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Paradigm shift is necessary to ensure all kids are ready for school
Sharon Kayne
I never thought I’d agree with Michael Swickard about anything, but I find myself nodding about his notion in a recent column that New Mexico needs to be fundamentally innovative in order to improve our public education outcomes. Further, he accurately stresses that reading at grade level is very important to overall school success. My agreement with him ends there, however.
True K-12 reform will require a paradigm shift. Consider this: The nation’s current system of public education was created when the country’s economy was based largely on agriculture. That’s why school is out all summer – so kids could be available to help harvest crops. That’s also why, until the industrial age, most kids did not attend school beyond the eighth grade; a high school diploma was simply not necessary unless you wanted to pursue one of the few professions that required a college degree.
Times have changed, but our K-12 system is still based on an antiquated model. An economy based increasingly on information and technology requires that a much higher percentage of our workforce have college degrees if the United States is to remain competitive in the global marketplace.
Another change: Our current economy allows few families the luxury of having a stay-at-home parent while their children are very young.
So, the average family needs childcare for preschool-age children. A year of high-quality childcare costs as much as a year at UNM and comes at a time when a young family, just starting out, can least afford it.
Why is high quality such an issue? What’s wrong with less expensive care where a child is strapped in a car seat in front of a television all day? Plenty. (And, yes, such egregious daycare conditions exist. Click here to watch an eye-opening video.)
The importance of early childhood care and education
Science tells us that the vast majority (as much as 85 percent) of brain development occurs within the first four years of life. This development creates the architecture – the actual circuits and synapses – upon which future learning will take place. This development requires human interaction (which is why, among other reasons, the TV makes a terrible babysitter).
This development also requires a nurturing and safe environment where exploration and experimentation are encouraged. Like all learning, new development builds upon previous development as children master each skill and move on to more complex ones.
Despite knowing how important quality early childhood care and education services are, as a nation and a state we have failed to make all but the most miniscule of investments in them. In New Mexico, less than 1 percent of the general fund budget is spent on these most important years.
This, despite the fact that we know investing in these years provides extremely high returns. Several long-term studies have shown that the return on investment in early childhood is 10 percent per child, per year. These payoffs begin with savings in remedial and special education classes for children who fall behind. They continue, and include higher reading scores and high school graduations rates and lower crime and teen pregnancy rates.
A critical economic issue
Make no mistake: This is a critical economic issue. Noble Prize-winning economist James Heckman calls this return on investment the Heckman Equation. There is no greater investment we can make, he says, than on human capital. And the earlier we invest, the bigger the payoff.
Many European countries have already made this shift in thinking and have invested accordingly. Meanwhile, the United States falls further and further behind other wealthy nations.
So what we need is a paradigm shift. Learning begins at birth. We need to ensure that parents have the supports and resources they need to make the best of their children’s earliest years. We need to ensure that children are ready to start school by the time they reach kindergarten. We need to think of kindergarten and the grades beyond as parts of an educational continuum that begins at birth.
Children do not and should not enter kindergarten as “blank slates.” And children who start behind not only stay behind – they get further behind.
Once we change our antiquated way of thinking about formal education, and begin investing in the early years as if they matter as much as they actually do, we may find that our K-12 system doesn’t need so much reform after all.
Sharon Kayne is communications director for New Mexico Voices for Children, which advocates for an adequate and stable funding source for the state’s early childhood care and education programs.
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These discussions are missing a few other factors that are having a substantial impact on the intelligence and health of our children.
1. Nutrition
2. Environmental toxins
These two factors do affect intelligence and are a widely pervasive problem. How’s that dose of reality?
“All of those who make babies ought to be solely responsible for their own actions. If these people cannot properly care for their progeny then the hard lessons of life must be allowed to prevail. Eventually, nature will teach responsibility if responsible people are not forced to subsidize stupidity.”
This is a perfect example of right-wing contrarian logic. On one hand they say this sort of stuff, and on the other hand, they want to restrict sex education, birth control and abortion. Crazy and unrealistic as all get out.
Thank you, IP, for taking on JC; it saves me the trouble of dealing with his ethnic-cultural-social put-downs.
And excuse me for not talking about the phrase “paradigm shift.” The phrase is a meaningless one once fashionable in a certain strain of English literary criticism a decade and more ago presuming to signify High Seriousness and Great Profundity. It appears to be entering the working lexicon of the social sciences and education. Here, it is not even defined, unless it means what everyone has long known: people learn from birth–not exactly headline news–and learn more if they are taught more.
However, whether an investment in early childhood education can pay dividends depends on whether the schools can reinvest them. The sorry fact is whatever difference such programs make before K becomes indiscernible within a few years because education in elementary schools is so weak. Thus, by 4th grade, 50 percent of students are not proficient in math or reading. That same fact applies to a much older program, Head Start. Although no comprehensive, longitudinal study has never been done, most studies show no academic difference between high school graduates who have and have not been in Head Start.
So before we start spending money on more labor-intensive programs which create permanent political constituencies for well-intentioned programs without significant benefits–for two, think dual-language instruction or reading specialists–we should do better with what we have by means of low- and no-cost reforms. One example: curriculum reform. Another: alignment of subject-matter courses required of education majors in colleges of education with the curriculums in subjects which teachers have to teach.
Everytime this subject comes up the solutions always miss the most obvious problem as relates to schools in NM. Expecting better results when there’s no cultural emphasis on graduating from high school much less teaching your kids to speak English before they get to first grade, is delusion. In spite of all the handwringing and money spent those obstacles remain in place for many New Mexicans, no different than they existed 40 years ago.
Well, let’s start with the multiple issues with the basic premise of that question, shall we? Ignoring what my medievalist sister would say about the eurocentric and incorrect term “dark ages”, I would point out that the poverty rate now is actually lower than it was eighty years ago (of a century ago, or two) primarily because of what you incorrectly call “socialistic reasoning”, and if you think stupidity is on the rise, then you really need a closer look at our history; Hiding under desks because it’ll protect you from the nuclear blast is stupid; believing that a whole segment of the population who have been given no education should be held as property because their lack of education proves them “inferior” is stupid. This is why we no longer believe these things. I think what you object to is a rise in prominence of people who disagree with you; that hardly makes them stupid, particularly when you base that belief on something that can be demonstrated false so very, very easily.
If we are going to talk about stupidity in this country, let me provide a few potential examples: believing that a firearm will protect your home from someone who burglarizes it when you aren’t even there is kind of stupid; sticking hundreds of individuals in a building for several hours a day for a large percentage of the year during the single most hormonal and confusing time of their life, and then expecting them not to have sex is fairly stupid; invoking a penalty that is only guaranteed to affect the female half of that same population is borderline idiotic; cutting taxes for the wealthy and expecting it to produce job growth, despite it’s failure to do so every time that it’s been attempted for four decades is the (admittedly cliché) textbook definition of insanity. Finally, choosing as a society to do nothing to correct these problems (and others) is positively suicidal.
If earlier and improved education produces better results for our society as a whole, then investing in that is the obvious first step for anyone who is not remarkably short-sighted.
I get a kick in the back pocket every time I hear beggars, bleeding hearts and socialists screaming and yelling that — WE — need — this and that to save this and that.
What’s needed is a healthy dose of reality and one such way is to stop taxing (investing) responsible people for the ludicrous behavior of those who’s lust precedes common sense.
All of those who make babies ought to be solely responsible for their own actions. If these people cannot properly care for their progeny then the hard lessons of life must be allowed to prevail. Eventually, nature will teach responsibility if responsible people are not forced to subsidize stupidity.
I know I will be called hard-hearted and don’t care for the poor, which is dimwitted nonsense, because anyone who truly cares about their fellow man, including their children realize that interfering with reality produces unintended consequences. The results of socialistic reasoning is all around us. If this is not true then why is poverty and stupidity becoming a nationwide plague that may make the dark ages look like utopia?