By ANDREW SANTIS

STAFF WRITER

In his State of the Union Address on Feb. 12, President Obama proposed working with every state to “make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America” to make sure “none of our children start the race of life already behind.”

They are, however, already behind. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ranked 38 developed countries by the number of four-year-olds enrolled in an early childhood education program. The U.S. placed 28th, well below the OECD average.

Funding for state-funded pre-kindergarten, which only 40 states have, decreased by $60 million nationwide, and only 12 states provide sufficient per-child funding to meet the quality standards for preschool education. In addition, Head Start, the federal program for children from low-income families that began under President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty,” serves about 10 percent of the nation’s population of three and four-year-olds, and only about half of eligible four-year-olds and less than half of eligible three-year-olds.

Most damning of all is that Head Start has proven ineffective after the first year. On Dec. 18, 2012, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that there were no significant differences between children who were in a Head Start program and those who were not by the time they were in the third grade. Even though the U.S. spends more than $8,000 per child in the Head Start program, the U.S. is still failing somewhere.

The solution to this crisis could be found in childhood development programs in Latin America. Brazil’s Bolsa Familia and Mexico’s Oportunidades are two of these programs. Both Oportunidades and Bolsa Familia are Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs, which means that the government transfers money and in-kind resources to poor families with one or more school-age children on the condition that those families fulfill certain commitments related to their children’s education, health and nutrition. In Brazil, for example, families receive monthly cash payments of up to about 200 reals (approximately $102) only if their children do not miss more than 15 percent of classes. If a child gets caught missing more than that, payment is suspended for the whole family.

In Mexico, Oportunidades increases payments as children progress to higher grades. The education component of Bolsa Familia begins at age five, while in Mexico it begins in preschool and continues through high school. The results have been overwhelming. Both in Brazil and in Mexico, the number of people in extreme poverty declined, there were significant positive health and nutrition effects and, most importantly, overall enrollment in school increased.

14 million Brazilians have benefited from Bolsa Familia and four million Mexicans from Oportunidades. Many Americans could benefit from a program similar to these in the United States. It serves as a starting point to improve the U.S.’s early childhood education system.

Opportunity NYC is based on Bolsa Familia, and provides families with the opportunity to earn rewards if parents attend school meetings and students pass standardized tests. Such initiatives can be started for families of preschool children based on family participation in classroom activities and health and nutrition awareness, for example.

Although low-income families would benefit the most from a CCT program since their children are more at risk of falling behind in school, they should not be the only targets. The goal is to ensure school readiness for all children, regardless of their socio-economic background. According to Libby Doggett, deputy director of the Pew Center on the States, and Albert Wat, project manager for Pre-K Now, offering early education only for poor children will result in a segregated structure.

At Fordham, the Jumpstart program works toward preparing children to succeed in kindergarten by developing language and literacy skills with children at preschool programs in the Bronx. The High Scope Educational Research Foundation found that Jumpstart children outperformed comparison children in the areas of language, literacy and socio-emotional development after participation in the Jumpstart program.

These positive effects continue even after children leave the Jumpstart program, as Jumpstart children outperform their non-Jumpstart peers in language, literacy, and initiative skills a year after they participated in the Jumpstart program. “There is obviously room for growth in our educational system,” Lauren Brodsky, Jumpstart Site Manager at Fordham, said.
“But it is such an important step in the right direction to be discussing the need for high levels of quality in early childhood education and care.”

When more than 30 percent of low-income children and 17 percent of children from middle income families have no familiarity with print, when 60 percent of low-income children and more than a third of middle-income children do not know the alphabet and when only six percent of poor and 18 percent of middle-income children understand numerical sequence, something, anything, needs to be done. If we want our four year olds to succeed in life we need to support them in preschool, and prepare them for kindergarten and beyond. Like President Obama said, “let’s give our kids that chance.”

Andrew Santis, GSB ’16, is a Corp Member in the Jumpstart program at Fordham and is from Flushing, NY.