Earlier this week, President
Obama’s State of the Union address focused heavily on outlining America’s
future; crucial to this outline was investing in equality of opportunity for
America’s young children. Quality childhood education programs are cost-effective
and a proactive attempt at curtailing educational inequality head-on, according
to many human capital experts, such as Nobel Laureate Dr. James Heckman.
Much research suggests that
low-income children come to school already systematically disadvantaged than
their peers that are higher-income. Often, low-income children are exposed to
significantly fewer words than children with higher-income parents. This is
nothing to say about the quality of low-income parents, this is however to
point to the fact that there may be some inherent and unseen (but vocal)
disadvantages working against poorer children when they come to school.
These cyclical “poverty-traps” negatively
affect low-income performance, compared to their higher-income peers in third grade (many child-education experts identify third grade as crucial
for predicting future educational performance). However, these effects are often curtailed when low to
moderate-income children start school, if children are enrolled in high-quality
early childhood programs such as JUMP Start. Less economically advantaged students
can perform equally well, there may just need to be consistent high-quality efforts to maintain the benefits.
President Obama, at the State of
the Union, affirmed the federal government’s commitment to help states expand
access to high-quality early education. In DC, Mayor Gray is already outspoken
proponent of universal early childhood access; there have been efforts to
increase high quality early childhood centers in low-income neighborhoods. One
such example is the Educare opening in Ward 7, which seeks to service children
and infants.
DC VOICE is committed to seeing
that early childhood initiatives are promoted within the District of Columbia,
to benefit our entire community. One of our recent projects, Ready Kids, was
conducted assessed how prepared young children are when they enter schools. Using
the District’s five readiness indicators (Social, Cognitive, Physical Health,
Emotional Appropriateness and Language Development), we conducted surveys of kindergarten
teachers, counselors and nurses.
Participants’ responses were
collected and the aggregate data was recently publicly released as part of our
Ready Kids project.
Written by: Claire Bocage
