[Senate Hearing 107-285]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 107-285
EARLY EDUCATION: FROM SCIENCE TO PRACTICE
=======================================================================
HEARING
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON HEALTH, EDUCATION,
LABOR, AND PENSIONS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
ON
EXAMINING EARLY EDUCATION ISSUES, FOCUSING ON QUALITY EDUCATIONAL
PROGRAMS, PARENT INVOLVEMENT IN EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT, AND
SEPARATION OF EDUCATION FOR CHILDREN WITH SPECIAL NEEDS
__________
FEBRUARY 12, 2002
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Printed for the use of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and
Pensions
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COMMITTEE ON HEALTH, EDUCATION, LABOR, AND PENSIONS
EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts, Chairman
CHRISTOPHER J. DODD, Connecticut JUDD GREGG, New Hampshire
TOM HARKIN, Iowa BILL FRIST, Tennessee
BARBARA A. MIKULSKI, Maryland MICHAEL B. ENZI, Wyoming
JAMES M. JEFFORDS (I), Vermont TIM HUTCHINSON, Arkansas
JEFF BINGAMAN, New Mexico JOHN W. WARNER, Virginia
PAUL D. WELLSTONE, Minnesota CHRISTOPHER S. BOND, Missouri
PATTY MURRAY, Washington PAT ROBERTS, Kansas
JACK REED, Rhode Island SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine
JOHN EDWARDS, North Carolina JEFF SESSIONS, Alabama
HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, New York MIKE DeWINE, Ohio
J. Michael Myers, Staff Director and Chief Counsel
Townsend Lange McNitt, Minority Staff Director
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(ii)
C O N T E N T S
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STATEMENTS
February 12, 2002
Page
Kennedy, Hon. Edward M., Chairman, Committee on Health,
Education, Labor, and Pensions, opening statement.............. 1
DeWine, Hon. Mike, a U.S. Senator from the State of Ohio, opening
statement...................................................... 4
Bond, Hon. Christopher J., a U.S. Senator from the State of
Connecticut, opening statement................................. 7
Shonkoff, Jack P., M.D., Dean, Heller School, Brandeis
University, Waltham, MA; Edward Zigler, Sterling Professor of
Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT; and Dorothy S.
Strickland, State of New Jersey Professor of Reading, Graduate
School of Education, Rutgers, the State University of New
Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ...................................... 8
Prepared statements of:......................................
Dr. Shonkoff............................................. 10
Mr. Zigler............................................... 15
Ms. Strickland........................................... 19
Reiner, Rob, Founder, I Am Your Child Foundation, Hollywood, CA;
Elisabeth Schaefer, Administrator, Early Learning Services,
Massachusetts Department of Education, Malden, MA; Susan D.
Russell, Executive Director, Child Care Services, University of
North Carolina Chapel Hill, Raleigh, NC; and Sharon Rhodes,
Director, Program Development and Evaluation, Parents as
Teachers National Center, St. Louis, MO........................ 39
Prepared statements of:......................................
Mr. Reiner............................................... 44
Ms. Schaefer............................................. 49
Ms. Russell.............................................. 57
Ms. Rhodes............................................... 60
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL
Articles, publications, letters, etc.:
Child Care Services Association.............................. 72
(iii)
EARLY EDUCATION: FROM SCIENCE TO PRACTICE
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TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2002
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:32 a.m., in
room SD-430, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Edward M.
Kennedy (chairman of the committee) presiding.
Present: Senators Kennedy, Dodd, Jeffords, Murray, Gregg,
Bond, and DeWine.
Opening Statement of Senator Kennedy
The Chairman. The committee will come to order.
It is just after 9:30, and I know that my colleagues are on
their way, but we do have a series of votes, unfortunately, at
10:30, three votes, which I regret, and I apologize to our
witnesses. People ask about the changes in the U.S. Senate, and
this is one of the more unfortunate aspects of it, because it
interrupts the flow of the hearing and I think presents
additional interference with our guests and witnesses, many of
whom have come a long way to share their experience with us on
a matter of enormous importance.
So I apologize to everyone.
We have as well this morning a variety of very urgent
hearings, with the budget hearing, the Enron hearings--I do not
think any of the other hearings are as important as what is
happening here, quite frankly. But nonetheless, a number of our
colleagues are on those committees.
This is a subject matter which is of enormous interest to
all the members of our committee on both sides of the aisle. I
would mention my good friend, Senator Dodd, who has done an
outstanding job in the area of children and has chaired the
Children's Caucus; and Paul Wellstone, who has been tireless on
this issue in working with us; and many of our colleagues on
both sides. Senator Gregg has been very strongly interested in
it; Senator Bond as Governor was active and involved in this
cause. You can just go across the spectrum.
Our first panel will bring us the best in terms of the
science, what we know. It is now incontrovertible about what we
know about the child and his or her ability to make progress.
Then, we will hear from some of those who have been most
active and involved in developing programs.
I think we have some of the best that we could have before
us today. There are many others whose advice and counsel we
will seek. But we know that in 1989, the Nation made a
commitment about children being ready to learn when they go to
school, and we have the opportunity to make a difference, and
we are interested in how we can best achieve that.
I would also like to mention that Senator Harkin wanted to
attend today's hearing on this very important issue, but
unfortunately could not because of his responsibilities as
manager of the farm bill which is currently being considered on
the Senate floor.
I will put my full statement in the record as well as the
statement of Senator Enzi and turn to Senator DeWine for any
brief comments he may wish to make.
[The prepared statement of Senator Kennedy follows:]
Prepared Statement of Senator Kennedy
Today's hearing continues the dialogue on what we need to
do to ensure that our youngest children reach school ready to
learn. We have before us today, the nation's leading experts in
the science of early childhood development, as well as state
and national leaders who have successfully used that science to
establish successful state and local programs for children from
birth to age five.
Last month we, were honored to have the First Lady appear
before this committee to stress the importance of nurturing
children's learning and skills during the critical years
between the crib and the classroom. Last week, President Bush
announced that early education is one of his top domestic
agenda items. And it's a top priority for this Committee, too.
In 1989, at the National Education Summit, then President
George Bush and the nation's governors established eight
national goals to reform the nation's education system. The
first goal was that by the year 2000, all children should start
school ready to learn.
It is now thirteen years later and we still have a long way
to go to meet this goal for our children. Our youngest children
still have many unmet needs and our nation's early education
system remains largely fragmented, underfunded and poorly
staffed.
Today, even more than in 1989, the science is crystal
clear. Over the past decade, experts from many disciplines and
perspectives have echoed the same conclusion--that what we do
for our children in their earliest formative years, sets the
foundation in school and in life.
With this scientific consensus, Congress has a new
opportunity--and a growing responsibility--to improve the
quality of education for the nation's youngest children.
There is much to be done. As elementary and secondary
education has been a priority over the last two years, we must
now devote the same energy to early education. We were
successful in working in a bipartisan manner to achieve
significant reforms in the Elementary and Secondary Education
Act. In the same bipartisan spirit, we must move on to the next
frontier in education--preschool.
It is time to close the gap between what we know and what
we do. The science of early development, especially brain
development, has advanced significantly. We know that human
development is on a course set long before birth. We also know
that the environments that children are in influence that
course. Today we will examine the research on early childhood
development and hear from experts in the science of early
childhood development. Then we will examine state initiatives
that bridge the gap between what the science tells us and what
we do to ensure our children arrive at our schools ready to
learn.
Some states and communities have begun to address this
challenge. They have formed strong partnerships at the state
and local level to weave the current patchwork of early
education and care programs into a high quality, unified system
of early education services for all children in America,
especially for those at greatest risk of academic failure.
We must do more to improve the existing federal efforts and
to improve the quality of these programs. We must coordinate
the current array of federal programs more effectively, from
Early Head Start, to Head Start, to the Child Care and
Development Block Grant to Title I.
To improve the chances for children to succeed in school,
we must also focus our investments on developing well-trained,
highly skilled teachers who have the knowledge and financial
resources to create stimulating care environments that help all
children to develop and prepare for school.
This could be the most important issue before this
Committee this year. And we look forward to hearing from our
distinguished witnesses.
[The prepared statement of Senator Enzi follows:]
Prepared Statement of Senator Enzi
Thank you Mr. Chairman. I appreciate this opportunity to
discuss the vital issue of early childhood education. I would
like to thank all of our panelists for their testimony before
the Committee.
We all agree that making sure our nation's children are
ready to learn when they reach the schoolhouse door is a top
priority. In fact, research indicates that the early years are
crucial for brain development, and that there is a direct
correlation between the amount of stimulation young children
receive in their early years and their success in learning and
intellectual growth as they mature. I was surprised to
discover, however, that there is still a great deal of
disagreement between experts in the field about the best way,
or time, to start helping young children learn.
In light of this fact, I would encourage this committee to
work to develop solutions that are flexible enough to take into
account differing ideas about what makes a quality early
education program, as well as the unique needs of small,
predominantly rural states like Wyoming. As we continue to
examine the issue of early childhood education we must keep in
mind that it is the responsibility of the individual states to
set the standards that will help to ensure that children enter
school ready to read and learn. In fact, the Wyoming Department
of Education recently formed the Early Childhood Standards Task
Force to create early learning standards for school readiness
that will assist parents, early childhood educators, and other
child care providers in designing learning experiences and
curriculum to help young children prepare for success in
school. As federal legislators we must clear away any obstacles
and unnecessary red tape that would slow or stop the
implementation of these standards that so many people in
Wyoming are working so hard to develop.
I would also like to take this opportunity to commend First
Lady Laura Bush for her commitment to the issue of early
childhood education. The success of the White House Summit on
Early Childhood Cognitive Development, which brought together
hundreds of educators (including Wyoming's Superintendent of
Public Instruction, Judy Catchpole), researchers, librarians,
business leaders and federal officials to help us better
understand the issues surrounding early childhood learning, is
a credit to this Administration. Two important early education
initiatives, which will directly impact the work of this
Committee, were announced at this summit. First, the formation
of a joint task force, headed by the Departments of Education
and Health and Human Services, that will work to determine the
best ways to ensure young children enter school ready to learn.
This goal will be accomplished by studying research-based
strategies on reading and math readiness and recommending how
they can be widely implemented in federally funded preschool
programs. Second, Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, announced
a plan to overhaul the Head Start program, which currently
serves 880,000 poor children. This proposal, which I
wholeheartedly support, will shift the focus of the federal
government's major preschool effort to emphasize literacy and
pre-reading skills for the first time. I am confident that this
shift in the focus of the Head Start program will bring our
nation's children closer to reaching President Bush's goal of
ensuring that all children can read before the end of the third
grade.
Mr. Chairman, 1 look forward to hearing the testimony of
all of our panelists. I know that their expertise in the field
of early childhood education will bring us closer to
understanding what our states can do to ensure that no child is
left behind, just as President Bush requested.
Opening Statement of Senator DeWine
Senator DeWine. Mr. Chairman, I will make it very brief and
ask that my statement be made a part of the record and just
thank you for holding this hearing on something that we all
know is so very, very important in early childhood development.
The Chairman. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Senator DeWine follows:]
Prepared Statement of Senator DeWine
Thank you Chairman Kennedy and Ranking Member Gregg for
holding this important hearing today. All of us here know that
our children are the most vulnerable members of our population
and yet our most valuable resources. As the parents of eight
and grandparents of six, soon to be seven, my wife Fran and I
know the responsibility, time, and dedication it takes to
ensure that children, especially very young children, receive
proper care.
The first five years of a child's life are a time of
momentous change. Research shows that a child's brain size
doubles between birth and age three. I remember my own children
during this time, and it seemed like every day they were
learning and doing something for the first time--walking,
crawling, or learning another new word.
Kids are like sponges, particularly at this early stage of
life. That's why education is such an important part of our
children's lives, not just when they reach kindergarten, but
really from the day they are born.
Early learning programs play a pivotal role in preparing
our children for kindergarten and beyond. First Lady Laura Bush
has taken an important leadership role in this issue with her
``Ready to Read, Ready to Learn'' initiative, which has helped
put early learning into the national spotlight. For example,
when she testified before this Committee just a few short weeks
ago, she discussed a marked discrepancy that exists in our
country. She explained that when children enter their
kindergarten classrooms on the first day of school, they are
not all starting from the same point. In other words, some
children are much more advanced than others.
Research shows that children who attend quality early
childcare programs when they were three or four years-old score
better on math, language, and social skills tests in early
elementary school than children who attended poor quality
childcare programs. In short, children in early learning
programs with high quality teachers--teachers with an
associate's degree or a bachelor's degree--do substantially
better.
Although states have dramatically increased spending on
pre-primary initiatives, this funding is only sufficient to
provide services to a small number of eligible children.
Right now, these programs are reaching children mostly
three or four years of age. we also need to reach those
children younger than three years-old--those children whose
brains are in a period of rapid growth which significantly
impacts language development and gross motor skills.
When we examine the number and recent expansion of pre-
primary education programs, it becomes difficult to
differentiate between early education and child care settings
because so often, they are intertwined. With 75% of children
less than five years of age in some kind of regular child care
arrangement, we need to determine where to target early
learning initiatives.
I am eager to hear from the panel as to how they view the
relationship between childcare and early learning, especially
in respect to the science behind the practice. These are all
very complex issues. We need to find a balance between
establishing quality pre-primary education programs and
ensuring that we reach as many children as possible.
Again, I thank Chairman Kennedy for holding this hearing,
and I look forward to working with my colleagues on this vital
issue.
The Chairman. It is a privilege to welcome our first
witness, Dr. Jack Shonkoff. Jack is dean of the Heller School
of Social Policy at Brandeis and served as chair of the
Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood
Development for the Institute of Medicine and the National
Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. He co-
edited the final report, ``From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The
Science of Early Childhood Development.''
Ed Zigler has been at this committee probably more times
than I have over 40 years, and we are always glad to have him.
He is the grandfather of the Head Start program, and we
recognize his contributions and expertise. He has just been a
tireless advocate for children and children's needs, has
written extensively and has been a valued advisor to all of us
on this committee. We always welcome and learn from Dr. Zigler.
And Dorothy Strickland, we thank you very much for being
here. She is a former classroom teacher, reading consultant,
early learning disabilities specialist, and is past president
of the National Reading Association and was been very much
involved in the Summit that Ms. Bush held and was a leader in
many of those discussions. We look forward to her comments as
well.
Welcome, Senator Gregg. Senator DeWine and I restricted
ourselves to one-minute comments and put our statements in the
record. I do not want to suggest anything, but if you would
like to be recognized at this time--I have already said how
interested you are and what leadership you are providing.
[Laughter.]
Senator Gregg. I would love to have you speak for me. I
will put my statement in the record also.
[The prepared statement of Senator Gregg follows:]
Prepared Statement of Senator Gregg
In 1989, President George Bush challenged our nation and
our nation's Governors to do two things: First, to develop a
strategy to improve our educational system and thereby the
academic performance of our nation's students and second, to
work toward the goal that all children would enter school ready
to learn.
Well, the first part of the challenge was realized thanks
to the hard work and dedication of our current President,
George W. Bush, who challenged those of us in this body to put
partisanship aside, roll up our sleeves, and get to work on
behalf of the children. And we did just that.
With the passing of the ESEA Reauthorization, we have taken
significant, if not monumental steps to improve the education
of our K-12 students.
The second part of the challenge, that all children would
enter school ready to learn, remains, and has now become the
focus of our attention.
I am hopeful that we can embark upon achieving this goal
with the same passion, commitment, and willingness to put
politics aside as we did the first.
It is clear to all of us who have examined the data on
brain development that learning takes place well before a child
steps foot inside the kindergarten classroom. The care,
attention, education and nurture that a child receives prior to
school sets the foundation for his or her formal education.
In fact, much of this learning takes place not in the
classroom, but at home. Parental interactions and involvement
can have a profound influence on the social and cognitive
development of pre-school age children.
Sights, sounds, touches--these are the things that early
learning is made of. That is what the science tells us. Yet the
challenge today is how to translate that into effective and
responsive governmental policy. One that recognizes and
respects the fact that parents are choosing from a wide variety
of options, ranging from at-home care, to family care, to
formal preschool. These options are varied, but they are all
designed to attain the same goal--that children be able to
enter school ready to learn.
Three weeks ago we heard from the First Lady about the
importance of literacy development. Not from flash cards, but
from healthy, consistent and responsive adult-child
interactions.
Today we will continue to dialogue on these important
issues. We will learn what science has to tell us about how
young children learn and under what circumstances are they able
to learn and thrive. We will examine the importance of quality
interactions with children, both in the home, and outside of
the home, and will hear first hand from practitioners who are
involved in providing enriched early opportunities for children
and helping parents learn more effectively how to be their
child's first and most important teacher.
Mr. Chairman, I thank you for holding this hearing today
and look forward to a dialogue on this important issue.
The Chairman. And I see that Senator Bond has arrived. We
also said good things about you, Senator Bond----
Senator Bond. Gee, I should have gotten here earlier.
[Laughter.]
The Chairman. We are going to have three votes at 10:45,
and as a result, we each took about 45 seconds to welcome our
witnesses. I indicated that you have been a strong leader on
this issue, particularly when you were Governor, and we welcome
your involvement.
If you want to say a brief word, we will be glad to hear
it.
Opening Statement of Senator Bond
Senator Bond. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I will take the suggestion of brevity very seriously. We
are delighted to have our good friends, Dr. Zigler and others,
with whom we have worked for many years, but I am extremely
pleased today that Sharon Rhodes will be speaking about Parents
as Teachers. I have been working with her since 1985, when we
started the program statewide in Missouri. She is currently
director of program development. She has helped develop onsite
technical assistance. She has worked in cooperation with
neuroscientists at Washington University to make the scientific
determinations which prove what we have seen from our own
nonscientific observation about the importance.
She has a long history with the Bush Center in Child
Development and Social Policy at Yale University and serves as
an adjunct instructor at the National Academy of the School of
the 21st Century.
She will be able to tell you why we are so enthusiastic in
Missouri about Parents as Teachers.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you very much. We look forward to her
testimony.
Dr. Shonkoff, we will hear from you now.
I would ask the witnesses to do their best in 5 or 6
minutes. These are enormously important presentations and are
the heart of this whole effort, so we do not want to
shortchange you, but to the extent you can help us, we would
appreciate it.
STATEMENTS OF DR. JACK P. SHONKOFF, DEAN, HELLER SCHOOL,
BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY, WALTHAM, MA; EDWARD ZIGLER, STERLING
PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY, YALE UNIVERSITY, NEW HAVEN, CT; AND
DOROTHY S. STRICKLAND, STATE OF NEW JERSEY PROFESSOR OF
READING, GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, RUTGERS, THE STATE
UNIVERSITY OF NEW JERSEY, NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ
Dr. Shonkoff. Thank you, Senator. I am out to prove that an
academic can speak in less than 6 minutes.
My name is Jack Shonkoff, and I am dean of the Heller
School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University,
and I am a board-certified pediatrician.
Recently, I had the privilege of serving as chair of the
National Research Council and Institute of Medicine committee
that produced the widely disseminated report entitled, ``From
Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood
Development.''
I would like to begin by thanking Senator Kennedy, Senator
Gregg, Senators Bond and DeWine, and the other distinguished
members of this committee who are not able to join us for
focusing the Nation's attention on our youngest children.
I am going to speak to you this morning not as an advocate
but as the chair of a committee of scientists whose analysis,
conclusions and recommendations were subjected to the rigorous
review of the National Academy of Sciences. In the spirit of
brevity, I offer four conclusions from the NRC/IOM report.
No. 1, molecular biologists at the forefront of the Human
Genome Project and prominent behavioral scientists all agree
that each of us is the product of both a unique genetic
endowment and the influence of our personal life experiences.
No. 2, human relationships are the active ingredients of
environmental influence on child development. The well-being of
young children is influenced most significantly by their
parents but also by the other important people in their lives,
who increasingly include nonfamily members who provide early
care and education.
No. 3, the development of intelligence, emotions, and
social skills is highly interrelated. How children feel is as
important as how they think, and how they are treated is as
important as what they are taught, particularly with respect to
their readiness for the challenges of school.
No. 4, early childhood interventions can have significant
positive impacts, but programs that work are rarely simple,
inexpensive, or easy to implement. Poorly designed services
delivered by inadequately trained providers are unlikely to
produce measurable benefits.
In contrast, knowledge-based interventions that are funded
sufficiently and delivered effectively are a wise public
investment.
Policies that dismiss or ignore the science of early
childhood development miss an opportunity to address the roots
of many important national concerns. Consider the following
questions: How can the recently enacted No Child Left Behind
Act of 2001 call for stronger performance standards and
financial incentives to attract and retain talented teachers
while we tolerate inadequate training and poor compensation for
the providers of early care and education throughout the very
important preschool years?
Why do we measure the success of welfare reform primarily
in terms of labor force participation when large numbers of
working mothers with young children are still living in poverty
and extensive research shows that poverty, particularly in the
first 5 years, is a very strong predictor of academic
difficulties and failure to complete high school?
How can we reconcile our concern about violent crime with
the fact that we have effective treatments for young children
who have been victimized by family violence and yet most of
these emotionally traumatized youngsters receive not
professional mental health services?
Half a century of considerable public investment in early
childhood research has generated a rich science base. However,
the gap between what we know and what we do is unacceptably
wide. Consider the following examples of how we could narrow
that gap.
If we really want to enhance children's readiness for
school, we must pay as much attention to their emotional health
as we do to their cognitive skills. Early literacy is clearly
very important, but knowing the alphabet on your first day of
school is not enough if you can't sit still or control your
temper in the classroom.
If we really want to promote the nurturing and stable
relationships that are necessary for the healthy development of
all young children, then we must address two compelling needs
of equal importance. First, we must find a way to provide paid
family leave to support parents who wish to stay at home with
their babies; and second, we must assure affordable and decent-
quality care and education for the infants, toddlers, and
preschool children of parents who return to work.
If we really want to secure the Nation's economic and
political future, we must invest in better training and
compensation for those who provide early care and education for
children beginning at birth and up to the entry into school.
And we must build community-based systems that ensure full
access to programs that work, and equally important, we must
rethink the delivery of interventions that do not work.
The committee of scientists who produced ``From Neurons to
Neighborhoods'' concluded that the time has come to stop
blaming parents, communities, business, and government and
begin a new public dialogue based on rethinking the balance
between individual and shared responsibility for our Nation's
youngest children.
Those who call for greater individual accountability and
those who advocate for a more active Government role are both
right. Those who support increased public investments in early
childhood services have an obligation to measure whether they
work and how much they cost. Those who oppose Government
intervention must acknowledge the clear and incontrovertible
scientific evidence that well-implemented services based on
sound knowledge can make a significant difference for
vulnerable children and that marked inequalities in access to
effective programs result in a highly uneven playing field for
America's young children well before they ever begin school.
I thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you
this morning, and I would be happy to answer any questions that
you might have.
The Chairman. Thank you very much, Dr. Shonkoff.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Shonkoff follows:]
Prepared Statement of Jack P. Shonkoff, M.D.
My name is Jack Shonkoff. I am the Dean of the Heller School for
Social Policy and Management and Gingold Professor of Human Development
and Social Policy at Brandeis University. I am also a Board-certified
pediatrician with two decades of practical experience in the delivery
of health care and early childhood intervention services who had the
privilege of serving as Chair of the National Research Council and
Institute of Medicine Committee that produced the recently released
report entitled, From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early
Childhood Development.
I would like to begin by thanking Senator Kennedy and this
distinguished Committee for focusing the nation's attention on the
health and development of our youngest children. I also would like to
acknowledge the support of The First Lady, Laura Bush, who testified
before this Committee three weeks ago, and underscore the importance of
a bipartisan approach to this critical national interest.
I speak with you this morning, not as an advocate or provider of
services, but as the chair of a committee of scientists who conducted a
critical analysis of current knowledge about early childhood
development, and whose conclusions and recommendations were subjected
to the rigorous review of the National Academy of Sciences. The
unimpeachable integrity of this distinguished institution and the
credibility of its endorsement should not be underestimated.
In the spirit of brevity, I offer four core conclusions from the
NRC/IOM report. These are not based on my personal opinion. This is
cutting-edge science.
1. Human development is determined by both nature and nurture.
Molecular biologists at the forefront of the Human Genome Project and
leading behavioral scientists agree that each of us is the product of
both a unique genetic endowment and the influence of our personal life
experiences. For young children, beginning at birth, the question is
not whether early experience matters, but rather how early experiences
shape individual development.
2. The essential features of the environment that influence
children's development are their relationships with the most important
people in their lives. When these relationships provide love,
stability, security, responsive interaction, and encouragement of
exploration and learning, children thrive. When these relationships are
unstable, neglectful, abusive, or disrupted by significant life
stresses such as economic hardship, substance abuse, or serious mental
illness, the consequences can be severe and long lasting. Children's
early development is influenced most significantly by the health and
wellbeing of their parents. It is also affected by the quality of their
relationships with the other important people in their lives, who
increasingly include non-family providers of early care and education.
Together these relationships define the cultural context within which
core values are transmitted from one generation to the next.
3. The early emergence of intelligence, emotional regulation, and
social skills are highly inter-related and the development of
competence in each is closely intertwined with the others. Starting
from birth, children are remarkably inquisitive explorers who
experience a range of powerful emotions. Before their first birthday,
they can feel the exhilaration of mastering a challenging task as well
as the deep and lasting sadness that builds in response to trauma,
loss, or early personal rejection. As their brains mature, their
ability to master new skills grows and these emerging learning
abilities are linked closely to their capacity to regulate their
feelings and control their own behavior.
4. Early childhood programs that deliver carefully designed
services by well-trained staff can have significant positive impacts on
young children with a wide range of developmental difficulties, but
interventions that work are rarely simple, inexpensive, or easy to
implement. There are no magic bullets or quick fixes for addressing the
complexities of human development. Poorly designed interventions
delivered by inadequately trained providers are unlikely to produce
significant benefits. In contrast, state-of-the-art services that are
funded sufficiently are a wise public investment that is likely to
return both short-term developmental dividends and long-term human
capital gains.
Stated simply, although the politics of early childhood are
complicated, the needs of young children are relatively straightforward
and the messages from the scientific community are clear:
All aspects of human development are influenced by both
the genes we inherit and the environment in which we live.
Human relationships are the ``active ingredients'' of
environmental influence on child development.
How children feel is as important as how they think,
particularly as it affects their readiness to meet the challenges of
school.
Developmental pathways can be influenced positively by
effective parenting and supportive environments, and early problems can
be treated effectively, but the success of early childhood intervention
services depends on the quality of their implementation and the
knowledge and skills of those who provide them.
When our public policies dismiss or ignore the science of early
childhood development, we miss an opportunity to address the underlying
roots of many important national concerns. Let me offer a few examples:
How can the recently enacted No Child Left Behind Act of
2001 emphasize the need for stronger performance standards and
financial incentives to attract bright and highly motivated teachers,
while we simultaneously tolerate large percentages of inadequately
trained and poorly compensated providers of early child care and
education who have an important influence on the foundations of school
readiness?
Why do we measure the success of welfare reform primarily
in terms of labor force participation when large numbers of working
mothers with young children are still living under the poverty level,
and recent research indicates that poverty in the first five years may
be a stronger predictor of not completing high school than is poverty
in middle childhood or adolescence?
How can we reconcile our national concern about reducing
violent crime with the fact that we know how to treat very young
children who have been abused or exposed to family violence, yet most
of these emotionally traumatized children receive little or no
professional mental health services?
Why do we focus public debate on the relative merits of
alternative investment options for the Social Security trust fund and
not also address the compelling question of how best to invest in the
young children whose future productivity will be essential to the
continued viability of the Social Security system ``as we know it?"
Over the past few decades, there have been marked changes in the
nature, schedule, and amount of work engaged in by parents of young
children, and greater difficulty balancing workplace and family
responsibilities for parents at all income levels. At the same time,
growing numbers of young children are spending considerable time in
child care settings of highly variable quality, some of which pose real
threats to their health and development. In 1999, the National
Household Education Survey reported that 61 percent of children under
age 4 were in regularly scheduled child care, including 44 percent of
infants under 1 year.
The knowledge needed for informed policies to promote the well-
being of all our nation's children has been gained from nearly half a
century of considerable public investment in early childhood research.
Although the science is growing at an increasingly rapid pace, the gap
between what we know and what we do is unacceptably wide. Let me offer
a few examples of what could be done to narrow that gap.
If we really want to enhance children's readiness for school, then
we must pay as much attention to the development of their social and
emotional competence as we do to their cognitive and linguistic
abilities. The current emphasis on early literacy, which should be
supported, will not achieve its full impact if early childhood
professionals are not prepared to help the many young children whose
learning is compromised by limited attention, aggressive behavior,
anxiety, depression, or difficulty making or sustaining relationships.
Knowing the alphabet on your first day of school is not enough if you
can't sit still or control your temper in the classroom.
If we really want to support families and enhance child well-being,
then we must promote healthy relationships between young children and
the adults who raise them. If we really want to strengthen those
relationships, then we must find a way to create more viable choices
for working mothers--by developing politically and economically
feasible mechanisms to provide both paid parental leave for those who
wish to stay at home with their young children and affordable, quality
care and early education for the children of those who return to work.
If we really want to reduce disparities in school readiness based
on social class, then we must promote real partnerships among federal,
state, and local governments to create more unified and effective
systems of services, from birth to school entry. Current early
childhood programs were established in a piecemeal fashion over time--
and their variable quality and persistent fragmentation result in a
confusing array of services for families, marked inefficiencies in the
use of public and private resources, a difficult environment for
assuring accountability and assessing impacts, and significant
inequalities in access to programs that are most effective, leading to
a highly uneven playing field for America's youngest children well
before they begin school.
If we really want to secure the economic and political future of
our nation, then we must enhance the value of our investments in early
childhood programs by increasing the knowledge, skills, and
compensation of those who provide these services. An education agenda
that neglects the professional development of those who influence the
foundation that is built in the first 5 years of life ignores the
science of learning, and assures that many children will be left behind
before they have a chance to start.
Most children successfully master the challenges of growing up in a
wide range of circumstances. A significant number do not. Most of those
who experience difficulties along the way are helped to get back on
track by the skilled guidance of their parents and other adults who
care for them. A highly vulnerable subgroup exhibits serious and
persistent problems that require specialized intervention.
The NRC/IOM report, From Neurons to Neighborhoods, calls for ``a
new national dialogue focused on rethinking the meaning of both shared
responsibility for children and strategic investment in their future.''
In its concluding thoughts, the report states:
The time has come to stop blaming parents, communities, business,
and government--and to shape a shared agenda to ensure both a rewarding
childhood and a promising future for all children.
There is a compelling need for more constructive dialogue between
those who support massive public investments in early childhood
services and those who question their cost and ask whether they really
make a difference. Both perspectives have merit. Advocates of earlier
and more intervention have an obligation to measure their impacts and
costs. Skeptics, in turn, must acknowledge the massive scientific
evidence that early childhood development is influenced by the
environments in which children live. (National Research Council and
Institute of Medicine, 2000. pp. 414-15)
I applaud the efforts of this Committee, under your leadership,
Senator Kennedy, to focus the nation's attention on our youngest
children and their families, and I welcome the opportunity to answer
any questions that you may have. Thank you.
The Chairman. Dr. Zigler?
Mr. Zigler. Good morning. It is an honor to be invited back
to the Senate before this particularly August committee and to
share my expertise with all of you.
I am the Sterling Professor of Psychology at Yale
University. I also head the Psychology Section of the Yale
Child Study Center and direct the Bush Center in Child
Development and Social Policy. I have authored 32 books and
over 600 scientific papers, the majority dealing with topics
pertinent to children's development and learning.
In the area of social policy, I have worked with every
administration, Republican and Democrat, since Lyndon Johnson.
I served in Washington during the Nixon Administration as the
first director of what is now the Administration on Children,
Youth, and Families, and as chief of the United States
Children's Bureau.
I was one of the planners of our Nation's Head Start
Program and a recent spinoff as well, Early Head Start. Over
Head Start's 36 years, I have become known as both its best
friend and its most vocal critic. Of late, there have been
criticisms that Head Start is not doing a very good job
teaching literacy to its young students. I will offer my
suggestions on that point in a moment.
First, let me state that I concur that the ability to read
is absolutely essential for an individual to have a successful
life. I therefore applaud President and Mrs. Bush for the
impetus they have provided to assure that every child in
America will be a successful reader.
However, as someone who has studied the growth and
development of children for almost 50 years now, it is my
responsibility to point out that reading is just one aspect of
cognitive development and that cognitive development is just
one aspect of human development.
Cognitive skills are of course very important, but they are
so intertwined with the physical, social, and emotional systems
that it is myopic, if not futile, to dwell on the intellect and
exclude its partners. This is one of the many good points that
my colleague, Jack Shonkoff, made before you just minutes ago.
Think about what goes into literacy. Yes, it involves
mastery of the alphabet, phonemes, and other basic word skills.
But a prerequisite to achieving mastery is good physical
health. The child who is frequently absent from school because
of illness, or who has vision or hearing problems, will have a
difficult time learning to read. So will children who suffer
emotional troubles such as depression, attention deficits, or
posttraumatic stress disorder.
And think about motivation. A child's curiosity and belief
that he or she can succeed are just as important tao reading as
knowing the alphabet. Phonemic instruction by the most
qualified teacher will do little for a child who suffers from
hunger, abuse, or a sense of inferiority.
I am urging that we broaden our approach to literacy by
focusing on the whole child. We must also broaden our
understanding of when and where literacy begins. I was
delighted with the First Lady's forum with you recently in
which she went back to her role as a parent in teaching words
and language to her own children.
I have heard a lot of preschool teacher-bashing lately, but
in reality, literacy begins much earlier than age 4, as Mrs.
Bush pointed out to you. It begins with the thousands of loving
interactions with parents after an infant is born. It begins as
a child develops a sense of self-worth by realizing that his or
her accomplishments, whether they be learning to roll over or
to recite the alphabet, are important to significant others. It
begins with sitting in a safe lap, hearing a familiar bedtime
story. Eventually, the child will want to emulate the parent
and read, too. Reading, then, begins with meeting the child's
physical, social, and emotional needs, followed by exposure to
more formal literacy skills.
This broader view was recently endorsed in the wonderful
new book, ``From Neurons to Neighborhoods,'' with one of its
authors to my right, where the finest child development
thinkers in this country pointed out the importance of
emotional and motivational factors in human development.
This statement in this important book in my view corrected
a shortcoming of my field for the past 50 years--namely, an
emphasis on cognitive development to the exclusion of
personality and motives, which are so central to the burgeoning
new discipline of emotional intelligence.
The President is correct in his recent championing of the
child's character. Piece by piece, then, the President is
discovering the whole children--recognition that has been one
of the great strengths of our Nation's Head Start program.
Head Start is an early education program, but it is also a
physical and mental health program. It is dedicated to
involving the parents who, after all, will have a greater
influence on the child's learning than any other source.
The new Early Head Start program in fact emphasizes parent-
child interactions--the very place where literacy begins.
Senator Kennedy realized the importance of the years zero to 3
some time ago, and I commend him for making Early Head Start a
reality in this country. Since then, Senator Kennedy and other
members of this august committee, it has grown from 17 sites to
over 600 sites.
You have all heard recent reports that children are
graduating from Head Start with few pre-reading skills. Yet a
sizeable literature shows that they are more ready for school,
and even the recent FACES evaluation of Head Start shows good
progress, including literacy, in kindergarten.
Do I believe that Head Start should do more to promote
literacy? Most definitely. The new performance standards are
moving the program toward more defined curricula with specific
goals for literacy and related skills.
But Head Start needs the resources to carry out these
plans. If we want well-trained teachers who can implement sound
educational programs that send children on their way to
reading, we simply have to pay them more than poverty-level
wages. And if we want to draw more low-income parents into
their children's learning, we need to expand Early Head Start.
I am very much afraid that the budget request of the
President for Head Start is disappointing to me and certainly
does not meet Dr. Shonkoff's urging that you need decent
salaries and high-quality programs to achieve ends,
particularly with poor children.
Shoring up the quality of Head Start can have an impact far
beyond its target population. Head Start is a model program
whose success in promoting school readiness has fed the
movement toward universal preschool. Head Start quality
standards are beginning to filter to child care settings, and
the child care settings in this Nation are one of the huge
problems and certainly the tragedy of America's children for
the past 30 years. A lot of research has shown that most child
care in this Nation is poor to mediocre. Yet millions of
infants and toddlers--the very ages when literacy begins--are
spending their days in such places.
In sum, if we want a nation of readers, we have to look
beyond teaching phonics. We have to look at the whole child,
the parents, and at all of the people and experiences that make
up the child's early learning environment.
Thank you.
The Chairman. Thank you very much, Dr. Zigler.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Zigler follows:]
Prepared Statement of Edward Zigler
It is an honor to be invited back to the Senate, and to share my
expertise with this committee. I am the Sterling Professor of
Psychology at Yale University. I also head the Psychology Section of
the Yale Child Study Center and direct the Bush Center in Child
Development and Social Policy. I have authored some 30 books and over
600 scholarly papers, the majority dealing with topics pertinent to
children's development and learning. In the area of social policy, I
have worked with every administration, both Republican and Democrat,
since Lyndon Johnson. I served in Washington during the Nixon
Administration as the first director of what is now the Administration
on Children, Youth and Families, and as Chief of the United States
Children's Bureau. I was one of the planners of our nation's Head Start
program and a recent spin off, Early Head Start. Over the program's 36
years, I have become known as both its best friend and its most vocal
critic.
Of late there have been criticisms that Head Start is not doing a
very good job teaching literacy to its young students. I will offer my
suggestions on that point in a moment. First, let me state that I
concur that the ability to read is absolutely essential for an
individual to have a successful life. I therefore applaud President and
Mrs. Bush for the impetus they have provided to assure that every child
in America will be a successful reader. However, as someone who has
studied the growth and development of children for some 45 years, it is
my responsibility to point out that reading is just one aspect of
cognitive development, and that cognitive development is just one
aspect of human development. Cognitive skills are of course very
important, but they are so intertwined with the physical, social, and
emotional systems that it is myopic, if not futile, to dwell on the
intellect and exclude its partners.
Think about what goes into literacy. Yes, it involves mastery of
the alphabet, phonemes, and other basic word skills. But a prerequisite
to achieving mastery is good physical health. The child who is
frequently absent from school because of illness, or who has vision or
hearing problems, will have a difficult time learning to read. So will
children who suffer emotional troubles such as depression, attention
deficits, or post traumatic stress disorder. And think about
motivation. A child's curiosity and belief that he or she can succeed
are just as important to reading as knowing the alphabet. Phonemic
instruction by the most qualified teacher will do little for a child
who suffers from hunger, abuse, or a sense of inferiority.
I am urging that we broaden our approach to literacy by focusing on
the whole child. We must also broaden our understanding of when and
where literacy begins. I've heard a lot of preschool-teacher bashing
lately, but in reality, literacy begins much earlier than age four. It
begins with the thousands of loving interactions with parents after an
infant is born. It begins as a child develops a sense of self-worth by
realizing that his or her accomplishments, whether they be learning to
roll over or to recite the alphabet, are important to significant
others. It begins with sitting in a safe lap, hearing a familiar
bedtime story. Eventually the child will want to emulate the parent and
read too. Reading, then, begins with meeting the child's physical,
social, and emotional needs, followed by exposure to more formal
literacy skills.
This broader view was recently endorsed in the wonderful new book,
From Neurons to Neighborhoods, where the finest child development
thinkers in the country pointed out the importance of emotional and
motivational factors in human development. This statement corrected a
short-coming of my field for the past 50 years--namely an emphasis on
cognitive development to the exclusion of personality and motives,
which are so central to the burgeoning new discipline of emotional
intelligence. The President is correct in his recent championing of the
child's character. Piece by piece, then, the President is discovering
the whole child--recognition that has been one of the great strengths
of our nation's Head Start program.
Head Start is an early education program, but it is also a physical
and mental health program. It is dedicated to involving the parents,
who, after all, will have a greater influence on the child's learning
than any other source. The new Early Head Start program in fact
emphasizes parent-child interactions, the very place where literacy
begins. Senator Kennedy realized the importance of the years zero to
three some time ago and was the one who made Early Head Start a
reality. Since then, it has grown from 17 sites to over 600.
You have all heard recent reports that children are graduating from
Head Start with few prereading skills. Yet a sizeable literature shows
that they are ready for school, and even the recent FACES evaluation of
Head Start shows good progress, including literacy, in kindergarten. Do
I believe that Head Start should do more to promote literacy? Most
definitely. The new performance standards are moving the program toward
more defined curricula with specific goals for literacy and related
skills. But Head Start needs the resources to carry out these plans. If
we want well-trained teachers who can implement sound educational
programs that send children on their way to reading, we simply have to
pay them more than poverty level wages. And if we want to draw more
low-income parents into their children's learning, we need to expand
Early Head Start.
Shoring up the quality of Head Start can have an impact far beyond
its target population. Head Start is a model program whose success in
promoting school readiness has fed the movement toward universal
preschool. Head Start quality standards are beginning to filter to
child care settings. A lot of research has shown that most child care
in this nation is poor to mediocre. Yet millions of infants and
toddlers--the very ages when literacy begins--are spending their days
in such places.
In sum, if we want a nation of readers, we have to look beyond
teaching phonics. We have to look at the whole child, the parents, and
at all of the people and experiences that make up the child's early
learning environment.
The Chairman. Ms. Strickland?
Ms. Strickland. I am Dorothy Strickland, and I am the State
of New Jersey Professor of Reading at Rutgers University. I
would like to thank the committee for this opportunity to share
some of the current thinking about the importance of parent
involvement in early childhood development. It is an honor to
be here.
I will concentrate my remarks on the development of
language and literacy since this is where most of my work has
been focused. I am a teacher-educator, and I have done a fair
amount of research over the years. My primary contribution to
the field has been as a translator of research to practice. I
have been a classroom teacher and a learning disabilities
specialist. I am also a mother and a grandmother. So I bring
many perspectives to the table.
Although I focus my remarks today on parents, virtually
everything I have to say also applies to child caregivers,
whether they are grandparents or child care workers in home
care or preschool settings. These individuals are often with
young children for most of their working hours, and of course,
caregivers frequently act in familial ways with the children in
their charge.
I have organized my remarks around three major points.
First, I will list what the research says, and then I will give
the implications for parents and caregivers as they relate to
those points.
I would like to say up front that I agree whole-heartedly
that language and literacy development should never, ever be
stressed at the expense of other domains of children's
development.
Point one is that literacy learning starts early and
persists throughout life. That has already been said this
morning as well. Learning to read and write is an ongoing
process from infancy. Contrary to popular belief, it does not
simply start at kindergarten or first grade. From the earliest
years, everything that adults do to support children's language
and literacy really, really counts, and that is a message that
we need to get out.
The research indicates that although oral language is
foundational to literacy development, the two really do develop
concurrently. What children learn from listening and talking
contributes to their ability to read and write, and vice versa.
Phonological awareness and phonics, which has already been
mentioned, begins early, and rhyming games and chants begin
right on a parent's knee.
Children who fall behind in oral language and literacy
development are less likely to be successful beginning readers,
and their achievement tends to lag behind throughout the
grades; it tends to persist.
It is not enough to simply teach early literacy skills in
isolation. I think that is a common criticism and fear among
many early childhood caregivers and is definitely something
that should be reckoned with. The research tells us that
teaching children to apply the skills in meaningful situations
has a significantly greater affect on their ability to read.
The implication, of course, is that parents need to know
that the child's capacity for learning is not determined at
birth, and there is really a great deal that they can do about
it. They should be aware that there are many informal and
enjoyable ways that language and literacy skills can be
developed in the home--and in fact, these are the only ways
that they should be developed. They should provide
opportunities for children to use what they know about language
and literacy in order to help them transfer what they know to
new situations. Mindless rote memorization is not the way to
teach young children.
Point two is that oral language is the foundation for
literacy development. So when we talk about language and
literacy with a very young child, we are really talking largely
about oral language. Oral language provides children with a
sense of words and sentences, builds sensitivity to the sound
system so that children can acquire phonological awareness and
phonics, and it is the means by which children demonstrate
their understandings of the meaning of words and written
materials.
Research indicates that children reared in homes where
parents provide rich language and literacy support do better in
school than those who do not. Language-poor families are likely
to use fewer different words in their everyday conversation,
and the language environment is often more controlling and
punitive. This is a big concern of many of us.
Exposure to less common, more sophisticated vocabulary,
sometimes called ``rare words,'' at home relates directly to
children's vocabulary acquisition.
There is a strong relationship between vocabulary
development and reading achievement. We know that good readers
combine a variety of strategies to read words and that even
when children have excellent decoding skills, they frequently
meet words for which the pronunciation is not easily
predictable. My point here is that meaning is very important,
that children bring more than just phonics to the code and
their understanding of the code to a text; that understanding
vocabulary concepts is very important to get meaning from the
text.
The implications have to do with things that you have heard
many times before--take time to listen and respond to children;
talk to and with children, not simply at them; engage children
in extended conversations, explain things to kids, and do not
be afraid to use sophisticated language with children.
Point three is that children's experiences with the world
and with print greatly influence their ability to comprehend
what they read. True reading--and I emphasize ``true''
reading--involves understanding. There is no real reading
unless there is understand.
What children bring to a text, whether oral or written,
influences the understandings they take away. The more limited
a child's background experience, the less likely this child
will be a skilled reader. So that background knowledge about
the world is very, very important. For poor kids and minority
kids, this is something that is often either misunderstood or
ignored, that to be a good reader, they really need to have a
wide variety of experiences. It is not just a question of
sitting them down and drilling them on the alphabet. And also
important, of course, is their background knowledge about print
and books.
The implications of course are that parents and caregivers
need to keep in mind that interesting concepts and vocabulary
do not emerge from a vacuum. We know a lot more today about not
simply maintaining kids, but providing interesting content for
them to talk about and think about--trips to local points of
interest, talking to kids about what they see and with them
about what they see, raising questions of children and
responding to their questions, providing time for reading and
talking about what is ready, an increased use of informational
books in the early years is very important--something that,
again, we did not realize how important it was--not just story
books and Mother Goose rhymes, which are also very important,
but informational text--and providing time for children to
``pretend read,'' that is, to go back and reenact the read-
aloud experience on their own.
In a setting like this, one cannot help but think of the
famous questions: ``What did you know, and when did you know
it?'' I have offered what I think are among the most important
things that we know about parent involvement in early childhood
language and literacy development.
I can tell you that we have known these things for some
time. They are not really brand new. Perhaps the key question
that you might ask of me today is: ``What are you doing about
it?''
There are some important efforts in place, most notably
some of the Even Start programs and Family Literacy programs
that are involved with Head Start, but I do not think that we
have really touched the surface of what the potential is for
spreading this information and really acting on it. And most
critically, we have not really reached the moms and dads who
stay at home, that stay-at-home population; nor have we reached
very well family day care providers. Perhaps we need to find
more creative and innovative ways to meet and to address the
needs of these people. Certainly, the media might be of help;
links with existing child care providers and support agencies
might also be of help.
Finally, we need to explore innovative ways of using
technology. We have to explore innovative ways to reach what is
a relatively amorphous population, provide incentives for
participation, support for professional development and better
compensation for child care workers to ensure quality in the
outreach programs that we do provide.
Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Strickland follows:]
Prepared Statement of Dorothy S. Strickland
Thank you for this opportunity to share some of the current
thinking about the importance of parent involvement in early childhood
development. I will concentrate my remarks on the development of
language and literacy, since this is where most of my work has been
focused.
I am a teacher educator. Though I have done a fair amount of
research over the years, my primary contribution to the field has been
as translator of research to practice.
I have been a classroom teacher and learning disabilities
specialist. I am also a mother and grandmother. So, I bring many
perspectives to the table.
Though I focus my remarks today on parents, virtually everything I
have to say also applies to child caregivers, whether they are
grandparents or childcare workers in home care or preschool settings.
These individuals are often with young children for most of their
waking hours and, of course, caregivers frequently act in familial ways
with the children in their charge. I have organized my comments around
three major points:
point 1. literacy learning starts early and persists throughout life
Learning to read and write is an ongoing process from infancy.
Contrary to popular belief, it does not suddenly begin in kindergarten
or first grade. From the earliest years, everything that adults do to
support children's language and literacy really counts.
Research indicates that:
Although oral language is foundational to literacy development, the
two also develop concurrently. What children learn from listening and
talking contributes to their ability to read and write and vice versa.
For example, young children's phonological awareness (ability to
identify and make oral rhymes, identify and work with syllables in
spoken words, and the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the
individual sounds--phonemes--in spoken words) is an important indicator
of their potential success in learning to read. Phonological awareness
begins early with rhyming games and chants, often on a parent's knee.
Children who fall behind in oral language and literacy development
are less likely to be successful beginning readers; and their
achievement lag is likely to persist throughout the primary grades and
beyond. (Juel)
It is not enough to simply teach early literacy skills in
isolation. Teaching children to apply the skills they learn has a
significantly greater effect on their ability to read. (Report of the
National Reading Panel)
Implications:
Parents and caregivers need to--
Know that a child's capacity for learning is not
determined at birth and there is a great deal they as parents and
caregivers can do about it. (Zero to Three)
Be aware that there are many informal and enjoyable ways
that language and literacy skills can be developed in the home.
Provide opportunities for children to use what they know
about language and literacy in order to help them transfer what they
know to new situations.
point 2. oral language is the foundation for literacy development
Oral language provides children with a sense of words and
sentences; builds sensitivity to the sound system so that children can
acquire phonological awareness and phonics; and it is the means by
which children demonstrate their understandings of the meanings of
words and written materials.
Research indicates that:
Children reared in families where parents provide rich language and
literacy support do better in school than those who do not. Language-
poor families are likely to use fewer different words in their everyday
conversations and the language environment is more likely to be
controlling and punitive. (Hart & Risely)
Exposure to less common, more sophisticated vocabulary (rare words)
at home relates directly to children's vocabulary acquisition. Rare
words are those that go beyond the typical 8,500 most common words in
the English language. (Dickinson & Tabors)
There is a strong relationship between vocabulary development and
reading achievement. We know that good readers combine a variety of
strategies to read words; and that even when children have excellent
decoding skills, they frequently meet words for which the pronunciation
is not easily predictable. Children, who acquire strong vocabularies,
increase their ability to make use of what a word might be along with
what they know about phonics. (Nagy, Clay)
Implications:
Parents and other caregivers should--
Take time to listen and respond to children.
Talk to and with children not at them.
Engage children in extended conversations about events,
storybooks, and a variety of other print media.
Explain things to children.
Use sophisticated and unusual words in their everyday talk
with children, when it is appropriate to the conversation.
point 3. children's experiences with the world and with print greatly
influence their ability to comprehend what they read
True reading involves understanding. What children bring to a text,
whether oral or written, influences the understandings they take away.
Research indicates that:
The more limited a child's experiences the more likely he or she
will have difficulty with reading. There are two kinds of experiences
that are highly influential to literacy development. Both can and
should be provided in the home:
Background knowledge about the world
Background knowledge about print and books (Rand/OERI Report)
Implications:
Parents and caregivers need to--
Keep in mind that interesting concepts and vocabulary do
not emerge from a vacuum. Parents should help provide interesting
content to think and talk about.
Involve children in trips to local points of interest and
talk with them about what they see and do.
Establish a habit of raising and responding to children's
questions about things that occur in the home environment or at trips
to local points of interest.
Provide time for reading to children and talking with them
about what is read.
Share a variety of types of literature, including lots of
informational books. Books stimulate conversations about ideas and
concepts beyond everyday experiences.
Make books accessible for children to return to on their
own to ``pretend read''--a child's personal reenactment of the read-
aloud experience.
In a setting like this, one cannot help but think of the famous
questions: ``What did you know?'' and ``When did you know it?'' I have
offered what I think are among the most important things that we know
about parent involvement in early childhood language and literacy
development. I can tell you that we have known these things for some
time. Perhaps the key question of me today is ``What are you doing
about it?"
There are some important efforts in place, most notably some of the
Even Start programs and the Family Literacy programs that are involved
with Head Start. I do not think that we have touched the surface,
however, in terms of reaching the vast number of parents who need this
information, particularly those who choose to stay at home with their
children and those who are caregivers in family day care settings. My
concern is that too few children are benefiting from what we already
know. Reaching stay-at-home parents and family day care providers,
perhaps through the media or through links with existing child care
providers, may be the new frontier of support for early childhood
development.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
We have been joined by Senator Dodd and Senator Jeffords. I
mentioned that Senator Dodd was chairman of our Children's
Caucus, and this has been a primary issue of his interest and
concern and leadership.
Senator Jeffords has been a voice in terms of the preschool
learning experience and held extensive hearings on this for a
long period of time and has been a very important leader on our
committee on this.
Senator Murray has been passionate about it as well.
So we have a lot of members here. I mentioned that we will
be interrupted at 10:45 with three votes, which is going to
interfere with both this panel and our second panel, which we
apologize for. But if you are all good enough to remain through
the course of the afternoon today, we are going to have a good
working session with all of you and our staffs to go through
both the recommendations this morning as well as ideas and
suggestions, so that will be very important and helpful to our
committee as well as to other staffs who have been interested
in these issues. Senator Voinovich, Senator Stevens, and many
others are interested and will be included.
I know Senator Dodd has to leave, so I will yield my time
to him at this time.
Senator Dodd. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
You are right, and there are also other hearings going on
on a variety of subject matter, so it is a little confusing,
but many of you have appeared before Congress before--Ed, a
dear friend for so many years, I would like a nickel for every
time you have appeared before congressional committees over the
last 35 or 40 years. It is a pleasure to welcome you here
again, as well as Dr. Shonkoff and Dr. Strickland.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This is an extremely important set
of issues, and I certainly want to commend the First Lady as
well for expressing a real interest in this subject matter.
I think the title of the hearing, ``From Science to
Practice,'' is important. For me in a sense, there is no real
debate about the science. I hope that debate is over with. We
are no longer arguing about the science of this. Apparently,
there are some who want to continue the debate, but as far as I
am concerned, that debate is over with. The question now is
whether or not we have the will as a people and as a Congress
to do what is clear, it seems to me, and that is whether or not
we are willing to commit the resources necessary and understand
the reality of what occurs across the country.
I know that for many of you in the audience and our
witnesses, these numbers are routine, but I repeat them often
because I do not think enough people really understand them.
Seventy-eight percent of mothers with school-age children are
working today--78 percent of women with school-age children are
in the work force today. Sixty-five percent of mothers with
children under the age of 5 are in the work force, and more
than 50 percent of women with infants are in the work force.
And the numbers are growing.
That is the reality. That is the hard reality. And those
numbers are not going away. In fact, every indication, of
course, is that they are continuing to move up.
So the issue is--and I think it is obviously very important
what happens with parents as first teachers and the like; that
is very, very important--but the critical issue is going to be
whether or not we have the intestinal fortitude to provide the
resources, the training, and the backing for those people who
watch and care for our children, many of them infants--as many
as 6 million infants that I know of are in child care settings,
and when you start adding toddlers, that number goes up to 14.5
million every day--how well-trained are those people? What is
happening in those centers and family day care homes? What is
happening in terms of how these children are being cared for?
So for me, that is the critical issue, whether or not in a
Head Start setting--and you can even talk about children in
school, pre-K programs for 2 to 3 hours, after school
programs--when you start adding these numbers, again, it seems
to me that we have a tremendous amount to do.
And again, I am preaching to the choir on some of these
issues, but we have to expect that a child care worker must
also be able to teach. On average, you are paying $15,000 to
$16,000 a year for a child care worker; it is double that
amount in almost every school district in America for a
teacher. So you are getting these people to come, but they
leave very quickly. You cannot get them to stay. Or, if you
have something less than a consistent child care setting, where
you have an aunt, an uncle, a brother, a sister, there is no
consistency to that at all in many ways for children. With
parents who are earning $75,000 a year or more, there are huge
numbers of their children who are in center-based child care
programs. And for the poorer families, of course, there are
not.
So I am hopeful that we can concentrate to a large extent
on the reality, and that is who is caring for children every,
single day and how many of them are in a nonfamilial setting so
that you have the opportunity to see to it they will get the
skills to be ready to learn.
We introduced last spring, as the chairman knows, the FOCUS
Act, which is based on the North Carolina T.E.A.C.H. program.
Given the resources, States would be able to improve
compensation and/or benefits for child care workers based on
their level of training, education, and experience. Child care
workers would be eligible for scholarships so that they can
further their education and training, combining their
scholarships with Pell Grants necessary to get an associate or
bachelor's degree in early childhood education.
Mr. Chairman, I really appreciate your giving me a minute
to talk about this, and again, I know that many in the audience
understand it, but as we look at the welfare reform
reauthorization bill, and as the economy is cratering a bit,
what happens is that unemployment rates go up, the ranks of the
unemployed increase, the difficulty of people finding jobs,
being out there looking for jobs, and of course, what happens
to their children who do not have the advantages of having a
parent home every day to go through the routine of providing
the kind of basic educational needs that we would like to see
them get.
With that, I thank you.
The Chairman. Thank you very much, Senator Dodd.
Senator DeWine, you are recognized.
Senator DeWine. For questions, Mr. Chairman?
The Chairman. Yes.
Senator DeWine. I thought Senator Dodd was making an
opening statement. I thought we were still on opening
statements.
Thank you very much.
We get into a battle sometimes in this country over--it
becomes a political or an ideological battle, I guess--over the
issue of stay-at-home parents versus working parents, and I
think Senator Dodd has expressed it very well as he always
does, and we take the numbers where we find them today, and a
large number of women are in fact working, men are working,
both parents are working, and there is no one home with the
child, so the child is in a day care setting.
I was interested, though, in the testimony of all three of
you, really, which in essence seems to say we need to put these
political battles aside, and we need to accept the reality, and
we need to understand that the stay-at-home mom may need some
assistance that we don't think about. I was kind of intrigued
by that as well as the comment, of course, that we have to
bolster what we are doing with child care.
Let me start with the stay-at-home parent. Several of you
alluded to that but did not really explain what your specific
recommendations are, and I wonder if you could go into that a
little bit.
I guess the assumption is that, intuitively, a stay-at-home
mom does not really need any help.
Dr. Zigler?
Mr. Zigler. Repeat the last point, Senator.
Senator DeWine. Intuitively, I think many people think that
the stay-at-home mother or father with the child is going to be
okay, and that we as a society do not need to worry about
giving any extra assistance there. Your point also, I think,
was that we need to deal with parental leave.
Mr. Zigler. Yes, that is one. First of all, Senator, you
are right. One of the sadnesses in observing the social scene
for quite a while has been this divisiveness that I have
witnessed between this notion of working women, which Senator
Dodd has so ably pointed out the numbers on, and stay-at-home
moms. There should have never been any fight. Working women
love their children just as much as stay-at-home moms love
theirs. There is no fight between these two groups. They both
have great needs that are not being met.
Senator DeWine. And--excuse me--the fight is not between
the groups. Sometimes the fight is with politicians; we sort of
get involved in this a little bit.
Mr. Zigler. Unfortunately, if you read Betty Friedan's
``The Second Shift,'' she chastises her own movement for
causing this divisiveness. So I am always glad to blame
politicians. I think that scholars and thinkers have to take
some of the blame. But a great deal should be done for parents
who stay at home. First of all, these figures that Senator Dodd
gave--one of the most dramatic changes in my lifetime
demographically is the one Senator Dodd just alluded to, that
today, something on the order of 55 percent of women with
babies under the age of one are in the out-of-home work force.
Where are those babies? The fact is that they are often in
infant and toddler child care. We have the four-State study
which indicates that 40 percent of that care for infants and
toddlers is so poor in quality as to compromise not only the
growth and development of children, but to place their health
and safety at risk.
So for stay-at-home moms, they should have Social Security
rights, which they have been arguing for for many years; they
do important work, which is unfortunately not considered work.
It is very hard work being a stay-at-home mom, raising
children. We should make it possible for all women, whether
they are working or staying at home, to stay with their own
children for at least those first 6 months of life. As the
national commission that I headed recommended some 20 years
ago, and which Senator Dodd picked up on and gave us the unpaid
Family and Medical Leave Act, which I commend him for--but we
have to move forward to paid leave. I recommend for your
attention the bill that he has to help the States move in that
direction, as does Lynn Woolsey on the House side.
So stay-at-home moms need help with parenting as well. That
is why I am delighted to see Parents as Teachers represented on
your second panel, which Senator Bond so ably put in place in
Missouri when he was Governor there, and I cannot commend him
too highly for that move, which we can now find in some 2,800
communities in this country.
So the kind of parent help that that organization gives to
stay-at-home moms is one of the supports we can give. Family
support of all types--something that has happened in this
country which is not very well-known has its headquarters in
Chicago, in the Family Forum--there is a new family support
movement going on, helping stay-at-home moms and working moms
get the services that they need out of the community--brokering
services, not providing them--more of that sort of thing, and
informational and referral systems to help moms get good child
care, or stay-at-home moms. In my Schools of the 21st Century,
we have an information and referral system for all mothers that
helps them in this complex society. I mean, how many people
even know about CHIP, which I think was a great victory for the
children of this country? Now the problem is to get people to
enroll.
So there is a role for all of these kinds of activities.
Senator DeWine. Dr. Strickland?
Ms. Strickland. I would only add that the National Center
for Family Literacy has been documenting some of these best
practices, and there are some very fine programs that exist
where there is outreach to parents who are at home. So that
using the existing structures to do this is a very good thing,
but it is very difficult sometimes to find these people, and I
think more emphasis needs to be there to let people know what
the services are and to help provide them on parents' own
terms.
Senator DeWine. Dr. Shonkoff.
Dr. Shonkoff. I really appreciate your question because I
think it is tremendously important, and you are right--as
Senator Dodd said, the science is not that complicated, but the
politics is enormously complicated. I think one huge mistake
would be to somehow think that because we have so much science
right now, we can make raising children a science. It is not a
science, it is an art, but it certainly could be informed by a
lot of science.
So to directly respond to your question, Senator DeWine, on
the one hand, I think we need to find ways to get as much
information in an understandable way as we can to parents in
this country so that they can feel confident raising their
children and have access to this information.
I think we also desperately need to find some way to really
give parents of young children a choice, particularly mothers,
about whether and when to go back to work. For many families,
there is no choice about going back to work because they have
to have the income in order to get by. If there were a way to
have some economic support to stay home, more mothers might
stay home.
The flip side of that is that when people go back to work,
whether they have to or because they choose to, the science
just kind of drowns you in information, but the quality of the
environment the kids are in really makes a difference. Dr.
Strickland was very eloquent on that, and Dr. Zigler has been
for a long, long time. That is where the quality of these
environments, which cost money, really matters. And I
particularly appreciated Dr. Strickland's comments about the
fact that early literacy starts in infancy with reading to
children, and the nature of the language environment. And also,
I am not a mental health person--it is interesting--I came
through this ``Neurons to Neighborhoods'' experience as a real
advocate for more attention to social and emotional development
and mental health, not because I came in with that perspective,
but just the science made you a believer in that.
So it is not just the language and the literacy that is
important in these nonfamily environments, but it is the
ability to understand and manage behavior. We have an explosion
in the use of psychopharmacology in young kids in this country.
I was in the pediatric world for a good number of years, and
the prescriptions for stimulants for attention deficit disorder
and for antidepressants in 2- and 3-year-olds is exploding in
this country, and part of it is because nobody knows how to
deal with behavior, and there are not resources and services to
take care of it. All these kids were in child care settings
where they are sometimes being thrown out. You know, there is
no mandatory child care, so kids are getting expelled from
these settings because the people who work there do not know
how to handle them.
So this costs money for sure, and it is very complicated,
but we have so much knowledge to tell us how to do it, and we
could be doing a lot better
Senator DeWine. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
Dr. Shonkoff, let us continue that thought. What is it that
we have learned from the science that is so important both in
terms of parents and people who are interested in early
learning that we have seen in zero to 5, particularly in the
early grades? And I will ask Dr. Zigler that question as well.
Dr. Shonkoff?
Dr. Shonkoff. I will actually try to summarize mountains of
science in a few simple points. One of the things that we have
learned, and we have learned it very well, is how important
these early relationships are to promoting learning, to
promoting healthy social and emotional development. So we know
a lot about what helps a child be a good learner, and it has to
do with these stable, nurturing relationships, ideally with
parents, and very important with other people who are not
members of the family.
We have also learned from the brain research, and I think
this is where we have to burst some myths. The brain research
has taught us a lot about how learning gets incorporated into
the brain. It tells us very little about how to produce super
brains. It tells us a lot about how we can hurt brains. So the
public grabs onto some of these gimmicks. For example, Mozart
tapes were big for a while, and there is no science about that.
People are peddling expensive educational toys for kids. The
science, from the behavioral science to the brain science,
tells us that the best way to promote learning and healthy
brain development is to have people who care for and love kids
take care of them, nurture them, provide opportunities to
learn, reinforce their learning, and provide a rich language
environment.
We have a huge amount of science that tells us what happens
to brains when the environment is not appropriate. A lot of
this is from animal studies, because we do not have studies
where we carve up tissues in human brains and look at what
happens, but the things that get into the press about how
stimulation produces more synapses and more connections between
cells and all that.
Actually, Bill Greenow, who has done a lot of that research
in mice and rates, was on our panel, and he educated us as to
what that research was all about. It is something really
important for the committee to understand. The animal studies
that show that if you are in ``stimulating'' environments, you
have more dense connections among your brain cells, and you
learn better--that is true, but the difference between putting
rats in complicated cages and putting them in simple cages is
that in the complicated cages, they had a lot of colors and
toys to play with, and the rats in those cages learned mazes
better, and when you looked inside their brain tissue, they had
richer connections in their brain cells. And the rats in
simple, empty cages did not learn the mazes as well, and they
had less connections in their brain cells.
But that is not a stimulation experiment. That is a
deprivation experiment, because a busy, complicated cage for a
rate is not a complex environment. The complex environment for
a rat is living in a sewer, the rat's natural environment.
So Bill Greenow has said that a lot of people took his
experiments and said now we know how to provide stimulation and
produce better brains. Wrong. What we learned from that was
that if you are in a deprived environment, you do not learn as
well, and your brain does not develop as well. So we have very
hard science that depriving environments that provide very
little stimulation and very little opportunity for learning
result in not only poorer learning ability but result in brains
that look different, with fewer connections.
We have a huge amount of research on how poor nutrition
influences brain development in a negative way, and we have a
lot of research on how chronic stress influences the
development of the nervous system and produces the kind of
short fuse for flying off the handle when you are stressed.
These results are from animals. They are also not irreversible;
they can be changed.
So the brain research, Senator Kennedy, has shown us so
much about the negative impacts of deprivation on brains. It is
not a formula for people with a lot of money to go out and
figure out how to produce super brains. The brain research has
not told us that at all. But we know a lot about how to prevent
brains from being hurt. We know a lot about how to optimize
learning; and yet we are allowing many children in this country
to spends large parts of every day in environments with very
little stimulation and very little language exposure. The hard
science tells us that that is not good for their development,
it is not good for their brains. It also tell us that if you
put them in better environments, you can reverse that and they
can do well.
The Chairman. Dr. Zigler, did you want to add anything to
that? I am running out of time, but I would also be interested
in how you translate that information into either guidance and
advice to parents or those who are interested in trying to help
and assist from a policy point of view.
Mr. Zigler. I will try to do both very quickly, Senator.
There is only one thing that I would like to add to the very
fine summation of Dr. Shonkoff. One thing about becoming an old
codger is that you get to see a wide swatch of history,
scientific and social. And probably over the last 25 or 30
years, the most important science--and it really has revealed
things that we did not know 50 years ago or even 40 years ago;
it is only about 30 years old, I would guess--is in regard to
the importance of those very early years, zero to 3.
I should point out to you that the brain research has
caused a huge debate--I would refer you to the book, ``The Myth
of the First Three Years.'' I am finishing a book on early
childhood learning. Senator Dodd invited me to testify before
his subcommittee on the implications of that brain development
work 3 or 4 years ago when it was very hot in Newsweek and Time
magazines.
Sitting behind me is a later panelist, Rob Reiner, who has
done so much to inform the Nation with his TV special and a
variety of other activities about the importance of these
years. We really did not know the infant's capacities at all 30
years ago. The world was supposed to be nothing but a buzzing
beehive. They are really super learners. I refer you to the
wonderful book, ``The Scientist in the Crib,'' which is exactly
what you have in this very young child.
One of the good things that ``From Neurons to
Neighborhoods'' did was to put this brain work into
perspective. I do not agree with every word in it, but most of
it I do agree with; it is a good summation on balance.
The first 3 years of life are really very important, and
one of the things I implore you is that unfortunately, this
country over the entire course of my life has had a love affair
with IQs, intelligence, cognitive development, and people
forget that--when you think of the brain, you immediately think
of intelligence, cognition--but the brain mediates everything--
emotions, motivation, every aspect of the child.
Discovering the first 3 years has been a gigantic
breakthrough. One of the most important implications that you
yourself are the hero of, Senator Kennedy--following through
with that information early on, before it was as well-known as
it is today, and giving the impetus--and many other members of
this panel helped as well--making Early Head Start in this
country a reality. There has been no huge Federal program for
zero to 3 or State program. They are the forgotten years. But
they are not forgotten any longer. I think that getting in
there even earlier, as early as possible, with parents, as
Parents as Teachers and other programs of that sort do, is the
way to go.
Let me give you one warning, however. I remember back in
the 1960's when we were all looking for magic periods. Think
about Head Start. What is it that we expect? It is a one-year
program. Unfortunately, people still think in terms of a model
that we had in the 1960's when we started Head Start, which I
remind you was a 6- or 8-week program. We were going to change
kids in 6 or 8 weeks--an impossibility.
So we have this notion of an inoculation, and my warning to
you for policymaking and lawmaking is do not fall into that
magic period crap. Human development is well-known, and the way
to think about it is that they are all magic periods--zero to
3, the foundation years, are tremendously important; the
preschool period following is equally important. This
continues. Just because you give the child the environmental
nutrients the child needs from zero to 3 does not mean he is
home free. You do not tell a parent, ``You will be a terrific
parent if you are a great parent for the first 3 years of the
child's life.'' You are a parent, as all parents know, forever;
and there are different needs forever.
So the kid goes through a series of stages which Piaget
told us about--and unfortunately, he too emphasized cognition
rather than the whole child. But he is right about these
stages. You can see them with your own eyes. Children need
certain environmental nutrients at each one of these stages,
and if we want our children to be all they can be, you have to
think about childhood certainly for the--your transition
program was the right way to go. It has got to be done better
throughout this country. Head Start children have got to be
followed up in those first 3 years of school with a program. If
you want those children to be able to read, as this
administration has championed, by the end of third grade, you
have to have the kind of insight that Dr. Strickland has
provided about what is necessary at that period.
So think of the whole child, not just the brain, as a
cognitive instrument. Think of each of these levels. Now, the
things that we really need to work on--and I know you are all
working on this, or many of you are working on it, because I am
in discussions with you--is that birth to 5 period, but do not
become encapsulated in that. Make sure that following the first
5 years, 3 or 4 years after that; you never give up on a child
right on through adolescence, because there are still dramatic
changes.
So that is the big picture.
The Chairman. That is very helpful.
Dr. Strickland, I thank you. My times is expired, and I am
going to recognize Senator Bond.
Senator Bond. Mr. Chairman, thank you.
It is fascinating to hear the discussion of these experts
and to learn from them all of the things that we are continuing
to develop. This to me has been, as Dr. Zigler was kind enough
to say, a long-time area of interest to me. I found out when my
son was born in 1981 how true it is--the first 3 years of life
are the greatest learning experience. I learned more in his
first 3 years than I have learned in the previous 20. It was
the pioneering work that you and others have done that helped
us learn with our son.
Dr. Strickland, I really appreciate what you said about do
not use baby talk; share complex thoughts with your children.
It is amazing how fast those little tabula rasas pick it up.
I do not know whether it was thermo-psychodynamics or
whatever, but I know there is some really whiz-bang science
going on that is above the comprehension level of most of us,
or at least above my level.
I really think it is important for us as policymakers to
continue to encourage the scientific exploration, but not to
overthink it. When you look at all of the science going on,
there are so many complicated things, but there are some very
simple points. Early childhood learning is extremely important.
Half of the child's learning intelligence develops by the age
of 3. You get it right then, or you have a real problem later
on. And it is not just education. We sold Parents as Teachers
in Missouri as a total child welfare program. It even reduces
child abuse because it teaches parents how to be constructive
in responding to the frustrations. And if you have a 2-year-old
who does not frustrate you out of your mind, either you are not
normal or the kid is not normal. You need to have the guidance
on how to do it.
No. 3, parents' involvement is critical involvement. We
believe--and Sharon Rhodes will talk about it more--that that
is the secret. If you establish that practice in the early 3
years, it will continue throughout, and a lot of teachers,
secondary school teachers and administrators, in Missouri that
I have talked to say that as far as they are concerned, it is
not the fact that Parents as Teachers gives children a start at
the beginning--it is the fact that the parents get sucked into
taking responsibility for their children's education that makes
a difference in middle school and even high school years.
Finally, there is so much knowledge that is being
developed--you all are learning it; the neuroscience and all
that great stuff--but every day, our parent educators who go
out with children in Missouri are finding new ways that come
from the parents themselves, and it is probably the most
exciting area--just practical applications of simple things,
simple games, that can be done. It truly is a developing area.
I do not have any specific questions for any of you, but if
any of you have any comments on it, I would be delighted to
hear them.
Are there any comments?
Dr. Zigler?
Mr. Zigler. You are right, as usual. There are really four
major determinants. I have come to the conclusion that you can
take that huge ecological model of my colleague, Yuri
Bronfenbrenner and reduce it. What are the real determinants in
determining the growth trajectory of children? There are really
only four--there are some after that, like the media--but the
big four to me, in my own investigation of this question, the
first and by far the most important is the one that you have
emphasized, Senator Bond, namely, that child's family. So
working with the family is absolutely critical.
The second is health care. If the kid is not healthy,
everything else is moot. If you cannot keep the child alive for
the first year of life, everything else is moot.
The third important system is the educational system. And
again, Senator Kennedy with President Bush has taken the lead
in the recent Leave No Child Behind bill, and that is the
system that is at the forefront of domestic policy today--
education. That is the third system.
But the fourth system and the one that keeps peeking up at
these hearings, we have never given the importance of its
merits, and that is child care. That is where most children are
in their first 5 years of life.
Let me give you one final thought. For all the years that I
have been involved with child care, which is a long time, it
keeps getting defined as a service. It is a service so that
mothers and fathers can go to work. That is true, but it is not
the way to look at child care. The way to look at child care is
that it is an environment. It is an environment that the child
experiences often for that full 5 years before he hits school,
and it is the quality of those experiences, the quality of that
child care, that determines a child's school readiness, which
in turn influences everything in school after that.
So those are the big four--the family is by far the most
important; health; education; and child care.
Dr. Shonkoff. Senator Bond, I would like to pick up on Dr.
Zigler's last point and get right to one of the most important
things you said, which was how much parents learn and what a
challenge it is in those first few years of life and how, if
you have a 2-year-old and you are not pushed to the limits, you
are missing something or there is something wrong with the
child.
This is where I think the rubber hits the road in terms of
what we have to do in bringing this science to practice,
because we have--and Senator Dodd gave the numbers--almost half
the kids in this country in their infancy are spending a lot of
their time in the care of people other than their parents
during the day. And as you pointed out very eloquently, that is
a very challenging situation even when you have one child, no
less being responsible for a whole group of children, and it is
particularly a challenge if you do not have a lot of
understanding and education and skills about how to deal with
young children. That is where the real dangers are in our
country.
All families use whatever resources they have to help their
kids get ahead, and we spend a lot of time talking on both
sides of the aisle about making sure nobody is left behind.
Well, there are a lot of children, particularly very young
children, in child care settings that are really causing them
to be very much left behind because they are not providing the
kind of language stimulation, management of their behavior, and
other things. This is where I think the responsibility that we
all share is not--I have gotten well beyond talking about
optimizing development. I do not know what that is. But I do
know what protecting children is all about, and I do know what
the minimum requirements are for a decent nurturing and
learning-promoting environment, and we have too many children
in environments that are below that level, particularly with
the very young children where it is most expensive and where
the shortage is most acute in terms of well-trained people.
A lot of folks have trouble understanding when we get below
age 3. A lot of people say, ``I understand education for 4-
year-olds, but I do not understand education for one- or 2-
year-olds.'' And maybe ``education'' is not the right word, but
certainly learning and development is what is going on. This is
where we desperately need a shared public commitment of
resources to make sure that no young child in this country
spends lots of hours every day in an environment that is
clearly detrimental to his or her health and well-being.
Ms. Strickland. May I just add--and this is the final word,
I hope--often the public seems to think that the people who
work with young children simply need the minimum amount of
background and skills, and that as long as they are kind,
loving, caring people, that is enough.
Based on what you have heard today and certainly what you
already knew, this is a very complicated process, working with
young children, and the knowledge base is strong. Moving
science to practice is not an easy thing or a trivial thing.
We need to attract the best and the brightest to work with
our young children. As a teacher-educator, those are the people
that I want to see out there with children every day. So we
need to elevate this whole profession of people who work with
young children.
Thank you.
Senator Bond. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. My own belief, just following on from what
you said, once we get started with the best and brightest going
to work with young children, I do not think they will ever give
it up, because they are going to be able to see the greatest
impact--a profound impact which they might not be able to get
when they are teaching at another grade level. I would think
this would give them enormous satisfaction and enrichment in
terms of their own lives if we can ever get focused in on
those. That is at least my hope.
Senator Jeffords?
Senator Jeffords. Yes, I think it is time to start talking
about what we do and where do we get the resources and what
kinds of resources are necessary.
To state what all of you know, every other industrialized
Nation, after the studies of the 1980's and 1990's, made their
3- and 4-year-olds part of their public school system.
I have been trying to, and have had some success in getting
some assistance to families through the Tax Code, but it seems
to me that if we do not provide the resources for the kind of
quality that is necessary for these young people, we are just
not going to make any progress.
I would note that 40 percent of our fourth-graders cannot
read at the third grade level. I do not think anybody has done
a study to determine whether that is the same 40 percent that
does not get any early learning, but I would imagine there
would probably be a significant correlation if we did so.
So my question to you is just for verification. Relative to
the rest of the world, have other nations had responses which
have justified making their school systems available to the 3-
and 4-year-olds? Has that been a positive thing?
Mr. Zigler. The countries that have gone to that are
France, Italy, Belgium, and we have their data. The French data
is available through the French-American Institute that I rely
on, and they have shown some benefits. They do not even think
about it. We are still testing. I agree with my colleague,
Jack--I think that when we put a program in place, we want to
be accountable, and we have to show its benefits. This has been
true of Head Start, and it should be true of all of our
efforts. We only have so much money.
In those countries, it is so accepted that they cannot
understand us at all, or why they need data. When I ask them
where are the outcomes, where is the efficacy data, and so
forth, they say they cannot think of not doing it because the
teachers themselves--it is just like in this country--when a
child has gone to Head Start, we are still arguing whether it
works or does not work--but kindergarten teachers say they can
tell that a child has gone to Head Start. So it has become part
of their culture and their society.
The same is true in this country, Senator Jeffords, of
schooling. We do not have to prove that first grade is worth
doing or sixth grade is worth doing. We have all come to the
place in our own society where we say of course children have
to be educated; it is just part of the culture. It is not part
of our culture, because no matter where you look, whether it is
leave for women, whether it is family support systems,
children's allowances are in Canada, in England, in a lot of
Europe. They support children, they support families. And this
is not just the liberal social democracies like Denmark and
Sweden--it is everywhere. The fact is we are the only country
besides Australia--we once had New Zealand and South Africa,
but they joined the rest of the world--we are the only
industrialized country besides Australia that does not have
paid leave so that when a woman has a baby, she can stay home
with the child for those first few months.
There is total agreement that we do not want children in
child care for those first 6 months, because for all the
processes of bonding and learning about this child and so on
that are necessary, the mother must be at home.
So these other countries are just way ahead of us in terms
of family support, training, rearing and education of their
children--even though we are richer than they are.
Dr. Shonkoff. Another point in response to your question,
Senator Jeffords, is that aside from the experiences of other
countries, in this country, we have 40 years' worth of
longitudinal research on the impact of early childhood
programs, and although we argue back and forth about the
significance of how many differences in IQ points and how many
differences on scores on standardized tests, the one finding
that comes up over and over and over again in almost every
longitudinal study we have done is that children who are in
good-quality preschool programs have less repetition of grades
in school later on and less need for special education. That is
what the scientists call the most robust finding we have.
So we have evidence from many different kinds of studies
that when children get into good programs early on, regardless
of what happens on their standardized tests, they need less
special education, and they repeat grades less in school, and
that is clearly an indication of what the tradeoff is.
We just committed to a huge investment in K to 12 education
in this country. It seems to me that not putting a comparable
investment up front before kids begin kindergarten is going to
really jeopardize how much we can expect from that K to 12
investment.
Senator Jeffords. You are giving me all the answers I
wanted, and I have a little trepidation to move forward, but
going on to Head Start, my understanding is that we have been
successful in socialization and getting young people to be able
to communicate and so on, but there is really little
educational element to the Head Start programs as they exist to
give us the kind of 3- and 4-year-old education they need. Is
there any truth to that?
Mr. Zigler. Senator Jeffords, I have been studying Head
Start since its inception, and I think I know that data as well
as anybody. The fact is this thing that I keep hearing, that it
is a social program, is simply not true.
The fact of the matter is that if you look at the recent
FACES data, if you look at the review by Steve Barnett from
Rutgers and the evidence that Dr. Shonkoff just gave you
concerning special education and being in the right grade for
age, Head Start is all of these things. Head Start gets
children ready for school. We have the FACES data to show that.
Look at the follow-up. The kids who are not as good as they
should be when they leave Head Start, when they get to
kindergarten are prepared; they catch up very, very quickly.
So I have criticized Head Start when it needs criticism,
but I think it is getting a bum rap here.
Now, after having said that, I know that a lot of people
think I am an advocate for children, but I pride myself on
being a scientist and on taking the data and trying to utilize
it in policy construction. So when I look at Head Start, I
wrote a chapter in the early days of Head Start in which I said
Head Start is not a program but an evolving process, and it
should always be an evolving process as we learn new things.
One of my students, Deborah Stipak, who is dean of the
school of education at Stanford, has done wonderful work on
curricula in this eighth period, and she finds Head Start
somewhat wanting. Her argument--and I think Dr. Strickland said
it here eloquently--is there more that we can do in Head Start?
Yes. Do I believe Head Start will do it? Yes, I believe they
will, because the hallmark of Head Start that we built in from
the beginning is that as new knowledge is forthcoming, we
evolve the program so it incorporates our best thinking.
So it is much too early to say that Head Start does not
help. It can do better, but I think it is doing a decent job
today and one that can become better with more attention to the
literacy and education preparation effort.
Dr. Shonkoff. If I could just add something to that, one of
the things that I have learned from economists is that more
important than what something costs is what value you get for
your investment; and that sometimes you can invest a little in
programs and get nothing for them, and it is a waste of money,
and it may be a little more expensive, but you get much more
for that.
Getting back to the issue we talked about of not segmenting
development into cognition and emotional development, for many
of these programs--and Head Start will be a good example--we
have to set them up for realistic expectations based on what it
is the are prepared to do.
We had a research roundtable on Head Start at the Board of
Children, Youth, and Families of the National Academy of
Sciences that I participated in and that ran over 2 years, and
one of the things that kept coming up was the problems that
Head Start deals with that it does not have the resources to
respond to. And that is where we really get into the issue of
some of the serious mental health problems and the consequences
of the violence and substance abuse that Head Start has no
capacity to deal with and desperately needs assistance in the
mental health area, for example.
So what happens is that sometimes you have a program that
is doing a lot of good things--it is getting good health care,
it is providing good social services and generically providing
good educational experiences--but for the kids whose need are
much beyond that, the resources are not there and the expertise
is not there, and we see the consequences of kids coming out of
the program who are not doing well.
The issue is to match the expertise with the kinds of
problems people are asked to deal with, and that is where we
have all this new knowledge and not enough people trained to
provide it, particularly in the area of kids who are in big
trouble. Many of these kids are in situations where their
families cannot advocate for them to get better services, so
they are the failures.
Senator Jeffords. Thank you.
I know my time is up, but may we have the right to ask
additional questions by mail or whatever?
The Chairman. Absolutely, absolutely.
As I mentioned, this panel and our second panel will be
working through the afternoon with our staffs and other members
of the Senate staff as well who have indicated an interest,
which will be very, very helpful to us, and other members of
the Senate staff as well who have indicted an interest. So we
are going to be drawing on them continuously, and we are very
grateful to them.
[The prepared statement of Senator Jeffords follows:]
Prepared Statement of Senator Jeffords
Thank you Mr. Chairman. Recent Administration estimates
reveal that up to 75% of children under the age of 5 in this
country are in out-of-home child care arrangements. And, as
more mothers of young children enter the workforce, we need a
system that links the children in child care to affordable,
accessible, high-quality early care and education.
The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that the quality
of early child care and education has a significant effect on
children's health and development and their readiness for
school. Quality early care and education: improves the academic
success and educational attainment of children; lowers
placement rates for children in special education; lowers
dropout rates; and improves attendance at 4-year colleges.
Benefits of quality early care and education not only
accrue to the child and the family, but to society as well.
Studies reveal that quality early care and education: reduces
crime; reduces substance abuse and drug related offenses; and
increases work productivity, as parents have fewer child-care-
related absences from work.
Shortly after these studies came out, all industrialized
nations, but unfortunately not the United States, made the
education of toddlers and pre-schoolers a mandatory part of
their public education system, and paid for it.
Quality child care is available in the United States to
young parents, but in many cases, it costs more than ten
thousand dollars per year. This is almost twice the cost of
going to many public colleges. And unfortunately, too many
child care facilities in this country have inadequate
educational components.
Currently, families must work through a maze of programs
and an array of funding streams to learn about or gain access
to quality early care and education programs. And, what we
don't need is another narrowly tailored program which only
addresses the needs of a few and only provides few dollars.
What we need is a seamless system of education: a system
that lays the foundation upon which all of our children can
learn. In particular, we need a high-quality, school readiness
component that: connects our children in child care with high-
quality early care and education; adequately trains,
compensates, recruits, and retains early childhood teachers and
providers; and links early care and education to existing
programs, such as the Child Care Development Block Grant, TANF,
IDEA, ESEA, Higher Ed, and other various early care and
education programs.
The Federal government also needs to recognize what the
science has already proven: that starting from birth, children
rapidly develop the foundation for learning, or as our esteemed
panelist Dr. Shonkoff calls, ``an indelible blueprint'' for
learning; and that early child development can be seriously
compromised by physical, social, and emotional impairments.
Therefore, we need to support our youngest children,
particularly those children ages zero through three, where
positive physical, social, and emotional development is crucial
to school readiness.
We have the best researchers and institutions of higher
learning in the world, and we need to help our states and local
communities connect with the experts so that parents,
providers, and teachers have the best tools available to
address the very special needs of these youngest children.
We also need to make high-quality early care and education
more affordable to all working families. Therefore, I intend to
offer parents a refundable tax credit for the costs of
attending high-quality, accredited care. This tax credit will
not only provide working families with the opportunity to place
their children in higher quality care, but would provide
incentive to providers to seek accreditation, and thus raise
the standards for care.
I am pleased that the President in his State of the Union
Address stated that early education is a priority, but I
challenge him to work with those of us in Congress who have
been working on these issues for decades to develop a
comprehensive school readiness system, and to support a school
readiness system with enough resources to actually make it
work. We all must recognize that the foundation for learning
begins in the earliest years of life, and that a failure to
nurture development in these earliest years is a lost
opportunity forever.
I want to thank our panelists for coming today, and the
Chairman for convening this hearing and shining the spotlight
on this vital concern.
The Chairman. Senator Murray?
Senator Murray. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank
you for holding this hearing, and thank you for an excellent
discussion on the critical issues that we face in early
childhood education.
Before I came to the Senate, I was a parent educator and a
preschool teacher, and I know first-hand the difference it
makes in a classroom. I can pick those kids out who are going
to be successful or not, and it often has to do with the parent
and what the family is doing as well.
One of the concerns I have is that we so often think of
early childhood education--and you kind of addressed this, Dr.
Shonkoff--as teaching the kid the alphabet, and if you can, he
is successful; if you cannot, kick him out--which is a
horrendous approach to early childhood education. It is so much
more than just learning basic skills. Definitely, early reading
is critical. But I had children in my classroom who could never
learn the letter ``A'' because they were more worried about
whether their dad was going to beat up their mom. I had kids
who had chronic ear infections who never went to the doctor
because they had no health care. How do you teach them the
sound of ``A''?
So it is the whole child that we have to deal with, and I
am concerned when I see the President's budget with a less than
inflationary increase for Head Start, because I know that
unless you work with the Head Start teachers and have them
recognize these things and be trained to do what we need them
to do, it is not going to pan out for the kids. And I know that
you need parents who are capable of recognizing these issues as
well. We all have to work together, and I think that
shortchanging the Head Start budget or saying that it fails if
we do not teach every kid the alphabet before the age of 3 is
really a wrongheaded approach.
If you want to comment on that, I would be glad to hear
from you.
Dr. Shonkoff. I completely agree with you. I think the
issue here is to set programs up for success and figure out
what it takes and recognize that this is one a one-size-fits-
all model.
We politicize the accountability issue and the evaluation
issue in a way that is holding this field back, because for so
long, what evaluation meant was should we invest in early
childhood or not. If we could change that political context to
say that we are going to do evaluation to answer the question
of whether it is worth investing, but to figure out how to get
the best value for our investments, then we can focus
evaluations on what is working and also focus on what is not
working and figure out how we can learn from that and do things
differently.
That really requires a change in the political environment
around early childhood. Maybe we are almost there; it would be
great to be there, because we are far beyond the point where we
should asking does any of this matter, or do these early years
really matter. So I really appreciate your comments.
Senator Murray. Ms. Strickland?
Ms. Strickland. So often when we talk about early childhood
education, and we focus on early literacy, we reduce early
literacy to learning the alphabet or learning the sounds that
letters represent. I think that that has brought a lot of
resistance on the part of early childhood people who worry a
great deal about ``skill drill'' kinds of efforts in early
childhood--and they are right to worry about that.
We need to broaden the conversation and broaden the scope
of what we mean when we talk about early literacy. We are
talking a great deal about knowledge about the world, content;
we are talking about language development, concept development.
Yes, print is a very important part of this, because you are
not going to learn how to read without significant print in the
environment and experiences with print. But if we could just
broaden that range of understanding about what is meant by
``early childhood literacy,'' I think that would help to bridge
what I see is kind of a contentious atmosphere right now around
these issues. People worry for good reason about subjecting
children to experiences that really could be harmful and
certainly would not enhance their cognitive development.
Senator Murray. Dr. Zigler, I appreciated your comments
about women staying home with their young children. I think
that in the push to reform welfare, we have sent an unfortunate
message that staying at home with your kids is not contributing
to our society in a good way. I worried very much as we did the
1996 welfare reform law about the work requirements imposed on
parents and essentially saying to them that unless you are
working, you are not a participant in our society. I agree with
you that being home with your child is one of the most
important things we can do. Now, obviously, there are a lot of
people who cannot be home with their children, but I appreciate
your work on family and medical leave to help more people do
that. I would love to see a point where we were as good as some
of our European allies in really promoting moms' and dads'
ability to play a larger role in their children's lives when
they are young, but I think we are a long way from changing
that at this point. But I do think we have to send better
messages about valuing parents who stay home.
Mr. Zigler. Senator Murray, to go back to the remarks that
you made earlier, I agree with every, single one of them. I was
not familiar with your own background, unfortunately, but it is
clear to me now that the Senate is indeed fortunate to have
somebody with your particular experiences, because you have
lived what scientists like us study, and you bring a wisdom to
these issues that I think your colleagues can utilize. So I
appreciate that a great deal.
Senator Murray. Thank you very much.
I look forward to working with all of you and with you, Mr.
Chairman, as we move forward and make sure that every child is
able to learn.
Thank you.
The Chairman. I thank our panelists very much for your
enormously helpful testimony and comments. We are very grateful
for your continuing help to this committee.
I will introduce our next panel, and then we are going to
have a recess. We have three votes, one of which is underway,
and then we will reconvene in about half an hour.
I will introduce the panel now. We welcome Rob Reiner from
California, who is the founder of the I Am Your Child
Foundation, an advocacy group for children ages zero to 3. Mr.
Reiner chairs the California Children and Families State
Commission. I am grateful for his commitment to children and
look forward to hearing about the innovative approaches
California is taking to address the early learning needs of
young children. Rob has been a good personal friend and a
friend, I know, to a number of us on this committee.
Elisabeth Schaefer is Administrator for Early Learning
Services with the Massachusetts Department of Education. She
supervises the distribution of early childhood funds to public
schools, Head Start, private child care, and preschool
programs. We welcome her and look forward to hearing her
testimony.
We also welcome Susan Russell, who is regarded as the
primary architect of the North Carolina T.E.A.C.H. Program and
the Child Care Wages Project, two of the premier components of
the North Carolina Smart Start Program begun under then
Governor Jim Hunt. Dr. Russell is currently executive director
of child care services. We applaud her innovation in the
development of the T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood Program, which is
a model program that offers scholarships for the training and
development of early education providers.
Sharon Rhodes is Director of Program Development and
Evaluation for the Parents as Teachers National Center in St.
Louis, MO. Ms. Rhodes has been a major developer of the Parents
as Teachers onsite technical assistance system and is currently
directing the development of program standards to promote
quality programming. Ms. Rhodes is working closely with
neuroscientists from Washington University in St. Louis and
coordinated the development of the Parents as Teachers ``Born
to Learn'' neuroscience-enhanced curriculum.
We thank all of you very much for being here and for your
help to our committee. When we reconvene, the committee will
hear from all of you.
I am enormously grateful that we had on the earlier panel
the science, which is so compelling and overwhelming; we have
on this panel those who have been working at the State level
and have been very much on the front lines of what is working
out there. They will give us the benefit of their judgment as
to what is working out there in the local communities and make
recommendations to us as to what role we might be able to play
to help in advancing the efforts which they have been nobly
leading in our country.
Important progress has been made in a lot of other States--
Ohio has had initiatives; Kentucky is moving along; I
understand Oklahoma has a program--the list goes on. So we are
interested, and we are drawing from all of these experiences in
the States and talking with the legislators who have worked on
those programs in the States as well to benefit from their
experience, because they have a wealth of experience to help
our committee. I am grateful for their willingness as well to
help in the course of this afternoon.
Now the committee will be in recess, and Senator Bond will
chair in about half an hour.
[Recess.]
Senator Bond. [presiding]. Ladies and gentlemen, if you
could take your seats, we will ask the members of the second
panel to come forward.
Again, on behalf of my colleagues, I offer sincere
apologies to the second panel. This is a tremendously important
panel, and as usual, the Senate vote schedule has messed us up.
This is the Senate corollary to Murphy's law--if it is possible
for a Senate schedule to mess up important things, it will
happen, there is no question about that.
But the good news is that there is enough interest in this,
and I think staff will be here and will be meeting with you
later this afternoon--and do not tell anybody, but the real
secret is that they are the ones who make things move around
here anyhow. But Senator Kennedy and I and others will do our
best to make sure that we keep our colleagues fully informed.
I will invite Rob Reiner to offer his testimony now, and
let me assure all witnesses that your full statements will be
made a matter of record, and we would ask that you make your
opening statements in 5 minutes. Depending on whether other
colleagues are able to go on, we will be able to go for about
45 minutes prior to the policy conference meeting.
With that, Rob, welcome.
STATEMENTS OF ROB REINER, FOUNDER, I AM YOUR CHILD FOUNDATION,
HOLLYWOOD, CA; ELISABETH SCHAEFER, ADMINISTRATOR, EARLY
LEARNING SERVICES, MASSACHUSETTS DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION,
MALDEN, MA; SUSAN D. RUSSELL, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CHILD CARE
SERVICES, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA CHAPEL HILL, RALEIGH,
NC; AND SHARON RHODES, DIRECTOR, PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT AND
EVALUATION, PARENTS AS TEACHERS NATIONAL CENTER, ST. LOUIS, MO
Mr. Reiner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I am honored to be here this morning to describe the
progress we have made in promoting school readiness in
California and to reflect on the lessons learned there and in
other States.
Today I will make the case that Congress has an historic
opportunity to do the right thing for children by investing
wisely in the most neglected period of life--the critical years
from the prenatal stage to school entry.
As our Nation focuses with a new sense of urgency on
education reform, it is time that we acknowledge and act upon
one simple truth. If we truly want to improve our students'
school performance, we must change the educational structure in
America. We must build a seamless education system that begins
before birth and ends at 12th grade.
Let me begin with a little background on how I became so
passionate about this issue. In 1997, after conducting my own
extensive research with scholars, business leaders, Government
officials and philanthropists, I founded the I Am Your Child
Foundation, a national, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization
dedicated to focusing national attention on the urgent need for
quality early childhood development programs. In collaboration
with hundreds of national, State and local groups, we launched
the I Am Your Child Campaign to promote broader public
awareness of and investment in the early years.
The following year, in my home State of California, I
authored Proposition 10, the California Children and Families
Act, to build a comprehensive system of early childhood
development for our State's youngest children. Over the last 5
years, I have traveled across America, working with the Federal
and State leaders on similar efforts in other States. Working
together, we have accomplished a great deal in these last 5
years, forging strong bipartisan support, identifying some new
resources, strengthening programs, and measuring results.
But we still have a very long way to go. Today we stand
ready to enter a new phase that should redefine the national
debate on education reform.
I listened with great interest to the First Lady's
testimony before this committee last month and to the
President's comments during his State of the Union Address
about the need to enhance preschool programs and teacher
training to achieve real progress in early literacy. I could
not agree more.
I have also spoken with Senator Kennedy about his early
education proposal to improve the quality of early learning
programs and to build a more coherent, comprehensive system. I
also could not agree more. We have an unprecedented
opportunity, starting today, to work together to bring about
real change, to build a continuum of care for our Nation's
youngest children, and to enact meaningful education reform
that reflects a true understanding of how our children learn.
In the last few years, science has confirmed what many
parents, teachers, and caregivers have instinctively known--
experiences in the early years have a profound effect on the
way children learn, grow, and develop. These early experiences
establish the foundation for children's future success in
school, in the work force, and in life. Researchers have
demonstrated that secure and loving attachments and the right
kind of developmental experiences instill in children the
social, emotional, and cognitive abilities they need.
Unfortunately, while the research and good common sense
dictate that public support for the early years is critical to
school readiness, this is simply not where we are making our
public investments.
Today, America's system of early childhood education
represents a haphazard, underfunded, incoherent approach that
does not meet the needs of this vast majority of our Nation's
youngest children.
Congress recently enacted extremely important education
reform legislation that will make a difference in establishing
strong standards, promoting quality teaching, and expanding the
resources devoted to low-performing schools. However, although
this is much-needed legislation that will strengthen our
schools, it did not go far enough.
Our current K through 12 elementary and secondary education
system, designed over 100 years ago, is outdated and
incomplete. Based on what science has shown us about how a
child develops and learns, any educational reform that begins
at kindergarten is simply too late. We must include early care
and education as part of an overall education system so that
every child has the tools that he or she needs to start school
ready to succeed. Quite simply, the key to educational
performance begins with healthy development before birth and
continues with quality early care and education beginning the
day a child is born. These early opportunities must not be left
to chance. They must be embedded into our health care, social
services, and education systems.
Only if we focus on healthy development, early learning,
and safe and nurturing environments can all of our children
realize their full potential. The absence of these essential
building blocks can be devastating. Consider what we know. We
know that low-birth-weight, pre-term infants are especially at
risk for poor health and developmental delays.
We know that the roots of academic difficulty are often
established well before a child's first day of school. It is a
national disgrace that about one-third of the Nation's
kindergartners are not ready to learn as judged by the real
experts--their teachers.
We know that children who fall behind before entering
school have a far more difficult time catching up.
We know that children who live with family and community
violence in their early years suffer a multitude of damaging
consequences that can last a lifetime and make learning all the
more difficult.
Fortunately, we also know what works to help kids start
school ready to succeed. Programs whose principles are
consistent with what we know about health development and early
learning have proven to be extraordinarily effective.
Appropriate prenatal care is an early learning program for two
generations; it helps expectant mothers deliver healthy
children. Well-designed home visiting programs for parents and
their infants can help improve birth weights and reduce
premature delivery and child abuse.
Effective parenting programs can help parents promote
children's learning and social skills. High-quality child care
and preschool programs can reduce the need for special
education, improve children's language and math skills in
elementary school, and generate lasting benefits that produce
significant cost savings in special education, welfare, and
crime.
What we have learned in the past two decades about how
young children learn and develop is truly extraordinary. The
science is right on the money, but unfortunately, the money is
not on the science. The gap is simply too large between what we
know and what we do.
In California, we are building an innovative Statewide
system that I believe will serve as a model for this Nation. In
November of 1998, California voters passed Proposition 10,
which dedicates approximately $650 million a year toward
building a comprehensive early childhood development system.
The initiative created the California Children and Families
Commission, the Statewide leadership agency which I am proud to
chair that oversees its implementation. The initiative also
created 58 local commissions to provide the local guidance and
decisionmaking on how the funding is directed in each county.
In a State as vast and diverse as California, this
structure enables each local community to determine the best
possible use of funds for its own children and families.
Although the initiative provides local control from our
urban centers to our rural outreaches, there is one overarching
guiding principle of Proposition 10--to create a coherent,
comprehensive school readiness system to ensure that every
child is ready to succeed from the first day of kindergarten.
Our commissions have spent the last 2 years designing and
building these programs. This year, we will see the launch of
school readiness centers throughout California, focusing first
on raising achievement in our lowest-performing schools. Our
school readiness centers, which are required to partner with
neighboring schools, will open their doors on or near
elementary school campuses across the State to provide every
family access to prenatal care, quality child care, and
preschool education, parent education, health care, and early
literacy programs at one easy-to-access site.
We realized early on with Proposition 10 that many programs
for young children throughout California are needed to meet the
demands of the Nation's most populous State. And although the
initiative has raised hundreds of millions of dollars, our
funding is insufficient to address every early childhood issue
in our State. However, what our new revenue can do is help
create a unifying system, a system that links existing services
like Head Start, Early Head Start, and Healthy Families to new
programs offering parent education and child care--and embed
all these family services into our existing education system.
Instead of using Proposition 10 to fund a series of
programs in their own ``silos,'' our goal is to glue our
programs together so that families can have access to
convenient and affordable supports to help their children grow,
learn, and succeed.
Our State's diverse families are responding
enthusiastically. As part of our parenting education component
for school readiness, last November we launched a ``Kit for New
Parents,'' designed to serve as a parents' ``instruction
manual,'' which includes educational videos on early bonding
and attachment, health and nutrition, child care, early
literacy, discipline and safety, as well as a ``Parent Guide''
listing available services in each community for parents of
newborns.
In the first 2 months, we have distributed more than 55,000
kids. Also, as part of our overall school readiness efforts,
thousands of families have benefited from our mobile vans that
bring books to underserved neighborhoods and from home
visitation programs that bring public health nurses to support
and teach new mothers. We also have funded programs that
address retention and compensation of child care providers as
well as training programs that help child care providers become
better teachers.
I am sorry--I will conclude in 1 minute.
With our school readiness centers, we are going to make
early childhood services an integrated part of our elementary
schools and create one system of education for our children.
Our ultimate goal in California is to stop funding K through 12
and early childhood as two separate and distinct systems, and
instead merge them into one seamless educational path for
children.
Recently, the California legislature charged Proposition 10
with developing the school readiness component of the State's
overall master plan for education. Never before had the State's
education planning framework even included an early childhood
component. We are not merely writing a separate chapter on
early learning but creating, as I have said, a seamless
education system from the prenatal period to 12th grade.
Of course, California is not alone. Massachusetts, Georgia,
North Carolina, Ohio, Connecticut, and New York among others
are beginning to piece together coherent, comprehensive systems
guided by science to benefit our youngest children.
But the truth is there is much, much more to be done. In an
era of grave State budget challenges, the Federal Government
must invest more and must focus funding where help is needed
most. Quite simply, every child in America deserves the same
chance to succeed, and well-placed Federal dollars in the early
years are the only means to ensure that every child gets that
chance.
Every State including California is heavily dependent on
Federal initiatives. From Head Start, the SCHIP program,
Medicaid, the Child Care Development Block Grants, and Family
and Medical Leave, our early childhood development programs are
largely built on a Federal foundation. Congress must keep these
programs strong, especially now, as States face large deficits.
But Congress must do more. Federal legislation should
provide incentives to the States to bring quality early
childhood services into the education system and to develop and
expand our best programs to best serve our children.
As our Nation focuses on how to improve our education
system to better service our children and to ensure long-term
competitiveness as a Nation, we need to advance a bold new
approach. I congratulate the committee for the courage to
change the nature of the debate, and I issue this challenge.
Any new Federal education initiative must be guided by one
essential question: Will it address a robust, comprehensive
vision of how children learn?
Early childhood development is the key to improving
America's schools and to the long-term strength of our Nation.
The science has told us in no uncertain terms that the early
years of a child's life will set the trajectory of school
performance and life performance.
We should stop talking about tinkering with K through 12
and start rebuilding the framework for P through 12, from the
prenatal period to high school graduation.
Senator Bond. Thank you, Rob. I have got to give the other
three panelists an opportunity to talk----
Mr. Reiner. You got the point.
Senator Bond. Amen to what you said. I appreciate it. I am
sorry that we are running out of time, and I do want to give
the other three witnesses an opportunity to testify, and
unfortunately, I agree with everything you said.
Mr. Reiner. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Reiner follows:]
Prepared Statement of Rob Reiner
Thank you Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee. I am honored
to be here this morning to describe the progress we have made in
promoting school readiness in California and to reflect on the lessons
learned there and in other states. Today, I will make the case that
Congress has an historic opportunity to do the right thing for children
by investing wisely in the most neglected period of life: the critical
years from the prenatal stage to school-entry. As our nation focuses
with a new sense of urgency on education reform, it is time we
acknowledge and act upon one simple truth. If we truly want to improve
our student's school performance, we must change the educational
structure in America. We must build a seamless education system that
begins before birth and ends at 12th grade.
Let me begin with a little background on how I became so passionate
about this issue. In 1997, after conducting my own extensive research
with scholars, business leaders, government officials, and
philanthropists, I founded the I Am Your Child Foundation, a national,
non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to focusing national
attention on the urgent need for quality early childhood development
programs. In collaboration with hundreds of national, state, and local
groups, we launched the I Am Your Child Campaign to promote broader
public awareness of, and investment in, the early years. The following
year, in my home state of California, I authored Proposition 10, the
California Children and Families Act, to build a comprehensive system
of early childhood development for our state's youngest children. Over
the last five years, I have traveled across America working with
federal and state leaders on similar efforts in other states. Working
together, we have accomplished a great deal in these last five years--
forging strong bipartisan support, identifying some new resources,
strengthening programs, and measuring results. But we still have a very
long way to go. Today we stand ready to enter a new phase that should
redefine the national debate on education reform.
I listened with great interest to the First Lady's testimony before
this Committee last month, and to the President's comments during his
State of the Union address, about the need to enhance preschool
programs and teacher training to achieve real progress in early
literacy. I could not agree more. I have also spoken with Senator
Kennedy about his early education proposal to improve the quality of
early learning programs and to build a more coherent, comprehensive
system. I also could not agree more. We have an unprecedented
opportunity--starting today--to work together to bring about real
change, to build a continuum of care for our nation's youngest
citizens, and to enact meaningful education reform that reflects a true
understanding of how our children learn.
In the last few years, science has confirmed what many parents,
teachers, and caregivers have known instinctively: experiences in the
earliest years have a profound effect on the way children learn, grow,
and develop. These early experiences establish the foundation for
children's future success in school, in the work force, and in life.
Researchers have demonstrated that secure and loving attachments and
the right kind of developmental experiences instill in children the
social, emotional, and cognitive abilities they need. Unfortunately,
while research and good common sense dictate that public support for
the early years is critical to school readiness, this is simply not
where we are making our public investments. Today, America's system of
early childhood education represents a haphazard, under-funded,
incoherent approach that does not meet the needs of the vast majority
of our nation's youngest children.
Congress recently enacted extremely important education reform
legislation that will make a difference in establishing strong
standards, promoting quality teaching, and expanding the resources
devoted to low-performing schools. However, although this is much
needed legislation that will strengthen our schools, it did not go far
enough. Our current K-12 elementary and secondary education system,
designed over 100 years ago, is outdated and incomplete. Based on what
science has shown us about how a child develops and learns, any
educational reform that begins at kindergarten is simply too late.
We must include early care and education as part of an overall
education system so that every child has the tools he or she needs to
start school ready to succeed. Quite simply, the key to educational
performance begins with healthy development before birth and continues
with quality early care and education beginning the day a child is
born. These early opportunities must not be left to chance; they must
be embedded into our health care, social services and education
systems. Only if we focus on healthy development, early learning, and
safe and nurturing environments can all our children realize their full
potential.
The absence of these essential building blocks can be devastating.
Consider what we know: We know that low birth-weight, preterm infants
are especially at risk for poor health and developmental delays. We
know that the roots of academic difficulty are often established well
before a child's first day of school. It is a national disgrace that
about one-third of the nation's kindergartners are not ready to learn,
as judged by the real experts, their teachers. We know that children
who fall behind before entering school have a far more difficult time
catching up. We know that children who live with family and community
violence in their early years suffer a multitude of damaging
consequences that can last a lifetime and make learning all the more
difficult.
Fortunately, we also know what works to help kids start school
ready to succeed. Programs whose principles are consistent with what we
know about healthy development and early learning have proven to be
extraordinarily effective. Appropriate prenatal care is an early
learning program for two generations: it helps expectant mothers
deliver healthy children. Well-designed home visiting programs for
parents and their infants can help improve birth-weights and reduce
premature delivery and child abuse. Effective parenting programs can
help parents promote children's learning and social skills. High
quality child care and preschool programs can reduce the need for
special education, improve children's language and math skills in
elementary school, and generate lasting benefits that produce
significant cost savings in special education, welfare, and crime.
What we have learned in the past two decades about how young
children learn and develop is truly extraordinary. The science is right
on the money, but unfortunately the money is not on the science. The
gap is simply too large between what we know and what we do.
In California, we are building an innovative statewide system that
I believe will serve as a model for the nation. In November 1998,
California voters passed Proposition 10, which dedicates approximately
$650 million a year toward building a comprehensive early childhood
development system. The initiative created the California Children and
Families Commission, the statewide leadership agency, which I am proud
to chair, that oversees its implementation. The initiative also created
58 local commissions to provide the local guidance and decision-making
on how the funding is directed in each county. In a state as vast and
diverse as California, this structure enables each local community to
determine the best possible use of funds for its own children and
families.
Although the initiative provides local control, from our urban
centers to our rural outreaches there is one overarching guiding
principle of Proposition 10: to create a coherent, comprehensive school
readiness system to ensure that every child is ready to succeed from
the first day of kindergarten. Our commissions have spent the last two
years designing and building these programs. This year we will see the
launch of school readiness centers across California, focusing first on
raising achievement in our lowest performing schools. Our school
readiness centers, which are required to partner with neighboring
schools, will open their doors on or near elementary school campuses
across our state to provide every family access to pre-natal care,
quality child care and preschool education, parent education, health
care and early literacy programs at one easy-to-access site.
We realized early on with Proposition 10 that many programs for
young children throughout California are needed to meet the demands of
the nation's most populous state. And, although the initiative has
raised hundreds of millions of dollars, our funding is insufficient to
address every early childhood issue in our state. However, what our new
revenue can do is help create a unifying system--a system that links
existing services like Head Start, Early Head Start and Healthy
Families to new programs offering parent education and child care--and
embed all these family services into our existing education system.
Instead of using Proposition 10 to fund a series of programs in their
own ``silos,'' our goal is to glue our programs together so that
families can have access to convenient and affordable supports to help
their children learn, grow, and succeed.
And our state's diverse families are responding enthusiastically.
As part of our parenting education component for school readiness, last
November we launched a Kit for New Parents, designed to serve as a
``parents' instruction manual,'' which includes educational videos on
early bonding and attachment, health and nutrition, child care, early
literacy, discipline, and safety, as well as a ``Parent Guide'' listing
available services in each community for parents of newborns. In the
first two months alone we have distributed more than 55,000 kits. Also,
as part of our overall school readiness efforts, thousands of families
have benefited from our mobile vans that bring books to underserved
neighborhoods and from home visitation programs that bring public
health nurses to support and teach new mothers. We also have funded
programs that address retention and compensation of child care
providers, as well as training programs that help child care providers
become better teachers.
With our school readiness centers we are going to make early
childhood services an integrated part of our elementary schools and
create one system of education for our children. Our ultimate goal in
California is to stop funding K-12 and early childhood as two separate
and distinct systems, and instead merge them into one seamless
educational path for children. Recently the California Legislature
charged Proposition 10 with developing the school readiness component
of the state's overall Master Plan for Education. Never before had the
state's education planning framework even included an early childhood
component. We are not merely writing a separate chapter on early
learning, but creating, as I have said, a seamless education system
from the prenatal period to 12th grade.
Of course, California is not alone. Massachusetts, Georgia, North
Carolina, Ohio, Connecticut, and New York, among others, are beginning
to piece together coherent, comprehensive systems, guided by science,
to benefit our youngest children. But the truth is there is still so
much more to be done. In an era of grave state budget challenges, the
federal government must invest more and must focus funding where help
is needed most. Quite simply, every child in America deserves the same
chance to succeed, and well-placed federal dollars in the early years
are the only means to ensure that every child gets that chance.
Every state, including California, is heavily dependent on federal
initiatives. From Head Start and SCHIP, to Medicaid, the Child Care
Block Grants and Family and Medical Leave, our early childhood
development programs are largely built on a federal foundation.
Congress must keep these programs strong, especially now as states face
large deficits. But Congress must do more. Federal legislation should
provide incentives to the states to bring quality early childhood
services into the education system and to develop and expand our best
programs to best serve our children.
As our nation focuses on how to improve our education system to
better serve our children, and to ensure our long-term competitiveness
as a nation, we need to advance a bold new approach. I congratulate the
Committee for the courage to change the nature of the debate and I
issue this challenge: any new federal early education initiative must
be guided by one essential question: will it address a robust,
comprehensive vision of how children learn? Early childhood development
is the key to improving America's schools and to the long-term strength
of our nation. The science has told us, in no uncertain terms, that the
early years of a child's life will set the trajectory of school
performance and life performance. We should stop talking about
tinkering with K-12 and start rebuilding the framework for P-12, from
the prenatal period to high school graduation. We must have the courage
as a society to close the gap between what we know and what we do.
Thank you for inviting me to join you today.
Mr. Reiner. Ms. Schaefer?
Ms. Schaefer. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I
am pleased to be here today to talk with you about ways in
which we can take what is known about children's development
and use this information as the basis for practice.
In this report, I am going to address two major points. I
am going to describe four initiatives that have made a
difference, and then I am going to demonstrate the need for
continued support.
First, building on State initiatives and eliminating
separate education for children with special needs. Come back
in time with me to a time 15 years ago. You probably know of a
situation like this from your personal experience. Four-year-
old Rose was diagnosed with autism. Her parents had concerns
about her social development but were not prepared for this
diagnosis. The only alternative offered by the school system
for Rose was a substantially separate classroom for children
with autism. Intuitively, the parents knew that this was not
the right program for Rose, but because few options were
available and services were fragmented, the parents took the
recommended program. They looked at child care and Head Start
programs but could not find one that had the need supports that
they could add to their programs.
Things are very different now. We do not have many
substantially separate programs for children with disabilities
in Massachusetts anymore. Most preschool children with
disabilities receive services in inclusive programs today
because of the integration of early childhood special education
programs with the State pre-kindergarten programs.
This was a very important initiative and has made a great
difference in the lives of young children. This initiative led
to improved teacher training, flexible funding to support
inclusion, and the availability of services to children with
disabilities in child care programs. The availability of these
services in the community can make a significant difference for
a young child like Rose.
Second is the need for the development of a system of early
care and education. The success of our efforts in joining early
childhood and early childhood special education led us to
wonder about the potential of further collaboration. Our State
Early Childhood Advisory Council studied the potential of a
collaborative model and found that local early childhood
councils could be effective in planning across public and
private programs if they were allowed the flexibility to
function based on different community resources and needs.
As a result of the focus on collaboration, Community
Partnerships for Children were first funded in 1993 at a $6
million level. The strength of this community involvement is
evident in the accomplishments of the Community Partnership
program during the next 8 years. Current funding is now at
$96.6 million, and the program serves 22,450 children.
In addition to providing access and affordability to early
care and education programs, the Community Partnership
Initiative also improved and supported program quality through
accreditation and professional development. One of the
significant outcomes of the program has been the large increase
in the number of Massachusetts programs accredited by the
National Association for the Education of Young Children from
66 programs in 1993 to 806 programs today. In addition, of the
1,500 family child care providers that participate in the
Community Partnership program, 608 are either accredited by the
National Association of Family Child Care or have a child
development associate credential or an associate's or
bachelor's degree in early childhood education. The program has
also supported the pooling of funds to provide training
resources and to fund college courses for teachers.
Community Partnerships has also supported families through
parent/child literacy activities and adult education classes
for parents to support them in getting their high school
diploma. In several instances, programs have added a mental
health component, because children were being expelled from
early childhood programs due to behavioral problems. Mental
health services allow children to stay in their child care
program while solutions are identified and implemented.
Imagine what it would be like to have a 3-year-old with so
much anger that he gets expelled from an early childhood
program. Imagine--and you do not have to go very far in your
imagination, because this is happening all around us. And then
imagine what it would be like for that child to be able to stay
in preschool and have mental health services implemented in the
program and then go on to have a successful kindergarten
experience. There have been many cases like this.
What made this program work for that angry 3-year-old who
was able to go on to kindergarten? First, the Community
Partnership program gave local communities the responsibility
to take care of their children. Second, the model allowed for
accessing mental health support during children's most
formative years. Third, the model helped parents feel
comfortable utilizing the services. And forty, a very important
element of the Community Partnerships approach is that it has
emphasized the development of relationships between program
providers and parents and specialists.
For further details about the Community Partnership
program, refer to the Massachusetts section of the State
Initiatives Report by the Center for Law and Social Policy.
The next issue is high quality at an affordable cost. A
cost quality study conducted by Wellesley College Center for
Research and Women and Abt Associates indicated that on a
seven-point scale, Massachusetts programs rated a 4.94, with 5
being good. While this finding made us feel confident that we
were really moving the system in the right direction, we
clearly need to address ways that the system can ensure that
all programs successfully prepare children for school.
Work still needs to be done to improve curriculum and to
improve children's language and reasoning skills. In order to
reach a good benchmark, programs need to provide a wide range
of materials such as toys, art and science materials, and
puzzles. But even more important, programs need professionally
trained teachers to help children use the materials creatively
and to incorporate children's interest in language and
reasoning skills.
Our research clearly shows the need to focus on teacher
qualifications, since teacher qualifications are strongly
related to quality outcomes for children. The study also found
inequities in the centers serving predominantly low-income
families. Only 10 percent of the classroom staff serving low-
income families have a 2-year college degree or more. This
compares to 61 percent of the staff at centers serving moderate
to high-income families.
Another problems that we have identified is the high rate
of turnover of teachers. Clearly, this is due to the very low
salaries that most early childhood teachers receive. Higher
quality early care and education costs significantly more than
lower quality early care and education.
The next issue is curriculum that builds on the foundation
for successful school experiences. In keeping with the
collaborative spirit that has evolved in Massachusetts, the
legislature, recognizing the power of collaborative efforts,
commissioned the preparation of early childhood program
standards. And the commissioner of education and the State
board of education perceived the need to link these standards
to the Massachusetts curriculum frameworks so that they could
become part of the curriculum continuum for education from pre-
K to grade 12. The preparation of the early childhood standards
involved collaboration from many sources and has resulted in a
draft publication which I am happy to submit to you with my
written testimony.
Senator Bond. It will be accepted as offered. Thank you.
Ms. Schaefer. Thank you.
Next, on the demonstration of the need for increased
resources and development of State system for early care and
education, the first recommendation is that the Federal
Government should support States and communities in developing
systems of early care and education. These systems should
support the development of children from birth until they enter
school, and they should be flexible.
This recommendation assumes that all current grant programs
will be continued and expanded to serve more children. We found
in Massachusetts that building on Head Start, child care in
public school systems was vital in bringing people together by
adding new funds to support the collaboration. New funding for
existing programs adds flexibility and increases quality.
On preparation and remuneration of teachers, ideally, it
would be wonderful if the Federal Government could fund high-
quality early childhood programs for all children birth to 5.
Realistically, I am urging that the Federal Government fund the
current need for teacher training and preparation. This would
go a tremendous way toward improving the quality of the
education that children receive in their most formative years.
We really need support for early childhood teachers getting
their degrees, and we need to increase compensation and
training so that when they go forward, they stay in the field.
In conclusion, we share a common goal. We want to be able
to take what is known about the science of development and
create quality early care and education programs for every
child.
I would like to end with the words of Ibsen: ``A community
is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the
helm.''
It is this idea on with the Community Partnerships for
Children has been built on, and it is this idea that has formed
the foundation for the success of the Community Partnerships
efforts. Communities and States need the support of the Federal
Government in order to expand these initiatives which have
already achieved significant outcomes.
Thank you.
Senator Bond. Thank you very much, Ms. Schaefer.
The Community Partnership and particularly the early
childhood special education and mental health remind me of a
visit I made last month to Lee's Summit, MO, just east of
Kansas City, where they have a significant program like that.
We would like to make sure that we provide them and other
districts around the State that are working in similar programs
with your experience. I find that very exciting, and I am very
happy to learn about the Community Partnership.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Schaefer follows:]
Prepared Statement of Elisabeth Schaefer
Mr. Chairman, and Members of the Committee: I am pleased to be here
today to discuss strategies for getting from science to practice, from
neurons to neighborhoods.
I would like to set the context for my remarks with a quote from
Ibsen: ``A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to
take the helm.''
In Massachusetts we have been successful in working with other
agencies and groups to share the responsibility for taking the helm.
Those of us in the early childhood community have a history of working
within the confines of our programs to serve specific groups of
children. We are currently working to move outside our boundaries to
create a system of early care and education.
Our first attempt to create a system of early care and education in
Massachusetts began within the Department of Education. When I came to
Massachusetts to be the Director of Early Childhood Special Education
in 1986 Massachusetts had been serving young children with disabilities
for 10 years. At that time public schools did not have any funding for
preschool children without disabilities and the classes were
exclusively for children with disabilities. Schools did use Head Start
programs and a handful of private programs for inclusion but eighty
percent of the three- and four-year-old children with disabilities in
the Commonwealth were educated in separate programs exclusively for
children with disabilities. We knew that research supported inclusive
programs and that children with disabilities would benefit by being
placed in programs with their peers. We knew that their peers without
disabilities were attending private preschools and child care programs.
We worked to convince special education directors to place the children
in community preschools and child care centers and a handful did, but
most of the others felt that since they were responsible for
implementing special education legislation they should keep the
children in the public schools.
A wonderful opportunity presented itself when new funds became
available with the passage of PL 99-457 the Education of the
Handicapped Amendment of 1986 and at the same time Massachusetts funded
a state pre-K program. The Department decided to coordinate the two
programs and have them both focus on inclusion. We realized we needed
special education and regular education working together. We combined
early childhood and early childhood special education programs into one
unit within the Department. We also combined program standards, teacher
certification standards and funding.
While we initiated the joint program to promote the inclusion of
young children with disabilities we found the quality of the programs
improved for all children. Teacher expertise improved as they learned
about early childhood and special education. And we now feel that we
are operating programs that give children the opportunities to learn
from each other. Currently in MA more than 80% of the three and four
year old children with disabilities are in inclusive programs with
their peers.
The development of a system took another step forward in 1990. The
Early Childhood Advisory Council to the State Board of Education
conducted a study that found that the existing local early childhood
councils could be effective in planning across public school, Head
Start and child care programs if they were allowed to function in
different ways in communities based on differing resources and needs.
In 1992, the Council, along with Early Learning staff, developed a
proposal to the Legislature to expand the state-funded preschool
program based on a more collaborative model to provide high quality,
comprehensive early care and education that would support the state's
Education Reform initiative that went into effect in 1993. The Governor
and the Legislature awarded an additional $6 million to the existing
$6.9 million program in fiscal year 93 for the proposed Community
Partnerships for Children program (CPC). In 1996 the Massachusetts
Legislature studied the program and began to grow it to the current
program funded with $96.6 million this year and will serve 22,450
children.
The basic problems and facts that the CPC model was designed to
address were identified by many researchers as well as the observations
of people familiar with the Massachusetts system. Ten years ago the
existing situation was this:
Early care and education was a fragmented and duplicative
system;
Head Start, private preschool and child care, public
school preschools and family child care providers already existed,
providing similar services, although they differed in philosophical
history, funding, eligibility criteria and cost, etc.;
Every piece of the system was under-funded, significantly
affecting program quality and equal access to high quality programs for
children from different socioeconomic backgrounds; and
Parents found early care and education programs primarily
through relatives, friends, pediatricians and other local contacts.
The model that developed into the CPC program addressed these
facts. The Department of Education funds grants to communities to
develop local systems of early care and education for preschool-age
children and their families. Each community or group of communities
forms a local CPC council to conduct a needs assessment, plan for
services that address the five CPC objectives in a way that is
responsive to local needs and existing resources, and to oversee the
ongoing program.
Each council selects a lead agency to manage the funds. Lead
agencies may be public school districts, Head Start programs or
licensed child care agencies. Currently there are 15 child care
agencies, 33 Head Start agencies and 120 public school districts that
serve as lead agencies. The 168 CPC councils oversee the local early
care and education systems in 335 out of the 351 cities and towns in
Massachusetts.
A goal of the CPC program is to involve those providing programs
and services, along with family and community members, in designing and
improving a local system of early care and education. Councils must
include representatives of each sector of the early childhood community
(Head Start, child care and public schools), parents, and members from
the religious, medical, senior citizen and business communities, and
representatives of other services or programs for children and
families. Together, there are roughly 4,000 council members across the
state involved in developing and improving local early care and
education programs.
Each CPC is unique, varying according to community resources and
needs as well as incorporating the creativity of council members and
staff. Even so, each community must plan to meet the following
objectives. The Department of Education convenes an interagency team to
read and rate council proposals in years when additional funding is
allocated by the Legislature.
cpc objectives
1. Support children of working families in accessible and
affordable early care and education programs:
\1/3\ of the children have to be in full day, full year
programs.
The community must provide options for families and
scholarships for services with sliding fee scale.
The community may create/renovate space.
2. Improve and support program quality through accreditation and
professional development:
Require programs seek national accreditation.
Encourage college courses and career counseling.
3. Work collaboratively with many programs and services to develop
a local system of early care and education:
Joint outreach and screening.
Coordinate staff development across programs.
4. Provide comprehensive services based on community and family
needs:
Health and mental health services.
Family education and family literacy programs.
5. Conduct outreach to the community to identify families that
could benefit from the program.
One concrete example of how Community Partnerships works to
integrate services is in the area of mental health services. Several
councils have added a mental health component to their programs as they
identified children being expelled from early childhood programs due to
behavioral problems. Mental health services allow children to stay in
the context of their early childhood program while solutions are
identified and implemented.
One example occurred in a small town in the middle of the state. An
early childhood program in a public school asked a mental health
consultant who was contracted by the CPC to observe a child who the
teachers were having difficulty understanding. The staff was also
having a difficult time communicating with the parents. The family
initially felt that the problems at the program must be the result of
something happening to the child at the program. The child's teachers
were becoming increasingly frustrated with the lack of support from
home and the challenge of safely containing the child in the program.
The consultant observed the child and met with the teachers to discuss
the observations and met with Mom to assess her sense of the child's
experience in the program. The program wanted to provide the Mom with
an outside view of the program and how the program was dealing with the
child's social/emotional challenges. The Mom told the consultant that
the child's Dad had recently left the state and his leaving seemed to
trigger the child acting out at home.
The consultant observed twice in the classroom. Each time she was
able to describe key behaviors she had observed in the child which
helped staff think about how they were responding to the child how to
reframe the teacher's response to achieve better results for the child.
For example the consultant suggested that the traditional ``time out''
model that had worked well in the past was not working with this child.
It appeared to be causing the child's troubling behavior to escalate.
The consultant suggested that staff reframe ``time out'' as ``time
in''. That if the child needed to take time away from the group that an
adult would be with him to support him, and to reinforce the idea that
his teachers were there to help him, no matter how challenging his
behavior became.
Learning to accommodate a child with a high level of emotional need
was a challenge to the program staff. Everyone experienced much stress
as they struggled to overcome old habits and disciplinary patterns but
they allowed the child to experience his emotions and search for
creative ways to build the child's self esteem while holding clear
limits and still challenging him cognitively. Program staff learned
ways to talk to the other children about strong emotions and how they
could all work with their feelings when they felt too big. The program
stretched the limits of the classroom boundaries to include support
from administrative staff when they needed to remove the child from the
classroom. They also used an area near the guinea pigs in the next
classroom as a good place to go to calm down. The teachers also helped
the child develop a relationship with the janitor and together they
built a bird condominium which now graces the entrance to the early
childhood program.
Staff also received training on how to better understand what
happens to children developmentally and psychologically when they are
overcome with strong emotions. They also learned ways to problem-solve
with all children and to teach strategies children could use to calm
down.
The consultant also helped the program staff build a better
relationship with the Mom. Staff are in close e-mail contact with the
Mom and tell her how the child does each day in school and she keeps
them updated on progress at home. The teachers have recommended to the
Mom that the child is evaluated for special education and the Mom was
open to the possibility. The child is now seeing a therapist regularly.
So, what are the elements of the CPC model that made it work in
this example? First, CPC gives local communities the ability to take
responsibility for children in their community. The concept of local
responsibility resulted in the local CPC council members hiring a
consultant to work with programs and families as mental health needs
were identified. Recognizing this shared sense of responsibility, the
consultant involved the teachers in the child's class, teachers in
another classroom, the parents and even the custodian. The action steps
taken with this particular child may have looked much different if the
responsibility remained with a larger decision making body. With larger
entities, rules and regulations for process and decision making guide
how to respond any situation, limiting the flexibility needed to
respond to individual needs. The local council members have the ability
and flexibility to look at each individual situation, assess the
circumstances and decide how much or how little is needed to best serve
the child.
The second element focuses on the idea of looking at needs through
a bigger lens. The consultant knew that this was not just a matter of
addressing the child's needs in the classroom. She responded to the
teachers' needs around adapting the environment and teaching strategies
when the child needed it. She knew that a communication system needed
to be established between home and school. She knew that additional
training for staff needed to be developed to better understand
children's development and behaviors within the context of stress and
crisis. Looking at needs through this larger context ensures that all
responsible individuals are prepared and ready to respond to a child's
needs.
The third element highlights the importance of sharing resources
and connecting families to those needed services. This consultant had
been hired by another CPC council to assist in responding to mental
health needs in a neighboring community. The neighboring CPC shared
their resources (i.e., the consultant) with this local CPC. The Council
hired the consultant. The consultant and the program teachers connected
the mother to special education, another support to the child and the
family. The CPC council also provided the mother with resources to
local therapeutic services. If local agencies and service providers
were not working together, service provision to this child would have
been fragmented and potentially ineffective. Combining the resources of
a local community ensures that the appropriate services will be
identified and a seamless delivery of services will be provided.
But the last, and highly important element, is that this local
approach makes way for the development of relationships. The council
establishes relationships with programs. It is this relationship that
made it possible for the program to open their doors and ask for help.
The consultant helped to build the relationship between the teachers
and the mother so that there would be a union, where all parties were
working together in the interest of the child. The relationships made
it possible for the teacher to approach the mother about having the
child evaluated for special education services. It is the relationships
that make this model work . . . trust that everyone is working together
to take the helm and ensure that the needs of every child are met.
This is one example of how Community Partnerships helps to build a
system of early care and education around existing programs. Community
Partnerships has also brought resources to the early childhood
community that have allowed programs to make significant strides in
improving quality. One of the objectives of the program is to build
quality across the system of early care and education. As a result
Massachusetts has gone from having 66 programs accredited by the
National Association for the Education of Young Children in 1993, when
Community Partnerships for Children started to 806 programs today.
Massachusetts has led the country in the number of accredited programs
for the last four years. Family child care programs are also working to
improve program quality. Of the 1,574 family child care providers that
participate in CPC, 608 are either accredited by the National
Association of Family Child Care or have Child Development Associate
Certification or have an Associate's or Bachelor's degree in early
childhood education.
Creating a community that supports the development of quality
programs has decreased the fragmentation of services. Many councils
have directors' groups that meet regularly for support and service
coordination.
Providing local communities with a role in supporting the
development of young children has resulted in communities contributing
45 cents in in-kind contributions for every dollar of state funding
received according to a study conducted by Tufts University in 1996.
These in-kind contributions were defined as services, materials or
space contributed by CPC partners to meet CPC goals that were not
reimbursed by the grant. Some examples include the value of
transportation services, or administrative support donated by a partner
agency.
In 2000, the Department of Education contracted with the Wellesley
College Center for Research on Women and Abt Associates to conduct a
study of the cost and quality of early care and education in
Massachusetts. The study is being implemented over several years and
each year focuses on a different sector of the early care and education
system. The report on the first year focused on center-based, full-day
full-year programs for preschool children. Subsequent reports will
focus on public school preschool programs, family child care programs
and center-based full-day full-year programs for infants and toddlers.
The study will not assess the cost and quality of Head Start programs
in Massachusetts since there is a national evaluation currently
assessing Head Start that includes Massachusetts sites.
The first study found that full-time early care and education for
preschool children in Massachusetts is, on average high quality.
Researchers used the Early Childhood Rating Scale (ECERS), a 7-point
scale with a 5 being the ``good'' benchmark of care. A ``5'' is
associated with later school success in young children. Massachusetts
programs are on average a 4.94. While this finding made us confident we
are moving the system in the right direction other findings identified
issues we need to address if we are to develop a system that will
prepare all children for school.
We found that Massachusetts' classrooms need to improve in the
following ways:
We need to improve the curriculum, since only 35% of the
programs reached the ``good'' benchmark for language and reasoning and
only 24% rated 5 or better on the activities subscale. To reach the
good benchmark staff must integrate language and reasoning skills into
all areas of the program. To reach a good benchmark on activities they
need to provide a wide range of toys, art and science materials and
puzzles and they must facilitate creative use of the materials and
incorporate children's interests into the curriculum activities.
Teacher qualifications are related to quality outcomes for
children. The study found inequities in centers serving predominantly
low-income families. Only 10% of classrooms serving low-income families
have a two-year college degree or more, compared with 61% of staff at
centers serving moderate to high-income families.
Quality was also related to the amount of time teachers
spent with children versus teacher assistants. Higher quality was
associated with teachers spending more time with children than
assistant teachers.
The average turnover rate for teachers is 26%, with 41% of
the teachers leaving their jobs and leaving the field entirely.
The cost of raising the quality of the programs from a 3
(adequate) to 5 (good) would require a 27% increase in the cost,
although simply increasing funding would not achieve higher quality
automatically.
We have begun to address the issue of curriculum with the
development of Early Childhood Program Standards that include health,
safety and education components. The curriculum guidelines included in
these standards are built around the Massachusetts Curriculum
Frameworks so that the preschool curriculum articulates with the
kindergarten curriculum.
challenges to the system
Financing quality improvements to the system is complicated by the
fact that 60% of the funding for the system is paid by parents. This
fact is often ignored by policy makers who typically try to address
funding issues with increases in the subsidy rates. Subsidies cover
such a small portion of the system that they cannot finance major
system improvements, not finance improvements where or in the way they
are most needed. The major funders of the system, parents, are already
struggling to pay the current cost of care.
recommendations
Based on our work with the Community Partnerships program over the
years and an analysis of the results of the Cost and Quality Study in
Massachusetts, the following recommendations can be formulated:
Support early childhood teachers getting degrees. One
primary key to high quality programs and good outcomes for children is
teachers' educational level. In order to implement the kind of
language-rich environment and a curriculum that enriches children's
cognitive and social/emotional development, teachers need a college
education with a focus on early childhood education and child
development. Given the current circumstances, this will require a
reasonable time to achieve. Massachusetts' new standards require that
early care and education teachers will be required to have Associates
degrees seven years from the effective date of the standards and
Bachelor's degrees within fourteen years of the approval date. Funding
to make this possible through a variety of routes will be essential.
As expectations for teachers' rise, training opportunities
and compensation need to become comparable to those available to public
school teachers. It is clear that the amount of funding needed to
accomplish this cannot come from parents and significant federal, state
and/or local investments will be needed soon and over the long term.
Flexibility must be built into funding to accommodate
these differences and allow states to build on their own array of
programs to achieve key benchmarks of access and quality. Just as local
programs develop at different rates and have different needs and
resources available, so do states have very different existing
resources and populations.
Target programs for moderate-income families and infants
and toddlers. Several studies show they have the least access to high
quality care.
Continue to build on existing early childhood initiatives
such as section 619 and Part C of IDEA, TANF, CCDF, and Head Start.
Each of these programs has strengths and contributes to the overall
system of early care and education. We should be proactive in
coordinating these programs.
conclusion
Putting local Community Partnerships Councils ``at the helm'' has
been essential to the growth and improvement of quality in early care
and education programs in Massachusetts. It is community members who
care the most and reap the benefits from the progress and success of
early childhood initiatives. Parents feel most comfortable contacting a
local knowledgeable person or organization about their child care needs
and other needs they might have for parenting education and family
support. Using early childhood programs is about trust. The local
flavor and flexibility afforded to CPC councils has promoted creativity
in the way various services are implemented. The focus on collaboration
has developed networks both within communities and between communities.
Although it has taken several years, CPC's are starting to see
themselves as part of a larger system and often take advantage of the
larger network of programs to solve problems that come up in their own
programs as well as share ideas with others about their successful
initiatives. It is the local flavor and flexibility of the program that
engages people in building a system out of fragmentation and in
overcoming barriers of all kinds. The design of the CPC program works
on several levels at once, from the individual to the program level to
the statewide network. This is a primary strength of any program that
really works and that can sustain itself into the future.
Senator Bond. Ms. Russell?
Ms. Russell. Senator Bond, I appreciate the opportunity to
talk with you. My name is Sue Russell, and I am executive
director of Child Care Services Association in Chapel Hill, NC.
We have heard earlier today from experts who tell us that
the education, compensation and retention of the work force are
critical to making positive gains for our children. Yet today
and every day in North Carolina, about 35 child care teachers
will leave their child programs, representing an annual
turnover rate of 31 percent. They leave because they are paid
less than store clerks or parking lot attendants. Their median
wage is $7.50 an hour.
These teachers are women, mostly with children themselves,
who want to keep educating and caring for our young children,
but must move to other jobs to support their own families. They
have little formal education past high school, but a
significant majority want to take college courses to learn
more. In the last 3 years, about one-third of these women
relied on one or more forms of public assistance, and 27
percent of them have no health insurance from any source.
All this paints a bleak picture of the educational success
of our children.
But in some parts of our country, the picture is even
worse, and it could have been worse in North Carolina. In fact,
thanks to some major Statewide initiatives, we are seeing
incremental gains in our State.
To address the issues I just described, Child Care Services
Association began the T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood Project in
North Carolina in 1990. We designed a comprehensive scholarship
that helped teachers take courses toward an associate's degree
in early childhood education.
T.E.A.C.H. scholarships typically go beyond help with
tuition and books to include travel stipends and paid release
time, allowing recipients to attend classes or study. Their
sponsoring child care programs are asked to help support part
of the costs. When a teacher completes a required number of
credit hours, usually 9 to 15, she is eligible for a bonus or a
raise. In return for this incentive, she must agree to remain
in her sponsoring center for another year. Family child care
providers and directors are also eligible for scholarships.
Participants can renew their scholarship each year for as long
as it takes them to earn their degree, which may be 5 to 6
years because they are working full-time.
We began with private funds from foundations, United Way,
and corporations to start in pilot communities. In 1993, North
Carolina also initiated Smart Start, a comprehensive early
childhood initiative. This effort provides local communities
with significant resources to help ensure that children come to
school healthy and ready to succeed.
It was recognized early on that to be successful at the
local level, we needed to work on improving the education,
compensation, and retention of the early childhood work force
Statewide. So to build that critical piece of our
infrastructure for quality, the T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood
Project received $1 million from our State legislature. This
year, our T.E.A.C.H. budget is $3 million, using a combination
of State, CCDBG, foundation, and corporate funds. In our first
year, 21 scholarships were awarded; last year, we provided over
4,900 scholarships, reaching child care providers in all 100
counties.
The results have been remarkable. Child care teachers,
directors, and family child care providers on T.E.A.C.H.
scholarships last year alone completed over 21,000 credit
hours, saw their earnings increase, and left their programs at
a rate of less than 10 percent per year. Now that scholarships
have become universally available, we have seen steady growth
in demand, and our community college system has had to respond
with more classes, more accessible times, modalities and
locations for instruction, and even more colleges with
associate degree programs.
But we also realized that scholarships are not enough. Some
child care teachers already have degrees. Those on T.E.A.C.H.
scholarships would also expect to earn more money once they
earned their degrees. We knew we had to find a way to improve
child care earnings without forcing already struggling parents
to pay more for child care.
So in 1994, we began the Child Care WAGES Project. This
effort provides graduated supplements paid directly to
participants and tied to their level of education. Supplements
are paid ever 6 months as long as the individual remains in her
child care program.
Again, results have been impressive. Last year, over 8,600
child care providers participated. Supplement amounts ranged
from $200 to $4,000 annually. Because supplement amounts
increase as one gets more education, WAGES participants are
motivated to go back to school. And only 18 percent of
participants left their programs last year, a remarkably low
percentage given that this is the best-educated sector of our
work force and would therefore have the most other options.
This year's $7.7 million for WAGES comes from Smart Start and
CCDBG.
We also realized that health insurance continues to be an
issue facing the work force. So in 1998, we began the
T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood Health Insurance Program. Funded
exclusively with funds from CCDBG, this initiative reimburses
eligible child care programs for one-third of the cost of
health insurance for their teachers. About 2,500 child care
teachers, directors, and family child care providers benefited
from the program last year. After 1 year on the program,
participating center turnover rates dropped by 10 percentage
points, again making progress toward the goal of a better-
educated, compensated and retained work force.
Response by the work force has been extremely positive.
Through and incentive approach, we are directly helping with
the cost of education, better compensation, and benefits. And
we have seen Statewide impact. In 1993, turnover rates in our
State were 42 percent a year. Now, they are down to 31 percent.
In 1998, 62 percent of teachers had some college course work or
a degree; 3 years later, it has increased to 82 percent. In
those same 3 years, we have also seen the percent of teachers
with no insurance drop from 30 percent to 27. We are learning
that these initiatives can make a difference but that change
will be incremental and takes a long time.
T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood Projects are now operating in 19
States, housed in various Statewide nonprofit organizations.
With foundation help, Child Care Services has created the
T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood Technical Assistance Center to help
States begin and grow successful, results-focused projects.
This year alone, T.E.A.C.H. projects expect to award over
18,000 scholarships. Nationwide, funding for these projects is
patched together, with 14 States using multiple sources of
funds. But the majority of funds comes from CCDBG or TANF
transfer funds, with 16 of 19 States benefiting from those
dollars.
I have made presentations about T.E.A.C.H. in 36 States. In
every State, the issues are the same--increasing and/or high
turnover rates, low teacher compensation, and low and/or
declining teacher educational qualifications. The biggest
barrier that States face when deciding what to do is the lack
of resources. Many States are faced with long waiting lists for
child care assistance, and families are struggling without
child care. So focusing on quality improvements, particularly
those focused on the work force, may seem overwhelming. Yet
research tells us that good outcomes for young children in
child care are tied directly to the education, compensation,
and retention of their teachers.
My question is how can we afford not to address these
issues. Targeted and increased Federal resources can make the
difference our children, families, and Nation need.
Thank you.
Senator Bond. Thank you very much, Ms. Russell. You
certainly have addressed an overwhelming problem, and we look
forward to learning more about how you have expanded it into
other States.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Russell follows:]
Prepared Statement of Sue Russell
Senator Kennedy, Senator Gregg and members of the Committee, I
appreciate the opportunity to talk with you. We have heard today from
experts that tell us that the education, compensation and retention of
the workforce is key to making positive gains for children. Yet today
and every day in North Carolina about 35 child care teachers will leave
their child care programs, representing an annual turnover rate of 31%.
They leave because they are paid less than store clerks or parking lot
attendants; their median wage is $7.50 an hour. These teachers are
women, mostly with children themselves, who want to keep educating and
caring for our young children, but must move to other jobs to support
their own families. They have little formal education past high school
but want to take college courses to learn. In the last three years
about one-third of these women relied on one or more forms of public
assistance. And 27% have no health insurance from any source. All of
this paints a bleak picture for the educational success of our
children.
But in some parts of our country the picture is even worse, and it
could have been worse in North Carolina. In fact, thanks to some major
statewide initiatives, we are seeing incremental gains in our state. To
address the issues I just described, Child Care Services Association
began the T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood Project in North
Carolina in 1990. We designed a comprehensive scholarship. Our initial
scholarship helped teachers take courses toward an associate degree in
early childhood education. T.E.A.C.H. scholarships typically go beyond
help with tuition and books, to include travel stipends and paid
release time, allowing them to attend classes or study. Their
sponsoring child care programs are asked to help support part of the
costs. When a teacher completes a required number of credit hours,
usually 9-15, she is eligible for a bonus or a raise. In return for
this incentive, she must agree to remain in her sponsoring center for
another year. Family child care providers and directors are also
eligible for scholarships. Participants can renew their scholarship
each year for as long as it takes them to earn their degrees, which may
be 5-6 years because they are working full time.
When we began in North Carolina, we used private funds from
foundations, United Way and corporations to fund the Project in pilot
communities. In 1993, North Carolina also initiated a comprehensive
early childhood initiative, called Smart Start. This effort provides
local communities with significant resources to help ensure that
children come to school healthy and ready to succeed. It was recognized
early on that to be successful at the local level, we needed to work on
improving the education, compensation and retention of the early
childhood workforce. So, to build that critical piece of our
infrastructure for quality, the T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood
Project received $1 million from our state legislature. This year, our
T.E.A.C.H. budget is $3 million, using a combination of state, CCDBG,
foundation and corporate funds. In our first year, 21 scholarships were
awarded; last year we provided over 4,900 scholarships, reaching child
care providers in every county.
The results have been remarkable. Child care teachers, directors
and family child care providers on T.E.A.C.H. scholarships, last year
alone, completed over 21,000 credit hours, saw their earnings increase
and left their programs at a rate of less than 10% per year. Now that
scholarships have become universally available, we have seen steady
growth in demand and our community college system has had to respond
with more classes, more accessible times, modalities and locations for
instruction and even more colleges with associate degree programs.
But we also realized that scholarships are not enough. Some child
care teachers already had degrees. Those on T.E.A.C.H. scholarships
would also expect to earn more money once they earned their degrees. We
knew we had to find a way to improve child care earnings without
forcing already struggling parents to pay more for child care. So in
1994 we began the Child Care WAGE$ Project. This effort
provides graduated supplements paid directly to participants and tied
to their level of education. Supplements are paid every six months as
long as the individual remains in her child care program. Again,
results have been impressive. Last year, over 8,600 child care
providers participated. Supplement amounts ranged from $200 to $4,000
annually. Because supplement amounts increase as one gets more
education, WAGE$ participants are motivated to go back to school. And
only 18% of participants left their programs last year, a remarkably
low percentage given that this is the best educated sector of our
workforce and would therefore have the most other options. Funding for
WAGE$ comes from Smart Start (state funds) and CCDBG.
We also realized that health insurance continues to be an issue
facing the workforce. So in 1998 we began the T.E.A.C.H. Early
Childhood Health Insurance Program. Funded exclusively with
funds from CCDBG, this initiative reimburses eligible child care
programs for one-third of the cost of their health insurance for their
teachers. To be eligible the center or family child care home must have
all teachers with two or four year degrees in early childhood
education, or must be willing to sponsor some of their staff on
T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood scholarships to earn degrees.
About 2,500 child care teachers, directors and family child care
providers benefited from the program last year. After one year on the
program, turnover rates dropped by 10 percentage points, again making
progress toward the goal of a better educated, compensated and retained
workforce.
Response by the workforce has been extremely positive. Through an
incentive approach, we are directly helping with the cost of education,
better compensation and benefits. And we have seen statewide impact. In
1993, turnover rates in our state were 42% a year, now down to 31%. In
1998 62% of teachers had some college coursework or a degree; three
years later it has increased to 82%. In those same three years we have
also seen the percent of teachers with no insurance drop from 30% to
27%. We are learning that these initiatives can make a difference but
that change will be incremental and takes a long time.
T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood Projects are now operating in
19 states, housed in various statewide nonprofit organizations. With
foundation help, Child Care Services has created the T.E.A.C.H. Early
Childhood Technical Assistance Center, to help states begin
and grow successful, results-focused projects. This year alone
T.E.A.C.H. Projects expect to award over 18,000 scholarships to be used
at one of 447 different universities or community colleges. Nationwide,
funding for these Projects is patched together, with 14 states using
multiple sources of funds and 16 out of 19 states using CCDBG or TANF
transfer funds to support their efforts. Child Care WAGE$
Projects are also being replicated.
I have made presentations about T.E.A.C.H. in 36 states. In every
state the issues are the same, increasing and/or high turnover rates,
low teacher compensation and low and/or declining teacher educational
qualifications. The biggest barrier states face when deciding what to
do is the lack of resources. Many states are faced with long waiting
lists for child care assistance and families are struggling without
child care, so focusing on quality improvements, particularly those
focused on the workforce, may seem overwhelming. Yet research tells us
that good outcomes for young children in child care are tied directly
to the education, compensation and retention of their teachers. My
question is how can we afford not to address these issues? Targeted and
increased federal resources can make the difference our children,
families and nation need.
Senator Bond. Now, a long-time, very good friend, Sharon
Rhodes.
Welcome, Sharon.
Ms. Rhodes. Thank you, Senator Bond.
It is indeed an honor to be here today representing Parents
as Teachers National Center. While I am a director of Parents
as Teachers National Center, I am also, like many of you, a
parent and a grandparent.
Thank you for the invitation to appear before the committee
today to present on the importance of parental involvement in
children's learning from the earliest years on and how the
Parents as Teachers program helps parents give their children
the very best possible start in life.
It has been my privilege to have been involved in the
Parents as Teachers program since 1985, when it was implemented
Statewide in Missouri, thanks to the vision and leadership of
then Governor, now Senator, Kit Bond.
Parents as Teachers has since then expanded to more than
2,800 sites in all 50 States, in U.S. Territories, as well as
overseas. I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge
Senator Bond's long-term commitment to families and children.
As we well know, there are no prerequisites and no
admission exams required to become a parent. Good or bad, right
or wrong, many parents are on their own, and to complicate
matters, babies do not come with directions. Yet we expect
parents to have the knowledge and the tools necessary to
prepare their children to enter kindergarten ready to learn and
to succeed in school.
We have heard from Dr. Zigler this morning, who has been an
invaluable resource to Parents as Teachers over the years, and
we have also heard from our distinguished panel today about the
importance of capitalizing on windows of learning opportunities
in the early years of life. We can no longer afford to think of
education as beginning in preschool or kindergarten. Therefore,
we must encourage and support parental involvement in
children's learning from birth on because, as Mrs. Bush told
this committee in January, it is during those critical years
between the crib and the classroom that a child's education
really begins.
The value to schools and communities of fostering parental
involvement starting from birth is that it establishes a
pattern for parental involvement and continues when the child
starts school and then beyond.
What better place to foster parental involvement than in
the parents' own home? Home visiting programs such as Parents
as Teachers play a critical role, because as we all know,
parents are their children's first and most influential
teachers. Parents as Teachers trains parent educators to bring
research-based information grounded in child development and
neuroscience to parents in a way that makes sense to them. Our
goal is not to turn parents into neuroscientists, but to
translate the neuroscience findings into concrete What, When,
How, and Why suggestions that parents can use.
It is vital that parents know how to recognize and then to
capitalize on teachable moments using simple, everyday
activities such as feeding time, a game of peekaboo, or a trip
to the grocery store--all opportunities to develop their
child's basic skills. Research bears out how parents converse
with their children and formulate questions around these early,
everyday activities, that this lays the foundation for their
child's literacy skills and later reading success.
Senator Kennedy has publicly stated that it is essential to
plant the seeds of success to improve literacy, the gateway of
learning, and we at Parents as Teachers could not agree more.
It is so exciting to see parents realize that they have
what it takes to impact their child's learning. Recently, I
accompanied a parent educator on a visit to a family living in
a Yonkers housing project. The father was present but did not
appear to be engaged in the visit at all. There were four or
five children all bouncing around this tiny apartment, which
made for a tense and distracting environment.
At the end of what I would say was a challenging home
visit, the father looked up and spoke to us for the very first
time and said: ``Do you mean all I have to do is play with my
kids to help their brains grow?'' What a great step forward for
that family.
Senator Gregg told this committee last month that the
education and nurturing a child receives prior to school sets
the foundation for his or her formal education. We do have a
lot of good information for parents and early childhood
professionals. Now we have to put it to work.
In sum, our experience with Parents as Teachers confirms
that when parents are involved in their child's learning from
early on, they stay involved. Therefore, we urge Congress to
include parental involvement as a critical component of all
early childhood initiatives.
We also believe that any comprehensive education reform
must include a home visitation program like Parents as Teachers
for all children during the early years beginning at birth.
I want to thank you once again for inviting us to share our
experiences in involving parents in their children's early
learning through the Parents as Teachers program.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Rhodes follows:]
Prepared Statement of Sharon F. Rhodes
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee: It is indeed a privilege
to be here representing the Parents As Teachers National Center, which
serves more than 2,800 Parents as Teachers (PAT) sites in all 50 states
and several other countries. I am Sharon Rhodes, Director of Program
Development and Evaluation at the Parents as Teachers National Center.
Thank you for your invitation to appear before the committee today to
present on the importance of parental involvement in children's
learning from the earliest years, and on Parents as Teachers, which is
a parent support and education program founded on the principle that
parents are the most important determinants of their children's success
in school and in life. I have been involved in Parents as Teachers
since 1985, when it was implemented statewide in Missouri, thanks to
the vision and leadership of then Governor, now Senator, Kit Bond. In
addition to my statement today, I have provided a written statement for
the record.
Parents as Teachers National Center recognizes that the first years
of life are a time of tremendous growth and learning. Research has
clearly demonstrated this. We also recognize that the quality of a
child's environment in these early years has a strong influence on that
child's later development and success in school and life. Our
experience has demonstrated the effectiveness of helping to engage
families early in their child's development. Further, thirty years of
research show that greater family involvement in children's learning is
a critical link in the child's development of academic skills,
including reading and writing. Parents as Teachers and other family
support and parent education programs that emphasize the earliest years
of life can be part of a broader effort to foster widespread parent
involvement in their children's learning and education.
The Parents as Teachers Program
Parents as Teachers is a parent education and support program that
helps parents give their child the best possible start in life. The
program is designed to enhance child development and school achievement
through parent education accessible to all families, beginning even
before the child's birth. Acknowledging that all parents deserve
support in laying a strong foundation for their child's success.
Parents as Teachers is designed for the voluntary participation of all
families. It is a universal success program, appropriate for and
welcoming of families from all walks of life.
The work of Parents as Teachers is grounded in these guiding
principles:
The early years of a child's life are critical for optimal
development and provide the foundation for success in school and in
life; children are born to learn!
Parents are their children's first and most influential
teachers. Parents are the experts on their own children by virtue of
the special knowledge and insight that comes from everyday family
experiences and the attachment parents and their children share.
All families have strengths, and all parents want to be
good parents.
Established and emerging research should be the foundation
of parent education and family support curricula, training, materials
and services.
All young children and their families deserve the same
opportunities to succeed, regardless of any demographic, geographic or
economic considerations.
Among home visiting programs, Parents as Teachers is alone in
offering a universal access model. For example, in Missouri and Kansas,
PAT is available to all families with children in the appropriate age
range. Recognizing that all families can benefit from support. Parents
as Teachers families come in all configurations, from all socio-
economic levels, and from both rural and urban communities. This
universal access reduces the stigma that other programs addressing only
high-risk families may carry. However, universal access does not mean
that one size fits all. Parents as Teachers has been adapted to meet
the needs of diverse families in different ways.
Parents as Teachers brings research-based information (grounded in
both child development and neuroscience) to parents in a user-friendly
format to help them understand how they can impact their child's
development, starting prenatally. The Parents as Teachers Curriculum
offers a holistic approach, covering 4 domains development (cognitive,
motor, social-emotional, and language), emphasizes increasing parents'
knowledge of child development, and focuses on sharing parent-child
activities that will foster that development and enrich parent-child
interaction.
The Parents as Teachers Born to Learn Curriculum,
developed in collaboration with neuroscientists from the Washington
University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of
Chicago Medical School, distinguishes Parents As Teachers from other
parent support programs. The Born to Learn
Curriculum, is infused with neuroscience-based information for parents
about their child's brain growth and development, translated into
concrete ``when'', ``what'', ``how'' and ``why'' suggestions to enhance
their children's learning and development. The goal is not to turn
parents into neuroscientists; using the Born to Learn
Curriculum, parent educators provide parents with the tools to use
science in everyday ways. For example, language learning, which
neuroscience research has shown begins in the first few months of life,
is encouraged by sharing with parents the value of ``parentese'' and
face-to-face talking with their infants. The value of play is
underscored by connecting it with how the brain develops. For example,
repetitive games and games that stimulate several senses are encouraged
because they build and strengthen connections among brain calls.
The Curriculum also provides flexibility as to how the information
is presented. Detailed personal visit plans are offered in weekly bi-
weekly and monthly formats to accommodate individual family and program
needs. The parent materials are developed at two reading levels to meet
the literacy needs of a variety of families. Curriculum and parent
materials are now being made available in Spanish as well as English.
The curriculum begins prenatally and is organized around children's
developmental stages.
The Born to Learn Curriculum is the heart of
Parents as Teachers. In addition to core Parents as Teachers programs,
many other early childhood programs use the Born to
Learn Curriculum and training to supplement their
services to families. These programs, which include Even Start, Head
Start, Family Resource Centers, child care centers, and Healthy
Families America, have a variety of target areas: early literacy, child
abuse prevention, health care, parent education; and early childhood
development, and yet the Born to Learn Curriculum is
effective for each.
The Parents as Teachers model in its delivery has four components:
1) personal visits, 2) group meetings, 3) developmental, health,
vision, and hearing screenings, and 4) a resource and referral network.
Personal Visits
To most families enrolled in Parents as Teachers, the personal
visit stands out as the major service delivery component. Personal
visits support parents in their parenting role in order to promote
optimal child development and positive parent-child interaction. The
Parents as Teachers National Center recommends personal visits be
conducted at least monthly. (Families with greater needs might receive
weekly or bi-weekly visits.)
A trained, certified Parents as Teachers parent educator conducts
the personal visit. A typical visit begins with the parent educator's
preparation, as she reviews the personal visit plan in the Curriculum,
collects the handouts to share with the parent, and assembles materials
for the parent-child activity. As she plans the visit, she remembers
interests, concerns or needs the parents have expressed, as well as
observations she has made of the child's development. Using these, she
cam make this truly a personal visit, individualized for the family she
will be seeing.
The personal visit typically lasts an hour, and is usually held in
the family's home. The parent educator, parents or primary care
providers, and child make themselves comfortable on the floor, the
child's play space. Sometimes other people join in the visit, such as
child care providers, grandparents, adult relatives or other children.
Anyone living in the home or involved in the care of the child is a
welcome participant. The patent educator begins by checking in with the
parents.
What new things has the child done since the last visit? How did
the child and parent like the follow-up activity the parent educator
suggested at the last visit? She will also pay attention to the child,
talking to him, including him, in the conversation, and making
observations about his development. Throughout the visit the parent
educator will be sensitive to the comments and concerns of the parents.
While talking to the parents, the parent educator will incorporate
discussion points on topics included in this visit plan. She may
present a parent handout and focus the discussion by referring to it.
She may show a short video segment that illustrates an aspect of brain
development. The provision of information is conversational, and is
woven into the interaction between parent, child and parent educator.
Most often the parent educator will use an observation of the child to
provide the context for the information and make it relevant to the
parents.
The parent educator will also engage the parents and child in an
activity that is based on the information presented in the plan. This
provides for meaningful interaction between the parents and child, and
gives the parents an opportunity to observe their child's development.
What the parent and child will also remember, however, is that it was
fun. The parent educator suggests a follow-up activity that extends the
learning through the time between personal visits.
A literacy activity is an important part of each visit. The parent
educator brings a book, often related to the parent-child activity, for
the parent to read to the child. Book exploration skills are taught,
including telling a story based on the pictures in the book, so that
parents of varying literacy levels can successfully read to their
child. Rhymes and songs are a part of many visit plans, and parent
handouts support the development of the child's phonological awareness.
At the and of the visit the parent educator checks for any last
questions or concerns the parents might have. She summarizes the visit
by reviewing a significant developmental characteristic she was able to
observe, reflecting on a strength she observed in the parents, and
reminding the parents of the follow-up activity she has given them to
do.
Programs typically offer visits in the evenings and on Saturdays to
accommodate the schedules of working parents.
Group Meetings
A Parents as Teachers parent group meeting is an opportunity to
enhance parents' knowledge of child development and parenting issues
through group experiences. Group meetings provide opportunities for
parents to broaden their knowledge, learn from each other, observe
their children with other children, and learn and practice parenting
skills. Topics may include early brain development, fostering the
child's interest in books, choosing developmentally appropriate toys,
to name a few.
Developmental and Health Screening
Parents as Teachers provides periodic screening for early
identification of developmental delays or health problems. Research-
based screening instruments are used and parent educators receive
training in their administration. Screening provides regular review of
each child's developmental progress, identifies strengths and abilities
as well as areas of concern that require referral for follow-up
services, and increases the parents understanding of his or her child's
development.
Resource and Referral Network
Families may have needs for services that are outside the scope of
Parents as Teachers. Parent educators help families identify interests
and needs, connect with needed resources, and overcome barriers to
accessing services. Referrals to pediatricians, child diagnostic or
therapy programs that are indicated as a result of screening are prime
examples of this service. Other examples include helping families
provide for basic needs such as housing or utilities, connecting
families to child care, and making sure that adequate medical care is
accessible and affordable for the family. Each local Parents as
Teachers program develops a resource network within its own community
that it can use to locate services for families. Each Parents as
Teachers Program also has a Community Council made up of
representatives from local agencies, and that also provides links to
service providers in the community.
Success of the Parents as Teachers Program
Parents as Teachers began with four pilot sites in 1981, was
implemented statewide in Missouri in 1985, and currently has more than
2,800 sites in 50 states as well as foreign countries and U.S.
territories. The Parents as Teachers National Center has trained and
certified over 10,000 parent educators. Several hundred thousand
families have participated in Parents as Teachers. Nationwide, Parents
as Teachers is successfully blended with many existing programs for
families of young children. These existing programs for families of
young children often have a home visitation component delivered by
family service workers or family educators, but without a research-
based child development curriculum. They incorporate the Parents as
Teachers model to add parent education through home visiting or to
enhance the quality of their services to families. The tremendous
growth of Parents as Teachers can be attributed to the adaptability of
the program, research-based curriculum and training, flexibility of the
program, universal access approach, relatively low cost of
implementation, and documentation of program effectiveness.
PAT has a long history of independent evaluations demonstrating
positive outcomes for young children and their families. The
evaluations have focused on three main areas: (1) child development;
(2) parent knowledge, attitudes, and behavior; and (3) parent-child
interaction.
Child Development
Results of the evaluations show that Parents as Teachers prepares
children to enter kindergarten ready to succeed. Parents as Teachers
children are more likely to be on-track developmentally and to have
developmental delays identified early and remediated. An evaluation of
the statewide implementation of the Parents as Teachers program in
Missouri found that more than one half of the children with observed
developmental delays overcame them by age three. Parents as Teachers
children at age 3 are significantly more advanced in language, social
development, and problem solving and other cognitive abilities than
comparison children. The positive impact on Parents as Teachers
children carries over into the elementary school years. Parents as
Teachers children score higher on kindergarten readiness tests and on
standardized measures of reading, math and language in first through
fourth grades.
Parent Knowledge, Attitudes, and Behavior
Parents as Teachers parents gain knowledge of child development,
good parenting practices, and confidence in their parenting skills.
They show increased understanding of how to promote optimal child
development. Parents as Teachers parents are also more involved in
their child's schooling and support their children's learning in the
home. In a follow-up evaluation with families that participated in the
Parents as Teachers pilot programs, a significantly higher proportion
of Parents as Teachers parents initiated contacts with teachers and
took an active role in their child's schooling. For example, 63% of
Parents as Teachers parents compared with 37% of parents who had not
participated in Parents as Teachers requested parent-teacher
conferences. In a follow-up evaluation with families that participated
in Parents as Teachers when it was first implemented statewide in
Missouri, family members of almost 95% of Parents as Teachers children
attended special events in their schools and classrooms and almost two-
thirds of the children had family members work as volunteers in their
children's school. Teachers reported that 75% of Parents as Teachers
parents always assisted with home activities related to schoolwork, and
another 20% sometimes provided such assistance.
Parent-Child Interaction
Parents as Teachers parents are more likely to read aloud, promote
literacy and numeracy, and interact positively with their children.
These outcomes can be attributed to the quality of the parent
educator-parent relationship, level of parental engagement, flexibility
to tailor information to meet family needs, strengths-based model, and
the research-based curriculum and training.
We are submitting for the record a brief summary of evaluations of
the Parents as Teachers program (see Appendix A).
Parents as Teachers and Parental Involvement
Parents as Teachers believes that changes in children's outcomes
are fostered through changes in parents' knowledge, attitudes and
behaviors. Supporting and educating parents to become involved in their
child's development and learning results in lasting impacts on the
children.
We use the term parental involvement to refer to parents'
participation in their child's learning and education. This involvement
potentially begins at birth, or even prenatally, and is certainly well
under way in the first three years of life. One value of fostering
parental involvement starting from birth is that this sets parents'
expectations about their continuing role in the child's education once
he or she starts school. When parents are involved early, they stay
involved, and this involvement improves children's performance in
school.
Parents as Teachers contributes to increased parental involvement
on both a day-to-day basis and at a broader level. During the course of
the personal visits, parent educator's foster and support parental
involvement as they:
help parents learn to observe their child and read their
child's cues.
help parents understand typical development, including
brain development.
help parents know what developmental milestones to expect
next and empower them to act when they have concerns about their
child's development.
affirm parents' skills and strengths and encourage
parental involvement.
emphasize the child's emerging literacy skills by bringing
books to every visit from infancy on and showing parents how to read to
their child.
show parents how to capitalize on opportunities to enhance
their child's learning and development by using everyday resources and
contexts.
help parents recognize teachable moments and how to use
them with their child.
More broadly, Parents as Teachers enhances parental involvement in
that it:
helps parents be in a position to make better and more
informed choices for their child's care
empowers families to advocate for their child
builds parental feelings of competence and confidence
enhances the parent-child relationship
increases the child's school readiness
helps parents learn to access services and supports for
their child
The Parents as Teachers National Center recognizes that in addition
to parents, there are frequently many other adults that influence
children's lives in the earliest years--relatives, care providers,
early childhood teachers, and other caregivers. It is particularly
important that those working with children at this critical time also
recognize the importance of parental involvement.
How Parents Become Involved in Parents as Teachers and How They Remain
Involved
Parents are recruited for Parents as Teachers primarily through
partnerships in the communities where the program is located; in many
cases with the schools. Missouri is a case in point. There is a Parents
as Teachers site in every school district in Missouri. This partnership
with the schools in Missouri and other states creates a home-school
connection many years before the children actually start school. In
essence, Missouri schools are setting the expectation that the parental
involvement that begins with the Parents as Teachers program will
continue once the children start school. Studies show that school
practices that encourage parents to participate in their children's
education are more important than family characteristics like parental
education, family size, marital status, socioeconomic level, or student
grade level in determining whether parents get involved. Partnering
with Parents as Teachers is one such practice.
Parents remain involved because Parents as Teachers can be
individualized to meet the differing needs of families, and is
adaptable to communities and special populations, including teen
parents, families of children with special needs, and families living
on Indian reservations. An example of the program's adaptability is the
current initiative to translate Parents as Teachers curriculum
materials into Spanish to meet the needs of the many Spanish speaking
families in Parents as Teachers. What we like to say is that while
Parents as Teachers is a national model, it's a local program. The
program's adaptability makes a difference for families.
Conclusion
Since learning starts right from birth, it is important to begin
working with parents at that time or just before it. Research
demonstrates, and our experience with Parents as Teachers confirms that
when parents are involved in their child's learning from early on, they
stay involved, and that this on-going involvement improves children's
performance in school. The Parents as Teachers National Center
recommends that every parent in America have access to parent education
and family support that highlights for them the critical importance of
being involved in their child's learning as early as possible.
The 8th National Education Goal of the Educate America Act
recognizes the critical role of parents and the importance of parental
involvement in children's education once they are in school. The
Parents as Teachers National Center recommends that Congress also
increase support for programs and policies that emphasize parents and
parental involvement as key components of all early childhood
initiatives. We also recommend that any comprehensive education reform
must include a home visitation program such as Parents as Teachers for
all children in those early years prior to kindergarten entry.
Appendix A: Parents as Teachers Evaluation Highlights
Program evaluation has been integral in the evolution of the PAT
program since its inception. The first evaluation of PAT was funded
through a contract from the Missouri Department of Elementary and
Secondary Education. Subsequent studies have been supported by the
State of Missouri and other states, independent school districts, and
private foundations. A few studies have been carried out by individual
researchers, independent evaluations continue to confirm the positive
impact of PAT on parents and children.
Parent and Family Outcomes
PAT parents are more involved in their children's schooling--
parental involvement is key to a child's success in school.
PAT parents are more confident in their parenting skills and
knowledge.
PAT parents read more to their children.
Child Outcomes
PAT children at age 3 are significantly more advanced in language,
problem solving and other cognitive abilities, and social development
than comparison children.
The positive impact on PAT children carries into elementary
school.
PAT children score higher on kindergarten, readiness tests and on
standardized measures of reading, math and language in first through
fourth grades.
Missouri PAT Pilot Project: Outcomes at Age Three and in Early
Elementary School
75 project families were randomly selected from the 380 first-time
parents who had participated in PAT for three years. The pilot project
families and a matched comparison group represented Missouri's urban,
rural and suburban communities. Posttest assessments of children's
abilities and parents' knowledge and perceptions showed that PAT
children at age three were significantly more advanced in language,
problem-solving and other intellectual abilities, and social
development than comparison children. PAT parents were more
knowledgeable about child-rearing practices and child development.
Participating parents were more likely to regard their school district
as responsive to their children's needs than were parents of comparison
group children, 63% of PAT parents rated their district as ``very
responsive,'' versus 29% of comparison group parents.
(Pfannenstiel, J., and Seltzer, D., Evaluation Report; New Parents as
Teachers Project Overland Park, KS: Research & Training Associates,
1986 Pfannenstiel, J., and Seltzer, D., New Parents as Teachers;
Evaluation of an Early Parent Education Program, Early Childhood
Research Quarterly, 4, 1-18, 1989.)
A follow-up evaluation of the pilot program was undertaken to
determine if gains made during participation in PAT would have a
lasting effect on the children and their parents. PAT children scored
significantly higher on standardized measures of reading and math at
the end of first grade than did comparison children. A significantly
higher proportion of PAT parents initiated contacts with teachers and
took an active role in their child's schooling. For example, 63% of
parents of PAT children versus 37% of parents of comparison children
requested parent-teacher conferences. Thus, PAT parents continue to
play an active role in their child's education into elementary school.
(Pfannenstiel, J., New Parents as Teachers Project: A Follow-Up
Investigation. Overland Park, KS: Research & Training Associates,
1989.)
Statewide Implementation of PAT in Missouri: Outcomes at Age Three and
in Early Elementary School
The ``Second Wave'' study examined how well the PAT model program
would transfer statewide. This study determined the impact of PAT on
400 randomly-selected families enrolled in 37 diverse school districts
across Missouri. At age three, PAT children performed significantly
above the national norms on a measure of school-related achievement,
despite the fact that the Second Wave sample was over-represented on
all traditional characteristics of risk. More than one-half of the
children with observed developmental delays overcame them by age three.
There were only two documented cases of abuse and neglect among the 400
families over a three year period--significantly fewer than the state
average. Parent knowledge of child development and parenting practices
significantly increased for all types of families.
(Pfannenstiel, J., Lambson, T., and Yarnell, V., Second Wave Study of
the Parents as Teachers Program, Overland Park, KS: Research & Training
Associates, 1991.)
A follow-up of the Second Wave study assessed the longer-term
impacts of program participation. This study focused on the first- and
second-grade school experiences and performance of the Second Wave PAT
children, and PAT parents, involvement in their children's learning and
schooling. PAT children were rated by their teachers as performing at
high levels of proficiency in all areas assessed. When compared to
their grade-level peers, 91% of PAT children were rated by their
teachers as equal to or better than average. Overall, the relative
level of achievement children demonstrated at age three on completion
of the PAT program was maintained at the end of the first/second grade.
PAT parents demonstrated high levels of school involvement, which they
frequently initiated, and supported their children's learning in the
home.
(Pfannenstiel, J., Lambson, T., and Yarnell, V., The Parents as
Teachers Program: Longitudinal follow-up to the second wave study.
Overland Park, KS; Research & Training Associates, 1996.)
Evaluations of PAT Child Outcomes: Kindergarten Readiness and Beyond
The Missouri School Entry Assessment Project is a comprehensive
early childhood assessment effort designed to gather information about
what young children who enter Missouri's public kindergartens know and
can do and to relate this information to their pre-kindergarten school
experiences. Findings from the 1998 school readiness assessment project
involving 3,500 kindergarteners in Missouri show that Parents as
Teachers achieves its goal of preparing children for success in school.
Among children whose care and education were solely home-based, those
whose families participated in PAT scored significantly higher on the
School Entry Profile. However, the highest performing children were
those who participated in PAT combined with preschool, center-based
child care, or both. Children from high-poverty schools scored above
average an all areas of development when they entered kindergarten with
a combination of PAT and any other pre-kindergarten experience (pre-
school, center-based care, and/or home-based care).
(Barr, S. and Pfannenstiel, J., Missouri School Entry Assessment
Project Summary. Presentation made at the 8th International Born to
Learn Conference, St. Louis, MO, June, 1999.)
Parkway School District, a large metropolitan school district in
St. Louis County, Missouri, demonstrated the long-term positive impact
of PAT on school achievement. Third graders who had received PAT
services with screening services from birth to age three scored
significantly higher on standardized measures of achievement than their
non-participating counterparts. PAT children had a national percentile
rank of 81, while non-participating students had a rank of 63 on the
Stanford Achievement Test. PAT graduates were less likely to receive
remedial reading assistance or to be held back a grade in school. In
fourth grade, PAT graduates still scored significantly higher overall
and on all Stanford Achievement subjects (reading, math, language,
science, social studies) than did non-PAT fourth-graders.
(Coates, D., Early childhood evaluation, Missouri: A Report to the
Parkway Board of Education, 1994; Coates, D. Memo on one-year update on
Stanford scores of students--early childhood evaluation study group;
Parents as Teachers program leads to elementary school success, Parkway
School District News, Spring, 1997.)
A series of studies of PAT program participation and school
readiness were conducted in the Binghamton, New York, School District,
beginning in 1992. A pilot study focused on a sample of poor, high-
needs children. Pre-kindergarten assessments showed that compared to
matched comparisons, PAT children had better language skills and were
twice as likely to be reading-ready by kindergarten.
(Drazen, S. and Haust, M., Raising reading readiness in low-income
children by parent education, Paper presented at the annual meeting of
the American Psychological Association, August, 1993.)
A second study compared the school readiness of children who
participated in PAT with all kindergartners in the Binghamton School
District, PAT children showed better school readiness at the start of
kindergarten, higher reading and math readiness at the end of
kindergarten, higher kindergarten grades, and fewer remedial education
placements in first grade.
(Drazen, S. and Haust, M., The effects of the Parents and Children
Together (PACT) Program on school achievement. Binghamton, NY:
Community Resource Center, 1995.)
A longitudinal follow-up of these same Binghamton children found
that PAT children continued to perform better than non-PAT children on
standardized tests of reading and math achievement in second grade.
Compared to non-PAT children, PAT children required half the rate of
remedial and special education placements in third grade.
(Drazen, S. and Haust, M., Lasting academic gains from an early home
visitation program. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the
American Psychological Association, August, 1996.)
In this North Carolina study, children who participated in PAT were
tracked into kindergarten. A study of the long-term educational impact
of the Rutherford County Schools PAT program compared families who
participated in PAT for three years to families who either received no
services or who received a quarterly newsletter during the first year
of their chi1d's life. Upon entry to kindergarten, PAT children scored
significantly higher than children from the comparison groups on
measures of language and self-help/social skills.
(Coleman, M., Rowland, B. & Hutchins, B., Parents as Teachers: Policy
implications for early school intervention, Paper presented at the 1997
annual meeting of the National Council on Family Relations, Crystal
City, VA, November, 1987; Parents as Teachers: Kindergarten screening
final report. Rutherford County, VA: Rutherford County Schools, May
1998.)
Immediate Child and Parent Outcomes
In a series of studies, SRI International examined the impact of
PAT with high needs families in California. The pilot evaluation looked
at the effects of PAT on predominantly Hispanic families in Salinas,
California, 67 of whom were randomly assigned to PAT and 46 to a
control group, Assessments of parent and child outcomes at or near the
children's first birthdays showed a consistent pattern of positive
outcomes for parents and children. PAT parents had more knowledge of
infant development and consistently scored higher on measures of
parenting behavior and attitudes. Although not statistically
significant, PAT children scored consistently higher on developmental
measures showing physical, self-help, social and academic/cognitive
skills.
(Wagner, M. and McElroy, M., Home, the first classroom: a pilot
evaluation of the northern California Parents as Teachers project.
Menlo Park, CA, SRI International, 1992.)
A second SRI study focused on the parents and three-year old
children of PAT ``graduates'' in National City, California. These
families were predominantly Hispanic, unemployed, with low education
levels. PAT children scored higher than comparison children on
developmental measures of physical, self-help, social, cognitive, and
communication skills. PAT parents showed significant increases in
parenting knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. PAT participation was
the only factor significantly related to child development outcomes.
(Wagner, M. Evaluation of the National City Parent As Teachers Program,
Menlo Park, CA; SRI International, 1993.)
Evaluations of the Effectiveness of the Born to Learn
Curriculum
Parents as Teachers' new Born to Learn Curriculum
was field-tested with families in St. Louis and Chicago for whom
parenting is a special challenge. The project demonstrated that
neuroscience information could be successfully incorporated into the
Parents as Teachers educational intervention program, and could produce
meaningful changes in the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of
parents for whom parenting typically is a greater challenge.
(McGilly, K., Winter, M., & Strube, M. (2000), Linking neuroscience and
education to improve parenting of young children. St. Louis, MO:
Parents as Teachers National Center, Inc., McGilly, K. (2000) Chicago
Born to Learn Neuroscience Project: Final report to
Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation. St. Louis, MO; Parents as
Teachers National Center, Inc.)
A multi-site evaluation by SRI International was recently conducted
with 667 low-income families in three metropolitan areas. Families with
infants up to 8 months of age were randomly assigned to either a
treatment group receiving PAT services or a no-treatment control group.
Outcomes from the first two years of this evaluation were reported in
summer 2001. The results indicated that participation in PAT is as
effective for the lowest-income families as for those with more
moderate incomes. Of particular note were the positive effects on
parenting behavior and the impacts on language- and literacy-promoting
behaviors for families with very low income. In families with very low
income, those who participated in PAT were more likely to read aloud to
their child and to tell stories, say nursery rhymes, and sing with
their child.
(Wagner M. and Spiker, D., Multisite Parents as Teachers Evaluation:
Experiences and Outcomes for Children and Families, 2001.)
Senator Bond. Thank you very much, Sharon.
Unfortunately, we are going to have very little time for
question and answers--I am going to have to leave in just a few
minutes--but there will be a session beginning at 3:30, I
understand, a roundtable discussion, that I hope as many of you
as possible can attend.
On behalf of the Parents as Teachers organization, I would
like to extend an invitation to any of you to visit us in
Missouri. In the last 6 or 7 years, I have visited 90 Parents
as Teachers sites, and talked to the parents and seen what is
going on, and as I said earlier in my comments from the dais, I
have learned a great deal, and we appreciate very much the good
work that is going on in all of these areas.
I mentioned to Rob Reiner that it is unfortunate that we
agree on everything, because this place thrives on controversy,
and one of the worst things you can do is having something that
everybody agrees on. If there is not a fight, it does not get
covered, and I do not see anybody picking any fights today, but
I certainly hope that the caliber of the testimony and the
information that you have provided will stir all of us to some
effective action.
I just wanted to bring out a couple of things from Sharon
Rhodes' testimony. In your written testimony, you refer to
Parents as Teachers as the ``universal access model.'' Would
you explain to us what you mean by ``universal access'' and
what the implications of this approach are?
Ms. Rhodes. One of the things that Parents as Teachers is
predicated on is that all families deserve and can benefit from
support. I think that Senator Bond, who was a part of the
program, and our current Governor Holden can both attest to
that, that families today oftentimes do not live in the
communities in which they grew up, so when they look at what is
going on in their home and with their parenting skills, we
really believe that when a baby cries in the middle of the
night, no matter what socioeconomic determinations that family
may have, that they can all benefit from support.
When we talk about universal access, we also want to note
that it is offered to all families especially in the State of
Missouri, and today we are serving about 47 percent of the age-
eligible population in that State. However, as I said, we have
a number of programs outside the State of Missouri. Many of
those programs due to funding restrictions, are targeted
programs, so we are finding that we are a program that works,
when we say universal access, with all families, no matter
where they live--rural, urban--and no matter what their family
demographics and situation might be.
But I also want to point out that when we say ``universal
access,'' it does not really necessarily apply that one size
fits all. We have developed curricula and we have developed
training that supports working with families of all
configurations. We have specific training and materials for
working with teen parents; we work with the Bureau of Indian
Affairs on 30 or so sites around the country; we work with
parents of children with special needs. So we are universal
access in the respect that we are open to all families. We have
developed materials that would support that development.
Senator Bond. One of the challenges, obviously, is that
this is offered to every school district in Missouri, and every
parent is eligible, yet only 47 percent apply. Some of that is
due to a lack of funds, and some of it is failure to
communicate. Do you see any particular population that is not
getting in there? A lot of people think that the very
successful two-wage-earner professional family may not need the
services of Parents as Teachers. Do you serve them as well as
those in the lowest socioeconomic category?
Ms. Rhodes. I think that is probably one of the best
features about Parents as Teachers is the fact that it helps to
reduce the stigma of a particular program. In other words, if
we see that the doctor down the street is engaged in this
program, we also want to be engaged in the program.
Typically, the funding restriction is what is causing us to
serve only 47 percent of the age-eligible population. Many of
our school districts do have waiting lists and are trying to
get involved in the home visits. When the parents are anxious
to become part of the Parents as Teachers program, we do extend
group meetings for them and written materials; it is just the
lack of people that we have who are trained to go into the
homes. We have heard much about the importance of training here
this morning.
One of the areas, though, that we are really struggling
with is the inner city. Certainly in the urban communities, we
are through the school systems, but oftentimes we feel that we
really need to be working in concert with the local WIC clinics
where we are finding parents who are particularly in need of
services that may not be working with the school systems.
Oftentimes, our parents have a preconceived notion of schools
as not being a place where they can feel welcome. So we reach
out into the community and go to the local clinics and to the
health care professionals in the community to help recruit
those families. But those families are oftentimes the families
that are the most challenging to recruit.
Senator Bond. Rob, do you have any idea what percentage of
children in California you have been able to reach so far with
your Proposition 10 efforts?
Mr. Reiner. We do not know exactly. We have a number of
different kinds of programs. The Kit for New Parents that I
alluded to reaches all 500,000 children who are born in
California. It is free to the parent or caregiver of every
child born in California. So that is a program that reaches all
the children.
The school readiness initiative that I also alluded to is
targeted at the lowest-performing schools. Because we have
limited funds, we cannot really provide school readiness
centers for every child. So there are different programs that
reach different numbers of children.
Senator Bond. Ms. Schaefer, the funding has really gone up
for Community Partnership programs, now to almost $100 million.
What portion of the eligible population are you able to reach?
Ms. Schaefer. It is 22,000 out of about 70,000, so it is
not a lot, but we see ourselves are part of the overall system,
the eligible system--Head Start, what services they provide;
what child care centers provide; what public schools provide.
So if you look at that percentage, it is probably more like 70
percent of the preschool population is getting services.
Senator Bond. Ms. Russell, with all of the work that you
have done through Child Care Services and getting more people
into it, which is a problem that Ms. Rhodes described, what is
your success rate or your service rate in North Carolina? What
percentage of your target population are you able to service?
Ms. Russell. We are targeting the early childhood work
force, so in any given year, we have at least one teacher in
almost 40 percent of the centers on scholarship to go back to
school. So it is a fairly good rate given the work force.
Senator Bond. I mean, going downstream to the actual
services, do you know----
Ms. Russell. In terms of reaching children?
Senator Bond. We recognize that the lack of teachers is one
of the limiting factors, so where are you in terms of the
percentage of service?
Ms. Russell. In terms of where we are with reaching
children, in our Smart Start and T.E.A.C.H. and comprehensive
initiatives in early childhood in North Carolina, I would say
that in any given year we are reaching in various ways, as Rob
said in California, in various ways. Most of the children in
our State who are under 5, some get multiple services, they are
in early childhood programs, they get home visiting, they get
all sorts of developmental screenings, and other children get
limited services depending on our ability to fund those.
We are a long way from having the resources to intensively
reach all children, and that is the issue, that we can do a
little bit, but we cannot do enough.
Senator Bond. Well, I think that is the problem, number
one, designing good programs, making sure we have the teachers
and the parent educators there, and bringing the children into
the program. That is one area--Rob, with your skills--where we
need help.
I have found in talking with a lot of parent educators
around the State that the very best sales force we have for
early childhood education is the parents of those who are in
the program. If the program is working, we ask them to please
reach out to your friends, your coworkers, your neighbors, and
tell them that the program is good, because as we said earlier,
many people in some instances, in some groups, do not trust the
school system, and they want to hear from somebody who is
benefiting from the program.
That is just one of the many challenges that we face. I
very much appreciate your participation today. We hope that you
can participate in the 3:30 workshop.
The record will be open for 7 days to supplement, and I
know that we have a number of questions that I was not able to
get through, so we will submit questions in writing and would
ask that you respond to those. And for those who are interested
in this whole important area, if you have any really brilliant
thoughts that have not been expressed today, I hope that you
will submit them for the record to the committee, because this
is a vitally important area, and this record should be a most
important one.
Mr. Reiner. I just want to add one thing in terms of the
services and the percentage of children receiving services. To
my knowledge, there is nobody in the K through 12 system who
does not get education. We all agree on that. There is a
fraction of the children ages zero to 5 who get early childhood
services, but 100 percent of all children get K through 12
offered to them. So that is the context in which you have to
think of this, that we need the children from zero to 5 to be
getting the same kind of full access to services that children
K through 12 get.
Senator Bond. Thank you very much for those comments.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation.
The hearing is adjourned.
[Additional material follows.]
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL
Child Care Services Association,
Chapel Hill, NC,
February 12, 2002.
Hon. Christopher J. Dodd,
U.S. Senate,
Washington, D.C. 20515.
Dear Senator Bond: I am responding further to your question about
who our efforts were reaching and whether we were reaching parents and
children sufficiently to make a difference.
Because my testimony focused on the early childhood workforce and
efforts to improve the education, compensation and retention of that
workforce as a strategy to improve quality for children, I did not
fully understand nor adequately answer your question of me at the time
of the hearing.
The answer to your question is that we are not reaching a
sufficient number of children in North Carolina with high quality early
childhood education experiences. This is demonstrated by the fact that
we have over 20,000 children of low income parents on waiting lists for
child care assistance. Research tells us that while these parents wait
for help, their children are often shuttled between various make-shift
child care arrangements, most of which are not of high quality.
We also know that the quality of licensed child care is not
adequate in our state to make the difference for these children. In
fact, in some of our counties not a single teacher working in child
care has a two or four year degree in any subject, let alone early
childhood education or child development. Overall, less than one-
quarter of the workforce has a two or four year degree. Turnover rates,
while dropping, are still 31% per year. This means that almost one-
third of the infants, toddlers and preschoolers face the loss of their
teachers each year. For infants and toddlers, this is particularly
alarming, as it is critical that they build trusting relationships with
adults to support their positive brain development. We have a long way
to go to boost the system of early childhood care and education to a
level that ensures uniform access and uniform high quality. Thank you.
Sue Russell,
Executive Director.
[Whereupon, at 12:54 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]