Early Childhood Education
Educational programs for children prior to their entering elementary school.
Any educational program servicing children in the preschool years, employing trained adults, and administering a program designed to enhance later school performance might be considered an example of early childhood education (ECE). However, the original impetus behind what is now a heterogeneous collection of programs was the desire to provide young children living in poverty—and sometimes their families—with assistance to minimize the risks to their later academic growth and development. Probably the most well-known public early childhood program in the United States is the Head Start Program. Many others fall under the auspices of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
Title I preschool (i.e., prekindergarten) programs operate under a system of federal, state, and local cooperation. Local educational agencies apply to state agencies for program approval, and programs are funded with federal money. Local programs are monitored by state agencies but have the freedom to choose their own educational approaches. Head Start programs are funded by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, providing grants directly to community organizations. Private centers are tuition-based and may receive assistance from private foundations, or hold contracts to serve a certain number of children through Title I or other need-based programs.
There are several models of service delivery. Some programs are child centered, offering educational programs to groups of three- to five-year-olds in schools or other centers. Adjunct social services may also be available. Specialized services (e.g., health, speech-language therapy, occupational therapy) may be administered through the local public school {seeEducation for all Handicapped Children Act) or through other providers. Head Start programs, for example, are mandated to provide education, health and social services, and parent services.
Another type of program is one that is more family focused. Such programs provide family support services often through home visits or parent education centers. Their goal is to educate and nurture parents to provide more appropriate stimulation and care for the child at home.
Still other programs attempt to meet both child- and family-centered goals. They may provide center-based care and education for children while parents attend school themselves or obtain job training. A major objective of these programs is to help families move out of poverty, ameliorating some of the risk factors that necessitated early childhood education in the first place.
What evidence is there to suggest that ECE offers children a "head start" in their academic careers? Several model programs around the United States—the Abecedarian Project in North Carolina, Houston Parent Child Center, Milwaukee Project, and Syracuse Family Development Research Program, for example—have provided some answers. Studies indicate improvement in IQ scores and achievement among children who attend model programs compared to their peers who do not. At least in some projects, gains in IQ persist into adolescence when children had been enrolled in programs offering full-day educational child care. The most uniform effects, however, tend to be in areas of school performance.
Graduates of ECE programs are more likely to progress through their subsequent school years without being retained in grade (i.e., repeating), are less likely to be enrolled in special education classes, and appear to be more likely to graduate from high school compared to other children from similar backgrounds who did not attend early childhood programs They also are judged by their elementary school teachers to be better adjusted and seem to show more pride in their achievements compared to their unenrolled peers.
Of course, these results are from model programs. Do the benefits extend to programs that are more typical of what is available in most communities? Studies indicate that they do when the community programs meet basic guidelines for quality (e.g., teacher to child ratio, staff training), but the benefits—while still sizable—are somewhat dampened. Ellen Frede has reported that the most effective programs are those that offer small class size, ongoing support to teachers, ongoing communication with parents or guardians, and curriculum content and methods that are not too different from what the child will encounter in their early school years.
Doris Entwisle has pointed out that experience in elementary school contributes substantially to sustaining the benefits of early childhood education. Even a temporary cognitive boost can enable a child to take full advantage of experiences in the primary grades, prevent placement in lower tracks, avoid grade retention, improve the expectations
of teachers, and generally smooth the transition to the early school years. The effects begin to accumulate and may be enhanced by schools that provide supports such as small class size in the early grades, which has been shown to offer advantages to students that persist even when they move into larger classes in later grades.
Changes in the lives of children and families have contributed to the expansion of ECE efforts in recent years. Increasing numbers of single parent families and families in which both parents are employed have prompted the need for more private programs. In 1990, an estimated 60% of children in wealthy families were enrolled in some type of preschool education.
Children of wealth, however, are not the ones who will benefit most from their ECE experiences. Wealthy families frequently have resources to provide their children with educational advantages right in the home, including stimulating toys, games, books, computer programs, and access to play spaces, as well as basic safety, nutrition, and health care. Families who are living in poverty, however, often do not have such resources. In fact, these families frequently face multiple risks stemming from their poverty, including neighborhood violence, less than adequate nutrition, and poor health care. Therefore, it is not surprising that early childhood education offers the most to children of poverty, those who otherwise have the least.
While the need for further investment in public programs is becoming increasingly evident due to the continuing increase in the number of children living in poverty, 1993 saw only about 35% of children from poor families enrolled in ECE programs. According to Donald Hernandez, the number of children under the age of five living in poverty remained at about 25% from 1949 through the 1970s. By 1993, however, the number of preschoolers living in poverty had climbed to 33% with another 15% of these children living in near poverty conditions, while the Head Start program was able to serve less than one-third of eligible children.
Although there is resistance to providing full funding for federal early childhood initiatives, W. Steven Barnett points out that the estimated national cost of failing to offer two years of quality ECE is approximately $100,000 for each child born into poverty, or $400 billion for all impoverished children under the age of five. By comparison, Barnett estimates the cost of full ECE funding at $25 or $30 billion per year, a substantial portion of the annual federal budget, but a fraction of the eventual costs of not offering ECE to each poverty-stricken child who may benefit from it. The demographic trends suggest that early childhood education has become—and will continue to be—an important aspect of achieving an educational standard applicable to all youth.
Books
Consortium for Longitudinal Studies. As the Twig Is Bent: Lasting Effects of Preschool Programs. Hillsdale, NJ: Earlbaum, 1983.
Hernandez, D. J. America's Children: Resources from Government, Family, and the Economy. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1993.
Schorr, L. Within Our Reach: Breaking the Cycle of Disadvantage. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
Woodill, G. A., Bernhard, J., and Prochner, L., eds. International Handbook of Early Childhood Education. New York: Garland, 1992.
Zigler, E., and S. Muenchow. Head Start: The Inside Story of America's Most Successful Educational Experiment. New York: Basic, 1992.
