Childhood programs need state's support
Cross-posted with author permission from the San Francisco Chronicle »
California suddenly is again the land of plenty with a budget surplus in the billions. Yet we do not have to look far to find pockets of severe poverty where the youngest among us are desperate for investments in their future.
Today, with child poverty in California at nearly 23 percent - or more than 2 million children - very few places in the state are without kids directly affected by low family income. And it's our youngest Hispanic and African American children, from birth through age 6, who are suffering the most. Hispanics and African Americans together now make up 57 percent of all California children and 59 percent of those 5 years or younger.
Among Hispanics 5 years old or younger, more than 3 in 10 are living in poverty. For African Americans of the same age, it is nearly 4 in 10 (compared to only 1 in 10 of their white peers). Helping young children in need once was considered only a moral issue; now it is an economic imperative for our state and the country to mitigate the pernicious and long-lasting effects of childhood poverty.
Studies on successful early education programs show that the return on investment is anywhere from $7 to $13 for every $1 spent. These savings are seen in more productive citizens, less crime and reduced rates of teen pregnancy - along with the increased earning power that reduces the chance of poverty later in life.
The picture is grim for children who are born into poverty and start school ill-prepared for a lifetime of learning. Among Americans born in 2001, less than half of poor children started school ready to learn with the necessary early math and reading skills, overall good health and behaviors needed to succeed in the school setting. That compares with 75 percent of children from middle-income families.
Yet kids who are not ready for kindergarten often do not catch up. Researchers at Stanford University recently found that most of the achievement gap between children from rich and poor families occurs during the preschool years and grows by only 10 percentage points between kindergarten and 12th grade.
And as we know from many years of study, children from poor families start kindergarten having heard millions fewer words than their middle and higher income peers. Children who heard the most words by age 4 have the best vocabularies when they are in the seventh grade. The same is true with math - early number recognition and understanding of basic skills mean that children will be better at math later in their schooling.
There are many ways parents, businesses and communities can help prepare children in these first years of life. Parents, for example, can do more talking, singing and reading to their little ones, which research shows enhances critical brain development during the first months and years of life.
As a community, we can do more to educate parents about the importance of these activities.
Businesses can do more to ease work-related burdens for parents of young children by providing predictable work schedules with flexibility for times when a child is ill, so a parent can participate in a key event such as a preschool graduation, or to deal with an unexpected gap in child care.
Finally, government can step up by providing additional public dollars for preschool and quality child care. In fact, under a proposal from President Obama, California could expect more than $350 million in federal funding in the first year if Congress were to pass the proposal to expand early childhood education, child care and home visiting programs that researchers have shown produce the most benefit for children. Many of these investments are now largely up to the governor and our state legislators, who are missing an opportunity to use budget surpluses for early childhood education - an investment that could return three times the initial expense in California.
In the budget compromise reached between the governor and the Legislature, children living in poverty are given an important assist with the governor's progressive school funding formula, which provides more funding to school districts with high concentrations of children living in poverty. Yet the $1 billion in cuts to child care and preschool since 2008-09 appear unlikely to be restored. The new budget includes a modest increase to restore funds, but does very little toward making California preschools what they should be - the envy of every state in the nation. Early investments are a critical piece of this puzzle. The governor would be wise to heed his own claim that "Equal treatment for children in unequal situations is not justice" when working with the Legislature on how best to invest the budget surplus in the future.
Indeed, child poverty trends threaten the state's fiscal future, endanger the economic security of older Californians and undermine our moral obligation to give children the best start possible to succeed in life.
Ignoring these trends is bad enough. In times of a budgetary surplus, it's unconscionable.
This is why Next Generation - working in partnership with Hillary Clinton Rodham and the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation - is announcing a new national campaign called Too Small to Fail. It will provide parents and caregivers with the information they need to help set up their children for success, and it will encourage businesses and communities to do more to help prepare all children in America to succeed in the globalized and increasingly competitive 21st century economy.
With tools for parents coupled with the latest technology, and leadership from both business and government, we can help end the scourge of poverty, increase educational readiness and support our parents at home and on the job. Our progress as a state and a nation will depend on our ability to look at a child's early life not merely as a stage on the way to adulthood, but as the basis for everything that will follow.
Ann O'Leary is the vice president and director of the Children and Families Program at Next Generation, a nonprofit founded to promote solutions to the challenges facing the next generation, where she spearheads the Too Small to Fail initiative - www.toosmall.org