Morton Kondrake is absolutely right on the importance of early childhood education, though he is somewhat behind the curve when he talks about the growing body of evidence showing the importance of early childhood education. The evidence has been there for a long time. The late Joan Beck, national columnist for the Chicago Tribune, was writing about this 30 years ago. (See, for example, her book How to Raise a Brighter Child* and so many of her newspaper columns over the years. Her book was one of the reasons we decided to send our children, now 22 and 20, to Montessori schools as soon they turned three years old.)
But Mr. Kondrake is wrong when he bemoans the failure of California’s Proposition 82, which would have committed California to provide preschool education for all of its 4-year-olds. Early childhood education is important, but just as important as providing it, is how it is provided. If all we are going to do is to extend down the current public school system to children ages five and four and, hopefully, even three, early childhood education will not help the poor and disadvantaged. Too many of them have bad public schools now. If these same public school systems are the ones providing early childhood education, the poor and disadvantaged will get bad early childhood education, too.
What we need to do is to try providing early childhood education in a different way. Maybe we could follow a model more like college education. There could be lots of options, private, parochial and public. Parents would be provided the financial resources to be able to send their children to the school they choose. And because we are talking about pre-school, as opposed to college (where the next step is a paying job), the financial aid would be in the form of grants, not loans.
The teacher unions would probably complain, but we can correctly tell them we are not talking about taking away the jobs of their members – or affecting their members in any way. This is a new program; it will not affect their members. We are just helping children; poor children, disadvantaged children.
Of course, the liberals and the teachers unions will say that the parents do not have the information or the experience to know where to send their kids. I disagree. Unlike the liberals and the teachers unions, I do not think the parents of these students are dumb. Maybe they do not know as much about educational theory as the teachers, but they know more than any teacher about the one most important thing when it comes to picking a school for their child: they know more about their own child. And I trust them to make the right choice for their child.
The other reason we need to let the parents decide and to get private and parochial schools involved, is because we need to get this done now. We cannot wait for the public school bureaucracy to get to it. It would take too long. Involving private schools and parochial schools, along with the public schools, will get more early childhood education places out there quicker.
We need to help the kids now, not when the government bureaucracies finally get around to doing it. We have failed too many poor children for too long. The public schools cannot get this done. But parents, given the resources they need so they can help their own children, can.
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* If you are interested in How to Raise a Brighter Child, you might want to look at one of the used editions listed on Amazon.com. I am not familiar with the 1999 edition. We read the 1975 edition.
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