Building A Bigger, Stronger Preschool
January 6, 2012
Classic children’s literature often conveys parables in age appropriate ways. Gerrit Westervelt and Carrie Schwerner turn to the Three Little Pigs in their recent commentary in online edition of Education Week to make the case for strong systems of early education and care.
To withstand the attack of the big, bad wolf, one pig built a house out of straw, the second built a house of wood, and the third built a house of bricks. All three undertook the same project and had the same goal, but they experienced vastly different results. Two houses (and their occupants in some tellings) sadly succumbed to the wolf. Only the house of brick remained standing as a tribute to that pig’s foresight and hard work.
After 20 years of building education systems around standards-based reform, poor kids remain too often stuck with the least-prepared teachers; attend school in dilapidated buildings; and lack access to the top-notch preschool, child-care, and family-support programs that can help them start school on par with more-advantaged children.
In the story of the three little pigs, each pig whose house was felled by the wolf was able to run to safety to the next home until all of the pigs were together in the solidly built brick house. This is where the story stops working for early education. The children whose educational homes are collapsing don’t find refuge in the strongest schools. Consider some of the numbers cited by Westervelt and Schwerner:
Donald Hernandez of the City University of New York highlights the consequences of a weak learning foundation: His “Double Jeopardy” report finds that one in four 3rd graders who have lived in poverty and are not reading at grade level will fail to finish high school by age 19. That is more than six times the rate for proficient 3rd grade readers.
To follow the metaphor, children in Massachusetts who don’t have the strongest house (i.e. preschool) are likely to be consumed by the “wolves” of illiteracy, lower graduation rates, and economic insecurity.
So what’s the moral of the story?
Westervelt and Schwerner go on to call for the types of early education reform embedded in the new federal Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge grant initiative.
Massachusetts, it was announced on December 16, secured a $50 million grant to build a brick preschool big enough to accommodate the more than 30,000 children ages 0-5 in each of 17 high need communities who are not documented as receiving any early learning services outside of the home before Kindergarten. While the details of the four-year, comprehensive reform effort still need to be worked out, what we do know is that Raising A Reader MA will play a role in creating the foundation for the preschool infrastructure by providing our high quality, high impact family literacy instruction in communities across the Commonwealth. By December 2015, when the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge grant wraps up, we are hoping to have the biggest, strongest preschool house for as many Massachusetts children as possible. Stay tuned for the end of this story!
Learn more about Gerrit Westervelt and Carrie Schwerner’s recommendations for early education reform in Education Week online.