What is the Cost of Educating Our Preschoolers? What is the Cost of NOT Educating Our Preschoolers?
By Holly DeLeon
After 50 years of trying new reading programs and hundreds of approaches to teaching reading, you’d expect reading scores to improve. But recent NAEP scores show that instead, we’re stagnating. Billions of dollars have been spent trying to remediate this problem, yet we’re continuing to see almost half the nation’s children score “not proficient” on third grade reading assessments.
What it boils down to is that we are so busy trying to fix the problem that we aren’t devoting enough time to preventing the problem. Our children have a right to literacy, so we need to get to the root cause. It’s time to say “enough is enough” and focus on prevention.
The root of literacy
The science of reading is clear on how a young child becomes a proficient reader and where the development of the skill begins. Neuroscientific research shows that language development must start with listening and speaking before learning to read and write. Luckily, babies are innately wired for listening and learning speech and acquiring meaning from their surroundings. Those areas of the brain are also the fertile bed for later acquiring the print concepts required for reading, though that process is not innate. The foundation must be built for language development before the work of teaching reading can begin.
Building this early literacy foundation is just like building the foundation of a house. If you do not build a strong foundation, the walls will begin to crack. For a child who is not given the early language foundation before kindergarten, the cracks appear as gaps in pre-reading skills.
The necessary shifts
Let’s look at all environments where we find preschool children: at home with a parent or caregiver, at a daycare center, in a public or private Pre-K center, or in Head Start. In each environment, children need to hear lots of words, sentences, stories and songs – actually around 21,000 words per day – in order to develop those pre-wired areas of the brain for speech, meaning, and later, reading. Many children are living in a verbal desert as well as a book desert. They are not engaging in verbal exchanges with important adults nor are they hearing the language of books.
With that lens, we understand why NAEP scores aren’t changing when we keep trying elementary remediation. Can this situation ever change? Yes! But the solution is prevention. It must be started early, before students even enter kindergarten, and must be laser focused on building that early language and literacy foundation to give children the chance to thrive.
Finding Funding
A common statistic in early childhood education is that we achieve a $7 return for every $1 spent in early childhood education. But where do you find the $1? The following list represents some of the funding sources for early childhood development. A good resource to determine the funding provided for a particular state is First 5 Years Fund.
Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG)
Federal funding to states for childcare subsidies for low-income families with children under 13.
Early Head Start
Federally funded program for low income families with pregnant women, infants, and toddlers up to age 3
Head Start
Federally funded program that provides comprehensive early childhood education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income children, ages 3-5, and their families.
Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV)
Federally funded program to help pregnant people and parents of young children improve health and well-being for themselves and their families.
Preschool Development Grant – Birth through 5 (PDG B-5)
Competitive federal grant designed to improve states early childhood system. The grant seeks to align preschool programs within a birth to 3rd grade continuum of services.
Individuals with Disabilities Act – Part C (IDEA-Part C)
Federally funded program that promotes the development of infants and toddlers with delays or disabilities, enhances the capacity of families to meet the developmental needs of their infants and toddlers, minimizing the need for special education and related services when children enter school
State Funded PreK
Many states have Universal PreK policies but very few have achieved the enrollment criteria of 70% of 4 year olds in the state. Only District of Columbia, OK, VT, and WI are at that level currently.
