Economics « Preschool Matters… Today!

Latest Yearbook Findings: A Wake-Up Call?

April 26, 2011

When NIEER’s research team analyzed the 2009–2010 data for this year’s State Preschool Yearbook, it was not without some trepidation. News coming from the states has been anything but encouraging and we knew the previous year’s data had not captured the full impact of the recession. In many respects, the 2009-2010 data does present a fuller appreciation of the economic stresses affecting the states. For the first time since we began tracking state pre-K, total spending for the country fell in real (inflation adjusted) dollars. So did per-child spending, which now sits $700 below what states, on average, spent in the 2001–2002 school year.

Beyond the national averages, however, there’s a very mixed picture — some of it good, some bad and some downright ugly. First, the good: Enrollment increased nationally with nearly 1.3 million children attending state-funded preschool education. While the enrollment increase was not large, it does stand as testimony to the value many state leaders grappling with tough economies place on preschool education. Alaska and Rhode Island started programs for the first time – the first new states to provide pre-K in many years.

But there was plenty of bad news. After adjusting for inflation, state funding per child declined in 19 of 40 states with programs. Many of these were relatively large states. Nine state (Alabama, Arizona, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Ohio, and South Carolina) cut per-child spending by more than 10 percent. While four states (Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia) improved on NIEER’s Quality Standards Checklist, two states (Ohio and Nebraska) lost ground. And, despite increased enrollment at age 4, enrollment of 3-year-olds decreased across the country with nine states (Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Ohio, South Carolina, and Washington) cutting enrollment at age 3 by 10 percent or more.

In talking with members of the early education community as we prepared to release the report, it sounded like more bad news is in the offing in states like North Carolina, New York, and Illinois. These are states that have made good progress in state pre-K in recent years – progress which is now being threatened by the proposed cuts and changes in governance. Barbara Bowman, a NIEER scientific advisory board member who runs Chicago’s pre-K program, describes the funding situation in Illinois as “dire” and points out that if the federal stimulus money she used this year to support public pre-K in Chicago isn’t replaced she will have to cut the number of kids they serve next year.

This state of affairs is not lost on U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who joined me in Washington to present the yearbook findings. Duncan remarked that educational inequality is the civil rights issue of our time and increased access to quality pre-K and other early learning opportunities is the way to begin addressing disparities.

– Steve Barnett
Co-director, NIEER

4 Comments | Early Childhood, Economics, Preschool, Quality Early Childhood Programs, Research, State-funded programs, Stimulus Funds | Permalink
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An Early Start to Financial Education

April 15, 2011

This week the PNC Grow Up Great program marked its seventh anniversary. The program was launched by the PNC Financial Services Group in 2004 as a 10-year, $100 million school readiness program to help prepare at-risk children for school and life.

Since the program’s inception, more than 1 million children have been served by the more than $30 million in grants and programs that have assisted numerous early childhood education centers and other non-profit organizations. PNC employees have volunteered more than 176,000 hours at early education programs and donated more than 260,000 items to enhance early childhood classrooms. With expert early education partners like the Fred Rogers Company and Sesame Workshop, the program has created and distributed new resources to support parents and educators in their efforts to prepare children for kindergarten.

As we continue to look for ways to expand the programming offered through Grow Up Great, our attention was caught by research that shows that very young children are capable of understanding basic financial concepts. At the same time parents and caregivers report that they want to address financial matters with their children, but feel they lack the tools and resources to do so. The subject seemed relevant given a heightened awareness of the need for financial education before adulthood and the decrease in public funding for such programs. Working with our partners at Sesame Workshop, we felt that we were uniquely positioned to address this topic as part of the Grow Up Great program.

On Wednesday, PNC announced a new financial education initiative. The $12 million initiative features a new multimedia education kit created by Sesame Workshop. Entitled For Me, for You, for Later: First Steps to Spending, Sharing and Saving, the bilingual kits feature an original Sesame DVD, a parent/caregiver guide, and activity book. PNC produced 1 million kits that will be distributed for free. The kits are available at PNC branches and online at pncgrowupgreat.com or sesamestreet.org/save. An educator’s guide and additional materials are also available on-line. The initiative also includes $5 million in grants for non-profits to provide financial education based on the materials Sesame Workshop created. PNC will also conduct a public awareness campaign throughout the spring and summer to highlight financial basics and the availability of the new materials.

We feel this new initiative is an important addition to the Grow Up Great program. As we look over the last seven years at all of the meaningful work that has been done to help prepare children for school, we are confident that this new initiative will not only prepare them for school, but also for life.

Sally McCrady

Program Manager, Grow Up Great

3 Comments | Early Childhood, Economics, Outcomes, School Readiness | Permalink
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Head Start’s Improved Eligibility Process is a Positive Change, but Doesn’t Address the Root Problem—For Many American Families Quality Early Education is Out of Reach

April 1, 2011

It comes as welcome news that the Office of Head Start proposes more stringent rules for enrollment eligibility and data keeping in the program. (See the Federal Register at: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2011-03-18/pdf/2011-6326.pdf.) Although the extent of the problem is unknown, in some locales parents have been able to enroll their children in Head Start despite the fact that they are not income eligible. This may deny access to children who do meet the guidelines and creates enmity among parents who are not willing to break the rules. Yet, tougher enforcement of eligibility rules does not get to the root of the real problem.

Many American families with incomes too high to qualify for Head Start or state-funded pre-K simply can’t afford a good preschool education for their children. Unless they live in Oklahoma or one a of a handful of other places that offer pre-K to everyone regardless of income or has a relatively high income cutoff for eligibility, families will continue to be frustrated by their inability to provide their children with a quality early education no matter how hard they work. And no matter how tough the screening, parents will continue to feel pressure to misrepresent their finances and manipulate their circumstances at enrollment to gain access to a good early education.

NIEER encountered one such example last August when a young single mom from the Southwestern United States shared her story of frustration. Her son, whom we’ll call Cam, was looking forward to attending preschool. His mom had tentatively enrolled him in the local Head Start program and together they purchased a new back pack for him. But preschool wasn’t in the cards for Cam. By the time Head Start informed Cam’s mom that her income was too high, other pre-K programs in the area were already full. Cam, now 4, remains at home while mom works. She is frustrated not only at the lack of pre-K programs for Cam, but also because, in her view, the rewards of public pre-K go first to those who game the system.

Q: Why was Cam denied enrollment in the program?

A: Because they said I make too much money and I didn’t get enough points in their enrollment system. I make $37,000 a year and I got 50 points — 25 for being a single parent and 25 for having a child at home with no caregiver. The other possible points were for homelessness, foster care, learning disability, inability to speak English, and death of a parent.

Q: That seems straightforward enough. Why are you frustrated?

A: Because I am pretty sure other people lie about their income to get their kids in school. In fact I know that they do. Besides that why should income define what children deserve in education?

Q: What makes you think that?

A: I have spoken with other women in the community whose kids were being turned away because of income and they were told to lie about their income. And while we were registering Cam, my father overheard a young lady being told to lie about her income. I also know of a couple that owns their own business and got their children in.

Q: Did you point this out?

A: I did and I asked them if they expect me to quit my job to get Cam into school. I also confronted the school on the screening process of parents. They said they do not verify check stubs so anyone can make a few changes to get their kids in. I then proceeded to ask them, “Well if I come back next week with an altered check stub my son will get in?” I wanted to point out the flaws in the program criteria.

Q: Did anyone recommend other programs?

A: Yes. There is a program 20 miles away. I work a lot and that would never work out for us. There was another program that would cost $347 a month and I can’t afford it. The program was also started for school teachers so that their kids get in first and then the other children. So even if I got a second job to pay for schooling for my son, he is not guaranteed to be accepted.

Q: How is Cam doing?

A: He got really upset when we got the denial and he still gets excited when he sees a school bus drive by. My dad stays home and watches him every day while I work. We bought books on preschool learning at Sam’s Club and my dad is teaching him from them. He turned 4 in November and is really ready to go to school.

4 Comments | Economics, Head Start programs, Quality Early Childhood Programs | Permalink
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New York and Ohio: Early Education Caught Up in a Fiscal Crisis

March 21, 2011

Research by early childhood stakeholders in New York and Ohio finds that expanding pre-K has the potential to improve the supply of high-quality child care in those and other states. Our recent research has found that child care providers participating in state funded pre-K report receiving additional funding, technical assistance, and support that enables them to offer enhanced educational services. In addition, school-based pre-K directors report that they can offer working parents services that both meet their needs for care and their children’s educational needs.

Yet much has changed since the policy brief was finalized. Both states have elected new governors and each is facing a fiscal crisis, the solution to which threatens early childhood education.

In New York, the governor’s budget proposes to maintain funding for its universal pre-K program at the 2010–11 level of $393 million with the full phase-in of the program statewide pushed back from 2013–14 to 2016–17. One state early childhood leader has reported that “Governor Cuomo’s proposed budget cuts education and healthcare, which is no surprise as they are the largest budget items. Overall, his budget is not very good news for early childhood. While UPK (the state’s universal pre-K program) is not slated for cuts (level funded), and afterschool programs took a small cut, child care is reduced to the level of state funds required for matching federal dollars, and early intervention and home visiting have been hit hard.”

In Ohio, the picture appears to be more dire. Governor Kasich campaigned on a platform of reducing state spending and eliminating “unnecessary regulation.” When he took office, the state had already reduced early childhood financing by $280 million. Current estimates indicate that an additional $100 million reduction is expected. As one early childhood leader in the Ohio recently said, “We are 8 billion in the hole. We are keeping our fingers crossed but we know early childhood will take a hit.”

Early childhood leaders in both states are deeply committed to ensuring the school readiness of young children. To date, both states’ pre-K initiatives have helped prepare thousands of children from low-income working families for success in and beyond school. However, pre-K funding is not an automatic part of state funding formulas, and questions now exist about the future direction of pre-K in New York and Ohio.

In 2011, factors that New York and Ohio stakeholders identify as key to the quality and supply of child care for low-income working families—including stability of funding and authorizing legislation— are now in jeopardy. That means that, political rhetoric aside, each state’s continued advancement in meeting school readiness goals is now uncertain.

Diane Schilder, Ed.D.

Senior Research Scientist

Education Development Center, Inc.

www.edc.org

1 Comment | Economics, Preschool, State-funded programs | Permalink
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Selling our Children’s Birthright

March 4, 2011

Is Anybody Listening to Ben, David and Paul?

Anyone interested in our children’s future — and thus that of our nation — should be alarmed at the news coming from state houses and Capitol Hill these days. From Georgia to Iowa to Texas, governors are proposing to cut early childhood education in their efforts to reduce spending and the U.S. House of Representatives has proposed massive cuts to Head Start and education that will no doubt affect many young children and their families. Like Esau who sold his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of stew, these political leaders are choosing a small immediate gratification over much larger future rewards, thereby sacrificing our children’s future. Previously I have written in this space why, when it comes to education, austerity is a false cure for what ails our economy. In recent days, three of the most respected minds in the nation have also sounded their concern over looming cuts to education.

This week, Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke urged state and local leaders not to short-change education as they address fiscal problems and zeroed in specifically on early childhood education. “Research increasingly has shown the benefits of early childhood education and efforts to promote the lifelong acquisition of skills for both individuals and the economy as a whole,” he said.

In recent days two of the nation’s preeminent columnists (from opposite sides of the political spectrum) added their voices to the call to spare education from the meat axe approach many politicians are taking to spending. David Brooks, the conservative columnist at The New York Times, said what many politicians have been unwilling to: “Trim from the old to invest in the young. We should adjust pension promises and reduce the amount of money spent on health care during the last months of life so we can preserve programs for those who are growing and learning the most. Brooks described governors’ cuts to education as “thoughtless and destructive” and said Republicans in Congress are excusing the elderly while imposing budget cuts that would send early childhood programs off a cliff.

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman sounded a similar message in his recent New York Times column titled “Leaving Children Behind.” He zeroed in on Texas where Governor Rick Perry has proposed cuts that would deny an estimated 100,000 at-risk kids access to state pre-K. Krugman points to the abysmal 61.5 percent high school graduation rate in Texas and asks, “What’s supposed to happen when today’s neglected children become tomorrow’s work force?”

I do not for a minute downplay the severity of the fiscal crisis confronting the nation. It is severe. However, it must be addressed in a way that preserves the prospect of our future prosperity.—and that means investing in early childhood education. Doing so requires brand of leadership that seems in short supply these days. During the dark days of 1776, Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense saw the need to pen another pamphlet to encourage the populace to do the right thing in the face of dire threats to the republic. It was titled The American Crisis and in it, Paine wrote that it is surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country. Yet, he said, panics are capable of producing “as much good as hurt” because “the mind soon grows through them and acquires a firmer habit than before.” Let’s make sure that habit includes putting productive investments in children’s early education at the top of our list of priorities.

Steve Barnett,

Co-director, NIEER

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Will New Jersey Gut Its Abbott Preschool Program? Or, How to Ruin Absolutely Everything

February 4, 2011

New Jersey Republicans are floating a proposal to cut the state’s highly effective Abbott Preschool Program from a full day of services to half a day. This, they say, would free up about $300 million in school funding that could be “more equitably” disbursed statewide. As is so often the case with such figures, the math is wrong—the plan might free up $150 million, but that is the least of the proposal’s problems.

They justify their proposal on the basis that the Abbott v. Burke V court decision did not specifically require the state to provide a full day of pre-K in order to provide a thorough and efficient education. Indeed, the justices wrote in 1998 that half a day of pre-K for kids in the state’s disadvantaged districts could represent an “initial reform.” (Emphasis added on the latter.)

It should go without saying that in the intervening years we have learned critical lessons about what it takes to provide disadvantaged kids with the kinds of experiences that enable them to acquire the skills necessary to narrow the achievement gap and enter school ready to learn. Chief among them is that more is better. NIEER conducted a randomized trial in the Abbott districts comparing extended-day, extended-year pre-K to the old half-day, school-year model. The longer day and year had larger effects on test scores than a half-day and these gains persisted. By first grade, effects of duration were apparent on more complex measures such as reading comprehension and calculation and not just on simple tasks like letter and number recognition. Other studies show that full-day Abbott preschool delivers high-quality education that significantly raises test scores and reduces school failure.

The Republican proposal would take money from disadvantaged children in the Abbott districts to address problems in New Jersey’s school funding scheme that are not without merit. Districts with a high percentage of senior citizens would get some of the money. So would those that transport children over longer distances or have demonstrated cost efficiencies. However, the state should address these issues without gutting the Abbott Preschool Program to do it. One suggestion: forgo the $1 billion dollar voucher bill that would bail out private schools hurt by the recession, but do little to raise test scores.

Backers of the pre-K cut proclaim its virtues based on three principles — equity, efficiency and accountability. It passes none of those tests. The Abbott program was developed to remedy the gap in equity between disadvantaged kids and their more affluent peers. Gutting one of its major components is hardly equitable. Neither does it pass the efficiency test. When kids receive high-quality pre-K such as the Abbott program, the subsequent costs of educating them go down, and the longer term benefits include lower crime rates and a more productive workforce. Sprinkling the funds freed-up around the rest of the state can’t be shown to produce any comparable returns for the taxpayer — who knows how the funds will be used? And that brings us to accountability. One must simply ask, “What accountability?”

I subtitled this essay “How to Ruin Absolutely Everything” because it illustrates the kind of state policy making that ruins public education. Hard evidence on what works and what doesn’t is ignored in favor of wishful thinking, ideology, and special interests. No studies are conducted to test out new proposals before they are widely implemented. Financial estimates are put forward that have no basis in reality.

It is a cruel irony that at the same time the proposal to gut the Abbott program surfaced the legislature is rushing to pass a voucher bill that research shows has no hope of significantly improving academic achievement and Governor Christie’s administration has announced a plan for the state to spend as much as $200 million to jump start a stalled Atlantic City casino project from which Morgan Stanley, in its wisdom, bailed out. The governor should insist that his advisors conduct cost/benefit analyses of both the voucher bill and the boardwalk empire plan. While they are at it they should also run the numbers on the costs and benefits of the state’s investment in the Abbott Preschool Program. If he does, he’ll find the current pre-K program provides a rich return to the public while the other proposals are, as they say, under water.

Steve Barnett

Co-director, NIEER

3 Comments | Achievement gap, Economics, Outcomes, Preschool, Research, State-funded programs | Permalink
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Early Childhood Education and the U.S. Labor Market Crisis

January 21, 2011

Guest post by Tim Bartik, Senior Economist, Upjohn Institute for Employment Research

As Steve Barnett’s recent post indicated, the U.S. faces a prolonged labor market recovery. As of today, the U.S. would need more than 10 million additional jobs to return to the employment to population ratio at the beginning of this recession (December 2007). Based on typical job growth rates, the U.S. will take five to 10 years before returning to “normal” employment conditions.

Given our labor market crisis, every area of public policy must consider how it might improve the labor market. This includes early childhood education. Advocates of early childhood programs need to answer how early childhood programs might deal with the U.S.’s labor market problems.

First, the labor market crisis means that early childhood programs are more needed than ever to make up for negative effects of parents’ labor market problems on young children. Research by Greg Duncan and others shows that parental income when a child is ages zero to five has large effects on the child’s later earnings as an adult. Once we control for parental income when a child is five or less, parental income at later ages does not much affect the child’s later earnings as an adult. This fits in with the assumption of early childhood education that children are more malleable to various influences (parental income, quality of preschool, etc.) when they are young.

Therefore, more children are at risk than before the economic crisis. The economic returns to early childhood education occur for all children, but are greater for at-risk children. The labor market crisis implies that investments now in early childhood education will have particularly high rates of return.

Second, early childhood programs provide economic stimulus by spending more money. Preschool teachers spend their salaries, which stimulates the economy. There is a net stimulus even once we adjust for the taxes needed to finance early childhood education. In my new book, Investing in Kids, I estimate that the spending associated with preschool (with some effects from the child care provided) will immediately boost earnings by about 22 percent of the preschool spending.

Third, we should explore packaging early childhood programs with programs that can help parents find jobs, such as well-designed adult job training programs. There could be some positive synergies between early childhood programs and job training programs for parents. The early childhood program provides time for parents to engage in job training programs. Parents may be more forward-looking with respect to their over lives if they believe that their child’s needs are being addressed. Read the rest of this entry »

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Suffer the Children: An Alarming Confluence of Events

January 14, 2011

While investors are celebrating brighter prospects, the news from the hinterlands continues in a much darker vein. The Wall Street Journal reports that wages for a broad swath of the labor force have taken a “sharp and swift” fall to an extent rarely seen since the Great Depression. Between 2007 and 2009 more than half of workers who lost jobs and then found new ones reported wage declines, with more than a third of them reporting declines of 20 percent or more. Experts say it will be years, if ever, before their wages return to pre-recession levels.

This — and the fact that real unemployment in the U.S. continues well above 10 percent — should be setting of alarm bells for anyone worried about the nation’s future. Research shows that children whose parents lose jobs and eventually find new ones at lower wages suffer from lower wages themselves. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) tracked the progress of people who, as children, lived through the post-war recessions that began in 1973 and 1980. Kids whose parents suffered layoffs end up with lower earnings when they became adults. The impact was concentrated in kids from lower-income families, presumably because parental unemployment posed a larger threat to things that were critical to family sustenance. It was especially pronounce for children who were the youngest during the recessions. The researchers conclude that:

“… children who fall into poverty during a recession will fare far worse along a range of variables than will their peers who did not fall into poverty. They will live in households with lower incomes, they will earn less themselves and they have a greater chance at living in or near poverty as adults. They will achieve lower levels of education, and they will be less likely to be gainfully employed. Children who experience recession-induced poverty will even have poorer health than their peers who stayed out of poverty during the childhood recession.”

We already know that poverty has been rising in the U.S. for decades. The latest Census Bureau data show the gap between rich and poor to be the widest on record. The ratio of earnings between the top and bottom is about double what it was when the Census Bureau began tracking it in 1967.

Confronting this threat to the nation’s future well-being with investments in high-quality early childhood education would help secure their future. Yet early education is not a high priority among the policy solutions we see being put forth to address our long-term rise in poverty. It’s encouraging to hear some suggest federal aid to the states. A portion of this should be dedicated to competitive federal grants to the states for high-quality early education.

Children are not able to vote and households with children are a declining percentage of American households. Yet they represent 100 percent of the nation’s future well-being. As we view our policy solutions, we should apply the cold calculus any successful business uses in making economic decisions. If we do that — and take even a rudimentary look at the returns to be had by investing in early childhood education — it should rise to the top of the policy priority list.

Steve Barnett

Co-director, NIEER

4 Comments | Early Childhood, Economics, Outcomes, Research | Permalink
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Early Education Seen in a Human Capital Framework

December 23, 2010

The idea that education leads to the accumulation of capital in the form of more productive workers and that this returns a profit to those who invest in it goes all the way back to Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, the man considered the father of capitalism and whose The Wealth of Nations is considered the first modern work of economics. It is ironic that in this day and age, the human capital rationale for investing in more and better early education continues to receive short shrift in this most capital-oriented of countries while China and other rising powers forge ahead of us on this front. Could it be that our policymakers are not sufficiently persuaded?

If so, Childhood Programs and Practices in the First Decade of Life: A Human Capital Integration, recently published by Cambridge University Press, provides all the evidence even the skeptics among our political leadership will need in a single volume. In it, leading scholars in human development and early childhood education discuss the effects and cost effectiveness of the most thoroughly studied model early childhood programs as well as state and federal programs. Head Start, Early Head Start, the WIC nutrition program, the Chicago Child-Parent Centers, the Nurse-Family Partnership, the Perry Preschool Program, and state pre-K are among them. Also discussed are various school reform strategies.

The book applies a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding and improving programs, practices, and policies with a goal of fostering increased human capital. This is reflected in the editors chosen for the assignment: Arthur J. Reynolds is a professor at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota and director of the Chicago Longitudinal Study. Arthur J. Rolnick is senior vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and associate economist with the Federal Open Market Committee. Michelle M. Englund is a research associate and affiliate member of the Graduate Faculty in Child Psychology at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota. Judy A. Temple is an associate professor at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota.

State-funded early childhood education is well represented in the book. Georgetown University’s William T. Gormley who has studied Oklahoma’s universal pre-K program extensively provides his analysis of the impressive gains made by that program in Tulsa. Our NIEER team, including co-director Ellen Frede and fellow NIEER researchers Kwanghee Jung, Cynthia Esposito Lamy (now at Robin Hood Foundation), and Alexandra Figueras, contributes a chapter on the long-term effects of New Jersey’s well-regarded Abbott Preschool Program. Robert G. Lynch, Washington College, provides a state-level synthesis of the cost effectiveness of public investment in high-quality pre-K.

In addition to Arthur Reynolds, other NIEER affiliated authors in this book include Clive Belfield (Queens College, City University of New York), Henry Levin (Columbia University), Robert C. Pianta (University of Virginia), Lawrence J. Schweinhart (HighScope Educational Research Foundation), and Edward Zigler (Yale University).

Childhood Programs and Practices in the First Decade of Life: A Human Capital Integration emanates from a conference by the same name held by the Human Capital Research Collaborative. That’s the organization sponsored by the University of Minnesota and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis that explores links between human capital and economic development, public health, education, and other connections. With this effort, they have gone a long way toward accomplishing their mission.

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Forget the Tea Party — The Milk Party Has Arrived!

December 9, 2010

Think the Children’s Movement of Florida is just another garden variety advocacy effort? You’re likely to think again after watching what could be the most compelling 15 minutes of video ever produced making the case for putting children at the top of our priority list. It incorporates five issues of the movement’s focus, the 4 ½-minute “I Am Florida” video, a portion of the CNN national story seen by millions of people, and highlights from the Milk Party rallies in which 15,000 Floridians participated.

Anyone who has worked with David Lawrence, Jr., the children’s advocate, retired publisher of The Miami Herald, and spark plug behind the movement knows he is an able executive. Here we see Lawrence and his fellow advocates crisscrossing the state aboard the smartly decked out Children’s Movement bus that served as a mobile command center for the milk party tour. The milk party designation the group chose was an inspired move. It speaks both to the grassroots nature of the movement and the impressive momentum Lawrence and his associates built as they pulled into town after town to the enthusiastic support of large crowds. Some have wondered if the milk party might spread to other states — possibly even become a national movement. Only time — and the actions of other advocates and concerned citizens across the country — will tell.

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