We are a citizen-led, non-partisan movement to educate political, business and civic leaders — and all parents of the state — about the urgent need to significantly improve the way we care for our children. Our goal is to encourage the people and leaders of Florida to make the well-being and education of our children the state’s highest priority. Read the rest of this entry »
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July 26, 2010
When renowned abstract expressionist Robert Goodnough created his paintings, he probably didn’t have an audience of 3-year-olds in mind — and when New Jersey built its performing arts center (NJPAC) in Newark, playing to preschoolers probably wasn’t high on the list of justifications. These days, however, both are regularly pressed into service to help young children develop a broader range of skills. Most people agree that exposing young children to the arts helps them develop but there hasn’t been enough said about how this should happen. That’s changing thanks to a series on children and the arts created by Caucus: New Jersey with funding from the PNC Foundation.
In the first segment, developmental psychologist and NIEER research coordinator Judi Stevenson Boyd is joined by Alfredo Franco of the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, Ronnie Ragen at the Trenton Community School, and Caitlin Evans Jones from NJPAC for a discussion about leveraging the arts to the advantage of preschoolers. It’s a dynamic discussion with concrete examples provided by all. Looking at Goodnough’s 1964 work (untitled), it’s easy to see why Franco chose it to help preschoolers find their own inner expressionist.
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July 7, 2010
The overwhelming majority of early childhood education in France takes place in public preschools such as the well-known ecole maternelle. These programs must meet national standards and are sufficiently subsidized by the government to enable children from middle class families to attend at little or no cost. Not surprisingly, enrollment of French children in the ecole maternelle is near universal at age 3.
That’s not the case in the U.S. where the majority of preschool-age children attend some kind of program at age 4, only about half at age 3, and many private and public programs are of questionable quality. This week, National Public Radio’s Paris-based Eleanor Beardsley dropped in on an ecole maternelle where her son Maxim is enrolled. The broadcast includes perspectives from other parents whose children attend, and commentary by NIEER co-director Steve Barnett who draws the contrast between what’s available to the parents of French preschoolers and their counterparts in the U.S. Barnett recently returned from an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development conference on early childhood issues in Paris and reports that as in the U.S., early childhood programs in much of the rest of the world exist under the threat of the budget knife that could cut preschool quality globally. Citizens everywhere must be concerned about the tendency for governments to sacrifice quality rather than quantity when budgets are tightened.
Listen to the NPR broadcast about early childhood education in France.
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March 26, 2010
We were bitterly disappointed to learn that the Early Learning Challenge Fund didn’t survive the rough and tumble of the health care reform effort. It represented much that was good about the Obama approach to education. Using competitive grants to fund better quality, better-coordinated services for children from birth to age 5, as the program proposed, would go a long way toward addressing the many deficiencies in our early childhood system.
We hope the administration finds another way to meaningfully fund the challenge grant concept for the early childhood years but can’t help wondering if this will actually happen. Obviously, it didn’t help that Congress had to resort to the reconciliation process for passage and that the amount saved from reforming the student loan program was revised downward. One worry is that the costs of health care reform, war, and other big budget items will simply squeeze early childhood programs out of the budget. In any case, this session in Congress will be a test of the early childhood community’s clout on the Hill.
The news wasn’t all bad for the early childhood community, however. The health care reform legislation does contain a $1.5 billion federal grant program for evidence-based home visitation for new and expectant families. Engaging families at home to deliver parenting education and child development guidance is not new. Programs like Parents as Teachers (PAT), Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY) and Even Start have been around since the 1980s. They use home visits to deliver parent education intended to promote better cognitive and socio-emotional development of at-risk children. In the 1990s, programs like Healthy Families America and Healthy Start began using home visits in an effort to prevent child abuse.
For years, these programs have been plagued with questions about how well they work. The quality of research on them is mixed, as are the findings. For the most part, when positive effects have been found, they have tended to be modest. One exception is the Nurse Family Partnership. Begun in the 1970s, it targets low-income, first-time mothers with visits from trained nurses. Randomized trials have found the program produced positive outcomes that, among other things, included fewer childhood injuries, fewer subsequent pregnancies, and improved school readiness among the children of parents visited.
If a major expansion of home visitation is to be effective, policymakers need to realize that success with this service delivery model depends heavily on the quality of the intervention. As with high-quality preschool education, much depends on the quality of the professional doing the teaching and the pupil — in this case the home visitors and parents.
A good deal more high-quality research needs to be done on home visitation to identify what works for given sets of circumstances and to inform various aspects of the policy process. Among those calling for that is John Schlitt who directs the Pew Home Visiting Campaign at The Pew Center for the States. His initiative is looking at what each state is doing in this arena and will publish initial findings this year. It is working in partnership with states that take different home visitation approaches in order to better develop scenarios from which other states may benefit. Meanwhile, a number of states are funding programs that don’t have much in way of compelling evidence that they are working. That needs to change.
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March 9, 2010
While new data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) suggests that the childhood obesity epidemic may have hit a plateau, the fact remains that in 2008, 14.6 percent of low-income children from ages 2 to 4 were obese. Obesity at such young ages has been linked to less physical activity, thus perpetuating unhealthy weight and inactivity status into adulthood. While obesity levels have been rising, the number of children enrolled in preschool programs has also been steadily increasing. Researchers and advocates have proposed that preschools might be an appropriate place for preventive health measures, particularly activities that increase young children’s physical activity. Enter the Children’s Activity and Movement in Preschools Study (CHAMPS).
CHAMPS studied preschool children enrolled in 24 preschools in an urban area of South Carolina, with the aim of learning how much and in what context preschoolers were engaging in physical activity. Preschools in the study were child care centers, faith-based preschools, and Head Start programs, and children were all between 3 and 5 years old. Of the more than 450 children participating in the study, roughly half were males and half were African Americans.
Children were observed during the preschool hours, both indoor and outdoors, and their levels of physical activity were recorded by trained observers. Physical activity levels were: motionless, stationary with limb or trunk movement, light activity, moderate activity, and vigorous activity.
The researchers found that children engaged in moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) during only 3.4 percent of the preschool day. They also found that 4- and 5-year-olds were less physically active than 3-year-olds, and males were more active than females. In addition, the study found that children in higher quality preschools were more likely to engage in physical activity than children in programs of lower quality.
While spending more time indoors, children were more likely to engage in physical activity when outdoors. The five most common outdoor activities involved open space, fixed equipment, ball and object use, socio-dramatic props, and wheel toys. The first three conditions are associated with high levels of moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA). The other two are also associated with MVPA at lower levels. Read the rest of this entry »
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November 13, 2009
Worldwide, a huge source of human potential is lost as children grow up without the benefit of effective investments in their early development. More than 200 million children under 5 years of age are not reaching their full mental, physical, and social developmental potential, says a recent report from The Open University based in the United Kingdom.
Many people associate early interventions to support child development with preschool education. That is only a part of the story in countries where problems like growth stunting, hunger, disease and extreme poverty necessitate early investments that focus on directly improving nutrition and health as well as care and education. With wide variations in the approaches to investments in early development and in children’s environments in the international arena, policy makers around the globe are asking, “How effective are the various programs in improving the development of children and does this vary across countries with very different economic conditions?”
To help answer that, NIEER recently conducted a meta-analysis of studies that looked at 30 interventions with varying approaches in 23 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. What NIEER found is encouraging: Regardless of the type of program, all had moderate positive effects in all domains of child development. The size of the long-term effects is similar to that found in a comprehensive meta-analysis of the U.S. studies. On average, they were about one-quarter to one-third of a standard deviation, with cognitive effects at the higher end, which translates to a gain of about 5 points on an IQ test. Studies that evaluated effects at older ages showed positive effects being sustained through adulthood.
Policymakers want answers to questions like what types of programs are most cost-effective, whether single-focus or combined-focus programs are best, and what treatment dosage is likely to yield the greatest gain in a given set of circumstances. While many of those answers will require further research, our findings shed some light. Interventions providing direct child care and education were more effective than other types of programs, particularly in terms of cognition. Interventions that combined education and care with attention to nutrition or health were more effective than cash transfer programs that gave money to parents in order to achieve a goal such as making sure kids get medical attention or programs that were solely nutritional in nature. Read the rest of this entry »
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August 28, 2009
Senator Kennedy leaves behind a towering legacy of fighting for children’s healthy development: “Were it not for Kennedy’s unwavering commitment to improving the lot of young children, we likely would have far less federal support for young children’s development across the board,” said NIEER Co-Director Steve Barnett.
Which leaves us all with the question: Where do we go from here? How can the vacuum in children’s advocacy be filled?
Read Sen. Kennedy’s Newsmaker interview with Preschool Matters earlier this year.
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August 17, 2009
A fascinating piece in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine by Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik details recent studies showing that not only do children possess powerful learning abilities at very young ages but by their preschool years, they are capable of using probabilities to learn how things work. Findings such as these need to be cast in the context of how young children learn and Gopnik does an admirable job of pointing out the differences between optimal learning environments for young children and the goal-oriented environments kids encounter later in school.
Two recent NIEER briefs address points brought up by Gopnik’s piece. “Connecting Neurons, Concepts, and People: Brain Development and its Implications” summarizes what science tells us about young children’s brain development and corrects some of the common misunderstandings about it. “Math and Science in Preschool: Policies and Practice” reviews the research addressing development of math and science in preschool and makes recommendations for early education policy in these domains. Research by Gopnik, NIEER Scientific Advisory Board member Rochel Gelman and others is at least partly responsible for the recent emphasis on math and science in early education.
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