Kids first, or leftovers? State needs sustainable early learning programs

By Chris Carman

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After the flood of 2008, a young mother brought her 3-year-old son to the child development center where I work. They'd been homeless for several weeks and had to stretch their limited resources as far as possible.

This young mom shared the following wisdom about setting priorities during tough times: “To make food last, I feed my son first and then I eat what he's left on his plate.”

As Iowans, we've faced tough times before. In 1986, on the heels of the farm crisis, Gov. Terry Branstad established a “Kindergarten-PreKindergarten Taskforce” to envision a better future for our youngest children. I was fortunate enough to have been appointed by the governor to this group. Recommendations from the task force formed the basis for the At-Risk Preschool Program (now called “Shared Visions”) which Gov. Branstad signed into law in 1988 and expanded in the 1990s.

In tough times, we must prioritize. If forced to triage for economic reasons, I'd agree with Gov. Branstad's decision to limit state-funded preschool to low-income children. Our first responsibility should be to provide high-quality early childhood services to low-income children who would otherwise enter kindergarten with huge deficits in skills, language and experience. High-quality early intervention for this group of children produces tremendous long-term savings to society.

However, I believe that Gov. Branstad has left two key factors out of his proposed fiscal year 2012 budget for low-income preschoolers:

l Quality program standards shown by research to be critical for long-term results. At their core, quality standards are about accountability. We should all want early learning programs to be accountable for quality and results.

l Sufficient funding to provide low-income preschoolers with the intensity and duration of services described in research. It isn't enough to know which medicine (or intervention) is needed; it must also be offered in the right dosage for a sufficient length of time.

Of greatest concern is the fact that the governor's proposed budget would cut existing services for low-income preschool children, including:

l 65 percent less funding for the Preschool Tuition Assistance Program for low-income children.

l 45 percent less funding for the Shared Visions Preschool Program.

l 20 percent less funding for the Early Childhood Iowa “School Ready” program for low-income children.

l 10 percent less funding for parent education for low-income families with young children.

The governor's budget would reduce the state's overall investment in education during the years when children's brains grow the most. Gov. Branstad does propose a “preschool voucher program” for low-income children, but he has not put forth any quality standards or research-based models for these services. There could be real merit in consolidating a range of existing programs into a carefully conceived, single coordinated system. However, nothing revealed about the voucher proposal, thus far, meets this description.

Iowa's children deserve something that our political system hasn't offered to date: a bipartisan early childhood “blueprint” that details a sustainable, researched-based approach for state investments in early learning - something to stick with in good times and bad.

Both political parties should participate in developing such a plan and both parties should pledge to support the resulting plan going into the future. Young children, parents and early childhood programs are all harmed by dramatic policy shifts back and forth from one administration (or legislative session) to another.

As individuals, almost all of us - Republicans and Democrats - would place the needs of a single vulnerable child above our own. However, our challenge now is to bring this same ethic to state-level decisions which affect all of our children, as well as Iowa's future.

Chris Carman has worked in the early childhood field since 1975 and has been the director of Linn County Child Development Center in Cedar Rapids since 1999. Comments: christophercar

man@hotmail.com