LearnmoreMN Blog

Early Childhood Education: Head Start is Not Enough

By Kate Bristol, April Guest Blogger

Macalester College — where I am a student — convened a Mayor's Forum in February to discuss best practices in education. The policymakers and educators who attended help shape the educational systems in many Minnesotan towns. One of the topics covered by the Forum was pre-kindergarten programs — which are vital in putting kids on a path to school success.

Data shows that investment in pre-kindergarten programs pays off, but we have yet to invest in these programs statewide. While districts claim that they lack funding, combining federal funding with an investment from local corporations would be sufficient to start up a pre-k classroom. We know what to do; we know how to do it; now all we have to do is take action.

To maximize high-quality preschool access for low-income students, I suggest the following changes to the federal preschool program:

1. Assist suboptimal programs to meet these standards.
2. Provide funding to hire qualified teachers and for ongoing teacher education.
3. Recruit the 40 percent of eligible children who are not currently enrolled in the Head Start.
4. Expand eligibility criteria of Head Start to include children of families living at the 125 percent Federal Poverty Level
5. Support recruitment of all eligible three-year-olds.
6. Mandate public preschool programs in all 50 states to provide greater access to children of families living at 150 percent
7. Establish minimum quality standards for all public preschool programs to improve kindergarten readiness.

Paying for the approximately five million additional children who would become eligible under this proposal may seem staggering. However, state and federal governments would share the financial burdens. The long-term benefits to our society of high-quality preschools are enormous. There is an astounding benefit-to-cost ratio of seventeen to one. There would be higher rates of education, employment, income, and marriage; and lower rates of delinquency, crime and drug use.

As a nation, we cannot afford to do otherwise.

Issues Before the Achievement Gap

By Josie Johnson, March 2008 Guest Blogger

On May 17 we will celebrate the 54th year since the Supreme Court settled the question in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other tangible factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunity? “We believe that it does,” the Court said.

Thurgood Marshall, the chief NAACP Legal Defense lawyer at the time of the decision, believed that the American Dream could be made to work for Black people as well as whites. He did not believe that the system was flawed and deeply etched with the effects of segregation and the laws of segregation which had denied Black children equal education opportunities.

Some historians have written that Marshall, the NAACP lawyers and the Black community were convinced that the Supreme Court decision guaranteed Black children the education their parents and communities had suffered and died for since 1865.

The dream of true emancipation through education continues to elude our Black community. It has become clear that the issues facing Black parents and Black communities are larger than simply the condition of the schools or transportation. They are more subtle and insidious.

In many schools, Black children are taught by teachers who believe them to be inferior and, therefore, treat them that way. The same teachers teach white children that they are superior. Curiously, the degree to which Black children are experiencing this from teachers has increased since the enforcement of Brown. Many Black children are forced to fight their way rather than learn their way through school in an effort to gain some sense of self-respect.

In many communities, experienced Black teachers have been removed from classrooms with large numbers of Black students where they served as models and have either been “promoted” to an administrative position or reassigned to a white majority school.

Furthermore, teachers are offered pay incentives classified as combat pay, to accept teaching assignments in schools in Black majority neighborhoods. All of these behaviors and policies perpetuate institutionalized racism which is etched deeply into the American social fabric.

One year after the historic May 1954 decision, renowned scholar and historian, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, predicted that it would force Black people to face:

…a cruel dilemma…with successfully mixed schools they know what their children must suffer for years from southern white teachers, from white students who sit beside them and under school authorities from janitors to superintendents, who hate and despise them….They must eventually surrender race ‘solidarity’ and the idea of American Negro culture to the concept of world humanity, above race and nation. This is the price of liberty. This is the cost of oppression.

Unfortunately, Dr. Du Bois was accurate in predicting the experiences Black children would have in desegregated schools.

In today’s system our children are not being taught to function successfully in society. Their learning has been replaced by emphasis on the achievement gap. The U.S. Department of Education describes this gap as “the difference in academic performance between different ethnic groups.” The Department also states that the achievement gap is a multifaceted problem that requires examination from multiple perspectives. Some educators suggest it is the difference between a child’s potential and his/her actual achievement.

In my judgment, the challenge to help Black students reach that potential is, in part, the lack of knowledge about and respect for the Black student’s community’s relationship/history with education.  Neither the teachers nor our children know their history. They don’t know who they are, their relationship to education or, from whence they have come.

The gap is caused by disparities in information, resources, instruction, belief, commitment, quality and care. Our children are given medication, assigned to special classes for emotional or academic deficiencies, allowed to fall short of their potential rather than reach their potential.

We must pull together as a nation, if we are to survive. We must save all of our children and help them become the best they can be.

The society needs all its children to become successful, productive, happy citizens.

A different kind of glass ceiling…

By Willy Tully, February 2008 Guest Blogger

The barriers that prevent Minnesota students from enrolling in college are often erected well before the senior year of high school.

A study, conducted for the Minnesota State Legislature by Ghere, Moore, and Schelske in 1999, shows that, "students begin self-selecting for high academic achievement as early as third grade, and courses that students take in middle school and early in high school are closely related to future college attendance."

Choices relating to academic rigor and extracurricular participation, as well as peer influence, shape a student’s perception of what they can achieve. At the same time, reserved space in honors courses, the cost of summer programs, and a lack of knowledge about (or access to) postsecondary choices exacerbate the innate barriers. Underperforming middle school students are funneled into high school programs that are unchallenging and that will not provide the requisite spark needed to excite the passion for learning present in every young person.

In actuality, students are constructing their own ceiling as they progress through a K-12 education. The unfortunate parallel is that our educational system is designed to reinforce these limiting "self" selections.

This makes me angry, and I hope it makes you angry too.

Schools are under-funded, teachers and counselors are under-paid, there are abhorrent socioeconomic and racial disparities in education, and schools located just minutes from one another are miles apart in the quality and breadth of educational programming they can offer. But now is not the time to despair. Indeed, now is the time to repair and rebuild. We must champion community cooperation – we must be pioneers for freedom and equality in education.

With the tools and the might, we must reach up and shatter that glass ceiling, for the limitations posed on individuals prevent this community from reaching its truest potential – from reaching greatness. And greatness is possible.