THE COUNCIL OF STATE GOVERNMENTS | CAPITOL IDEAS | NOV/DEC 2014 Copyright 2014 by The Council of State Governments. All rights reserved.

Preschool to ProsperityIt’s in the early years that children are learning so-called “soft skills”—

the ability to interact with peers, manage emotions, problem solve and be a part of a team, according to Bruce Atchison, director of the Early Child-hood Institute at the Education Commission of the States, a nonpartisan education research group based in Colorado.

“You don’t teach (children) this when they are in junior high school or 11th grade,” he said. “You teach them this early on. It carries through with them into the later years so that when they are graduating from high school or graduating from college, they have that basic skill set.”

That’s important, he and other experts say, in a time when many jobs throughout the workforce are going unfilled because of a lack of qualified applicants who have just those skills.

“It’s not so much that knowing a few more letters and numbers at kindergarten entrance somehow directly affects your adult skills,” said Timothy J. Bartik, a senior economist with the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, a Michigan-based think tank. “It’s more getting off to that good start that leads you to learning more in kindergarten, which leads you to learning more in first grade. … It’s a cumulative effect that these skills appreciate over time until they get translated into a better future as an adult.”

By Mary Branham, Managing Editor

The Council of State GovernmentsCapitol Ideas MagazineNovember/December 2014

Pathway to Economic Success Starts before Kindergarten

Preschool to PROSPERITY

When Connecticut officials compared schools in the state’s wealthy suburbs to poorer communities, they saw a significant achievement gap.

Senate President Pro Tempore Donald Williams Jr. said that’s the main reason the Smart Start program is of paramount importance to children in Connecticut.

“For children who lack this kind of high quality pre-K, it’s like running the 100-yard dash starting 50 yards behind the starting line,” he said. “We know the most effective way to narrow the achievement gap and provide the best tools for opportunity and success is through a high quality early childhood education.”

That success isn’t limited to the K–12 classroom; it also matters in higher education and in the workforce.

Copyright 2014 by The Council of State Governments. All rights reserved. NOV/DEC 2014 | CAPITOL IDEAS | THE COUNCIL OF STATE GOVERNMENTS

That’s one reason CSG’s 2014 chair, Tennes-see Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris, included issues related to children and youth as a part of the “State Pathways to Prosperity” ini-tiative. The initiative takes into account the many factors that can affect a state’s workforce development success.

Bartik said the global nature of our economy has made selection factors for business location “much more footloose.” No longer do businesses have to locate near natural resources or close to a targeted area to lower transportation costs.

“The factor that is least mobile and maybe the hardest to find is workers and their skills,” he said. “So businesses increasingly are looking for where they can find skilled workers.”

High quality early childhood education programs address that need in two ways, he said. Long-term, preschool is one of the most effective ways of developing a high quality workforce down the road. Secondly, he said, such programs allow parents to work and return to school to enhance their skills and increase their earnings.

“If you really want your state to shine 20, 25 years down the road, we need to be thinking about investing in this,” said Bartik. “You’re basically investing in trees. If you want a nice landscape, someone needs to plant trees.”

In a new report for the Upjohn Institute— “From Preschool to Prosperity: The Economic Payoff to Early Childhood Education”— Bartik looked at studies on three early childhood programs and found the ratio of earnings to programs costs for enrolled children ranged from 1.5-to-1 for some higher cost programs to 5.3-to-1 for full-day pre-K at age 4. He also found early childhood programs could increase the adult earnings of child participants anywhere from 3 percent to 26 percent.

Immediate benefits from preschool programs, he said, include lower retention rates and decreased costs for placing students in special education classes. Long-term benefits include lower crime rates, lower juvenile detention costs, lower state welfare costs and increased state revenue from the higher salaries for adults who obtained a high quality preschool education, according to Bartik.

“In the short-term, it does cost money,” he said. “It doesn’t immediately pay for itself. … I just think that people need to face up to the need to make smart investments. This is a smart investment.”

Connecticut’s Smart StartWhile Williams said Connecticut has long

had a commitment to increase early childhood education, legislators this year passed a bill to commit $200 million over the next 10 years to move the state closer to voluntary universal preschool for all 4-year-olds.

Connecticut is just the latest state to target early childhood education with a big funding commitment. Forty-one states have a state-funded pre-K program, according to Atchison. Many of those states continue to increase

pre-K funding, he said, because they see the importance of quality education before stu-dents enter kindergarten.

“We know that by age 5, it’s possible to predict with depressing results who will complete high school and who will not,” Atchison said during a session at the CSG National and CSG West Annual Conference in Anchorage, Alaska, in August.

Getting students on the right path in pre-school can help alter the course for many children, he said.

“Now, with the new rigor around academic performance and third grade reading and math proficiency, … if a child isn’t reading or math proficient by third grade, their likelihood of success in later grades or high school graduation decrease dramatically,” he told Capitol Ideas in September.

A Georgetown University study found kindergarten students who attended the Tulsa, Okla., pre-K program started the school year nine months ahead of their peers in reading, seven months ahead in writing and five months ahead in math. Oklahoma has funded preschool since 1998; it now reaches three-fourths of all 4-year-olds in the state, according to a May 2013 report in the Georgetown Public Policy Review.

PRESIDENT PUSHES PRESCHOOLDECATUR, Ga.—President Barack Obama discussed the

importance of education for young children in 2013. In his 2013 State of the Union address, Obama proposed a

plan to ensure high quality preschool across the country.

© Jason Reed/Reuters/Corbis/

“For children who lack this kind of high quality pre-K, it’s like running the 100-yard dash starting 50 yards behind the starting line.”

—Connecticut Senate President Pro Tem Donald Williams Jr.

THE COUNCIL OF STATE GOVERNMENTS | CAPITOL IDEAS | NOV/DEC 2014 Copyright 2014 by The Council of State Governments. All rights reserved.

Georgia’s Bright StartGeorgia also has a longtime voluntary uni-

versal preschool. For Georgia Sen. John Albers, offering preschool to every 4-year-old in his state is a no-brainer.

“We know the earlier we start giving the tools and education in classrooms to students, that we start them out ahead of the game,” said Albers. “By the time they get to kindergarten, they already have the skills necessary (so) that things are coming to them a little easier.

“Young minds are like sponges—they are absorbing all that information,” he said.

Georgia has been lauded for its state-funded preschool program, which started as a pilot pro-gram targeting 750 at-risk 4-year-olds and their families in 1992. Atchison said high quality early childhood programs should have a governance structure similar to K–12 programs. They also should have established standards and a dedi-cated funding stream, he said. Georgia is one of a few states that has those components, he said.

Albers said the state lottery provides about $300 million a year for the preschool program.

That dedicated funding stream and the public- private partnership model Georgia uses helps to make it a success, said Amy Jacobs, interim commissioner for the state Department of Early Care and Learning.

The program serves about 84,000 of Georgia’s 4-year-olds. “We could not do that without part-nering with our public school system, but also with our private child care centers,” Jacobs said. “The capacity just would not be there.”

But even with the multiple partners Georgia uses for its pre-K program, all students are get-ting the same quality education because the Georgia Pre-K Program sets uniform standards, said Kristin Bernhard, deputy commissioner for system reform.

“All of our pre-K classrooms have a cur-riculum that aligns with those early learning standards,” she said. “That’s one of the ways we ensure the quality of instruction and what children are learning is high and also uniform across the state.”

Those standards, Bernhard said, are aligned with K–12 standards. Georgia also requires

lead teachers in preschool classrooms to have a bachelor’s degree because, “we know that edu-cation can increase the quality of instruction,” Jacobs said.

The effort has paid off. A recent study conducted by the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina found the 509 preschool chil-dren included in the study made positive gains from the beginning of the school year to the end. The study also said children seemed to progress at a greater rate in preschool than would be expected for normal development.

Jacobs said her department is conducting a longitudinal study of pre-K. The first phase involved classroom observation to look at class-room quality; the second compared children that attended Georgia pre-K to those who did not.

“We saw better school readiness skills across all domains of learning,” said Jacobs.

The third phase, which is ongoing, will follow a sample of Georgia pre-K students into kin-dergarten to see how the program helped them.

Starting Earlier and MaintainingBut Georgia isn’t just focused on those

students entering pre-K. Jacobs said the Department of Early Care and Learning also established a Quality Rated program to look at child care centers that serve children from birth to 3.

“We understand that birth through 5 are really those critical years for brain develop-ment,” Jacobs said.

QUALITY EARLYAUGUSTA, Ga.—Jessica Hill spoke with 2-year-old Jonah Olson during preschool coloring time at the Georgia Regents University Child Care Center. The care center is a Quality Rated early care and early education program for children. The Quality Rated program looks at the structural quality of the program, including such things as teacher credentials and training, and instructional practices, as well as health, nutrition and physical activity, according to Kristin Bernhard, deputy commissioner for system reform in Georgia’s Department of Early Care and Learning.

© Corbis/Emily Rose Bennett/Staff/The Augusta Chronicle

“This is invest a nickel to earn a dollar … starting those kids out right is a huge return on investment in the state of Georgia.”

—Georgia Sen. John Albers

Copyright 2014 by The Council of State Governments. All rights reserved. NOV/DEC 2014 | CAPITOL IDEAS | THE COUNCIL OF STATE GOVERNMENTS

Bernhard said the Quality Rated program looks at the structural quality of the program, including such things as teacher credentials and training, and instructional practices, as well as health, nutrition and physical activity. The pro-gram also includes a classroom observation in which a trained assessor reliable on a national rating instrument will spend up to three days observing instruction and the interaction between teachers and students.

But the interest doesn’t stop once a child leaves pre-K or even kindergarten.

“To have a pre-K program—or any kind of high quality program—that sits by itself is not effective,” said Susan Adams, assistant commis-sioner for Georgia’s pre-K program. “It must be part of a birth through third grade alignment and a continuum because you need for any gains that children make to be sustained.”

She said it should begin with a high quality child care program that feeds into a high quality pre-K program, then into a high quality kinder-garten program and elementary school program.

“You’re really looking at a state having a systems program where your pre-K teachers understand the standards that kids are going to have in kindergarten, but also your kindergarten teachers understand what comes before,” said Adams.

That continuum is important, according to Atchison of the Education Commission of the States. In fact, he said, the majority of people focused on early childhood education have made a paradigm shift from focusing on birth

to age 5 to focus on birth to age 8. That’s because new research on brain development shows the majority of early brain development occurs from birth to age 3, but it doesn’t start to level off until about age 8.

Beyond the ClassroomThat’s something policymakers and others

around the country have realized.“Folks are familiar with studies that show

high quality pre-K leads to greater reader com-prehension by grade three, which in turn leads to greater academic success throughout middle school and high school, with many positive benefits flowing from high school graduation to continuation onto college,” said Williams of Connecticut. “All these pieces fit together and the critical starting point of a child’s academic success is high quality pre-K.”

Quality is the key, Williams and other say. But it’s also important to focus on other factors that can affect a child’s ability to learn, said Renée Wilson-Simmons, director of the National Center for Children in Poverty.

“In talking about children, we’re talking about their healthy development, which connects to

school success, which connects to their role in the workforce,” she said.

Her center promotes a two-generation approach that looks at not only the quality of the preschool classroom, but also the ability for families to thrive and prosper.

“It’s a little more complicated than just talking about what kinds of programs a state supports for child development without looking at the other piece of it,” Wilson-Simmons said. “If families can’t make it, how does a child make it?”

Atchison agreed. He said state policymakers should take a more comprehensive approach.

“It’s not just academics,” he said. “You have to begin to look at the whole child and family support systems and how we’re engaging par-ents in the education of their children.”

But high quality preschool programs are a start, even if they are costly in the beginning, experts say.

“This is invest a nickel to earn a dollar,” said Albers. “We know what education means long-term, and starting those kids out right is a huge return on investment in the state of Georgia.”

PROMOTING PRESCHOOLJACKSONVILLE, Fla.—Florida Gov. Rick Scott, left, and Jacksonville Mayor Alvin Brown talk with Jayla Fraizer (background), 5, and Benardiya Glover, 5, at All About

Kids Preschool Learning Center in March. The governor was in town to promote the state’s increases to early

education funding.

© AP Photo/The Florida Times-Union/Will Dickey

“If you really want your state to shine 20, 25 years down the road, we need to be thinking about investing in (preschool). You’re basically investing in trees. If you want a nice landscape, someone needs to plant trees.”

—Timothy J. Bartik, senior economist, W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research