New York City offers a model for early education


  • August 23, 2016
  • /   Reggie Dogan
  • /   education

Students at Jamison Street Preschool in west Pensacola engage in center-based, interactive learning throughout the day. Credit: Shannon Nickinson.

During the first few years of life, a child learns so much about themselves and the world around them, and parents are their first teachers.

Parents, at their best, teach their children how to speak, how to walk, how to feed themselves. They teach them the alphabet, shapes and colors, and in some instances how to count and spell very simple words.

But for healthy development, children need active stimulation and interaction with others. This is where early childhood education is the most beneficial.

In trying to identify what quality early learning should look like, it’s not always easy to find a model for success.

But New York City has moved to the forefront in offering some useful examples and good ideas for others to consider and emulate.

In the last two years the Big Apple has made tremendous strides in accommodating all of the city’s public school 4-year-olds in high-quality preschool classrooms.

In the fourth of a series of articles about public preschools, The Atlantic in “The Under-Estimation of America’s Preschool Teachers,” highlights the importance of recruiting and retaining qualified, certified teachers and the shift to make preschool an integral part of the public school system.

Between the 2013-14 school year and the 2015-16 school year, according to The Atlantic, New York City converted thousands of preschool seats from half-day to full day and also added thousands of brand new seats for a total new enrollment of 49,360 full-day seats. They also added 2,000 teachers.

At a time when leaders and educators across the country are debating the merits of early education, cities like New York are moving ahead with plans and programs to improve early education.

In President Obama's last State of the Union address, he proposed plans for universal preschool, which could help bridge the educational gap for young kids of different backgrounds. About two out of three 4-year-olds and two out of five 3-year-olds currently attend preschool, and the numbers are rising.

The growth in preschool participation has been fueled primarily by three factors: Research has revealed important brain development occurs in the early years of life; there is compelling evidence that preschool has long-term benefits for children, and preschool helps prepare children for the increased demands of kindergarten. Children from low-income families are less likely to attend preschool than kids from middle- and upper-income families, however, and this widens the achievement gap in kindergarten.

In New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio also has made universal pre-K a centerpiece of his new administration.

As the Atlantic article points out, the city’s experience with improving and expanding its existing preschool teaching force could provide a good test case for other cities or for the country as a whole, were the United States to pursue a national universal preschool program.

Lilian Mongeau writes:

Though many aspects of the city are unique, New York City’s internal diversity resembles the country as a whole more closely than nearly any other single city. It’s also very large, so officials here have had to do everything “at scale,” meaning they needed to create systems that would work for thousands of teachers and tens of thousands of children—not just a few hundred. Right now, as a country, the U.S. is way behind New York City when it comes to pre-K. The majority of the country’s preschool teachers and child-care workers are poorly paid and under-educated. Changing that would be necessary to the success of any attempt to expand preschool options and improve quality on a national level.

Investing in high-quality prekindergarten can help achieve many social and economic development objectives including strengthening economic growth, increasing incomes, creating jobs, reducing poverty, alleviating inequality, improving education and decreasing crime.

Research shows that kindergarten readiness is among the most important measures of a child’s academic progress. Children who are behind in kindergarten are more likely to be behind in third-grade reading, and they rarely catch up throughout their school careers.

That’s why kindergarten readiness is among the 16 measures in the Pensacola Metro Dashboard. The dashboard was developed with the University of West Florida to provide a snapshot of the community’s educational, economic and social well-being.

And it shows that only 66 percent of Escambia’s children are ready for kindergarten. That makes it critically important that we invest in those children before they get to school. That means making quality preschool and early childhood education a top priority in our community.

A major component of having a quality child-care program is the teachers, and if you don’t offer a lucrative or fair salary for them, then you won’t always get the best teachers. Having quality teachers is as important in preschool as it is in kindergarten and beyond.

Contrary to misconceptions, preschool is not daycare. Preschool is a child’s first formal learning environment, while daycare is often childcare without an emphasis on learning.

Preschool focuses on cognitive and social development by stimulating a child’s curiosity and imagination. Children learn through sharing toys, taking turns, and interacting with their teachers and each other.

Kindergarten classrooms are always busy places that aim to mix hands-on activities with learning. Photo credit: Shannon Nickinson

Kindergarten classrooms are always busy places that aim to mix hands-on activities with learning. Photo credit: Shannon Nickinson

The classrooms in high-quality preschools are lively, brightly decorated with posters of the alphabet, maps, number tables and student artwork. Classrooms must be interactive and stimulating to foster an exciting learning environment. Teacher-student ratios are also closely monitored to ensure close interactions, and class sizes are kept relatively small.

A major component of having a quality child-care program is the teachers, and if you don’t offer a lucrative or fair salary for them, then you won’t always get the best teachers. Having quality teachers is as important in preschool as it is in kindergarten and beyond.

The Altantic reported:

Two million adults, mostly women, care for 12 million children under the age of 5 in homes and centers across the country every day, according to the 2016 Early Childhood Workforce Index by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, a think tank at the University of California, Berkeley. Just over a third of the people teaching preschool in centers or public schools hold bachelor’s degrees. Home-based care providers are far more likely to hold only a high-school diploma or some college credits but no degree.

The U.S. Department of Education and Health Services co-released a report that identifies striking gaps between the pay offered to kindergarten teachers vs. those who teach preschool or early childhood education.

The median hourly wage is $9.77 nationwide for childcare workers, which equates to $20,320 annually. Preschool teachers earn $13.73 hourly, or $28,570 a year, and kindergarten teachers make $25.31 an hour, which is $52,650 a year.

The median hourly wage in the Pensacola metro area is $9.27 for childcare workers, which comes to $19,281 a year, according to the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity. The state median wage is $9.55, or $19,864 a year.

Clearly, money is a serious impediment to improving an expanding early education. It would be costly to pay kindergarten teachers on the same level as K-12 teachers.

But communities and cities like New York are finding ways to make the investments in children at an early age, and while the costs are high, the returns often are higher.

Marcy Whitebook, the director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, who has been focused on this group of workers for three decades, told the Atlantic that the very fact there is debate about qualifications for teachers of young children is evidence of how little the country values their work.

“What’s perplexing to me is: How come we haven’t moved?” she said. “There were all these excuses you could make 40 years ago about why we were stuck. But now, there’s no excuse.”

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