<p>Author's point is that there has always been a gap --- but the gap is getting bigger, quicker. Here in PA that is largely due to the economic slump and the draconian education policies that have cut 870 million (not a typo!) from public education in the state. If you are upper middle class and above, Jr just gets private lessons or a private school. If not, you are at the mercy of public schools with no funding who are making cuts of every imaginable kind in order to stay open.</p>
<p>It’s horrible. Why are they making those cuts, greenbutton? Have they had a heavy decrease in revenue intake because of the recession? Or do they have pension issues? Or what?</p>
<p>There is no amount of money that can ensure that all children have similarly cognitively stimulating early childhoods. Unless the state is going to take custody.</p>
<p>There is also a finite supply of money and a seemingly infinite number of good things to spend it on.</p>
<p>Yes, it is unfortunate in Pa. There are a lot of small state universities, but many lack the variety of programs that Penn State or Pitt offer. My younger son just turned down his acceptance at Penn State to go to a private school with a much higher price tag, but which offered us amazing financial aid. </p>
<p>Penn State (and Pitt) are the best available in-state options for Pa. residents. Yet the cost is ridiculously high compared to many other states. My son was also accepted to U. Delaware and U. Maryland, where the OOS costs are not even that much different than Penn State’s IS costs, once you take into account merit scholarships, which they offer (although UMD is not great about this). And their IS cost for their residents is amazing.</p>
<p>What was striking this year was that Penn State came up with $6000.00 merit scholarships that they were offering primarily to OOS students on a seemingly random basis. Perhaps this was to counteract fewer apps than last year, given the scandal. But it was kind of a slap in the face to IS residents.</p>
<p>Maggie, my parents and I were amazed when I was able to attend CMU for less than my brother at Pitt.</p>
<p>My schools in a pretty good district in a suburb of Philly were also really interesting. I went to an older elementary school, where there wasn’t a whole lot of money being reinvested (most of it went to the new schools they were building). The only real upgrade we got was a refurbished cafetorium (while at the same time classes were instead being held in trailers outside the school).</p>
<p>I remember loving my HS chemistry class where we didn’t have fume hoods (or windows…it was a fully internal classroom). Everyone would leave the class lightheaded. One day we found a hole in the bottom of a cabinet that lead down to the administrative offices. We brought in a big fan and funneled all of the fumes down there. The solution after five years of trying to get /something/ done? No more labs that produced smells (aka no labs other than boiling water).</p>
<p>Our school district still needs to cut about 4 million from the budget and we’re already at or very near bare bones. Class sizes are higher as retiring teachers are only replaced if there’s an absolute need. Field trips are self-funded or not happening. Copies are limited. New books - not happening. That’s all before the cuts.</p>
<p>Pension and healthcare issues, recession issues, the fall in house prices all come into play.</p>
<p>Soon some major decisions will need to be made - and our district is in GOOD shape compared to many around us.</p>
<p>All of that is true. But we are essentially the only developed country in the world where early childhood education is mainly considered a private responsibility and not a public good. We have ridiculously limited public funding for small children, and very little of it is treated as having educational goals (as opposed to warehousing kids so their custodial parent can work). So of course the wealthy have a huge advantage, one that the schools actually succeed in reducing (once the kids show up there), but never eliminating.</p>
<p>There is a tremendous amount of denial about the educational importance of ages 0-5, and a lot of sticking heads in the sand, too. People are obsessed with the latest unproven fad in charter school design to try to close the reading and math gap between poor and rich kids, and they put their hands over their ears, close their eyes, and scream la-la-la if someone suggests that it’s far more effective to address the problem with 3-year-olds than with 14-year-olds.</p>
<p>JHS, have you read the long-term studies of the effectiveness of Head Start? Not very promising. I love kids. Love them madly, and my dream was to be a children’s librarian, so I get the importance of early childhood education. But it’s not going to really do what we would like it to do if the home isn’t a good learning environment, as well. It’s also very important to teach the 14-year olds why they shouldn’t have babies until they are older, educated, stable and married. Two parents are the best gifts we can give to children for their future success.</p>
<p>This thread is connected to the vegetarian lunch thread in that when the schools are acting as parents, providing meals, medical care, social services, and so forth, there is not a lot of room left for education. That happens at the younger ages, as well. If a child is from a home that doesn’t provide appropriate parenting, then there is very little that society can do except pray that this child or that one over there will get lucky in overcoming his parents. Unless, of course, we want to take custody.</p>
<p>ZM, I agree that head start is a very flawed program. However, there are countries which have very successfully implemented early childhood programs that we could look to. The uk comes to mind. I can’t link since I’m on my phone but a google search could give some good ideas of what they’re doing and whether or not its working :)</p>
<p>In a very small anecdote, my daughter’s public high school (gang infested, all sorts of problems) had not insignificant improvements when they targeted the parents for education and support. The principal was the queen of grant applications and would have GED classes for parents, as well as other educational opportunities for the parents. I would love to know how that trickled down in families with younger kids. The best way to help kids is to help their parents.</p>
<p>zoosermom, there is a right-wing meme about the ineffectiveness of Head Start based on studies that show no difference in 4th grade math test scores between HS students and students not in HS, and other studies that show a convergence of IQ scores by high school. Other, more recent studies – and much longer-term studies, since the programs have been around much longer – show very significant differences in measures like high school graduation, college graduation, employment, earnings, not having children while a teenager, not going to prison, and not using public assistance, especially for high-quality Head Start (and other ECE) programs. (The quality of programs varies a lot, in large part due to our ambivalence about “quality” in early childhood education.)</p>
<p>Here are a couple of links. The first is a paper by Nobel Prize economist James Heckman of the University of Chicago, who has turned into something of a zealot on this issue. The second is a study of the effect of kindergarten teacher quality by Raj Chetty, Harvard professor, MacArthur Fellow, and this year’s John Bates Clark medalist. (The credential gap between early childhood education supporters and deniers is pretty stunning.)</p>
<p>Thank you for posting links JHS. I will read them with appreciation.
However I am not interested in a political argument so I will bow out now after offering my thanks.</p>
<p>You could have used neutral words such as “opponents” or “critics” instead of “deniers” but apparently want to group opponents of further spending on preschool with Holocaust deniers. This speaks volumes about your intellectual integrity and ability to respect people you disagree with.</p>
<p>Are you really calling me an idiot, too, JHS?</p>
<p>I was not making a political argument. I was making a human, complicated argument that I don’t think money is the answer. My daughter is a public school teacher. My kids went through public schools in the inner city. I understand many, many things and one of the things that I understand is that we need to help parents, which is what I said. We also need to recognize that no amount of money spent on preschool is going to fix the problems in the home, therefore I would like to fix the problems in the home.</p>
<p>I stand by those positions and wonder why you are so eager to shut down a respecful conversation. Actually, I don’t wonder. Never mind.</p>
<p>And I want to be on record that I would go to the mattresses to prevent my friend Romanigypsyeyes, who also questions the effectiveness of Head Start, being associated with the term “right-wing!”</p>
<p>From the NYT article: “But rising income inequality explains, at best, half of the increase in the rich-poor academic achievement gap. It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using it differently. This is where things get really interesting. High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich.”</p>
<p>From my personal observations, I agree with the above statement. IMHO, the gap will continue to grow.</p>
<p>And I was not calling you an idiot, zoosermom, far from it. I agree completely with your statement that no amount of money can eliminate problems in the home. But if some amount of money can significantly mitigate the effect of problems in the home, and reduce the rate at which they reoccur in subsequent generations, that is worth knowing, too. Because the other response is to throw up your hands, do nothing, and keep replicating the problems.</p>
<p>I agree with romani, too, that Head Start has lots of problematic aspects, and may not even be a very good program overall. Unfortunately, it’s a program that gets studied a lot, so it sometimes stands in for early childhood education in general. As happened here, when I said there should be more attention to early childhood education, and you responded but Head Start is ineffective, and I responded with two papers, neither of which was about Head Start. (The third one was, though. And it is the least inspiring.)</p>
<p>I just started reading that report, JHS, and will read the entire thing. But it immediately pops out that the conclusion isn’t as definitive as you indicated and, in fact, is very nuanced. Even taking this study as the whole truth (and it is 13 years old), it raises some very valid questions that make it perfectly reasonable and non-political to ask if there is a way to get better results. If one is truly interested in the well-being of kids, the results posted there are clearly not good enough and shouldn’t be accepted as the best case scenario. </p>
<p>And to be clear, I do understand the argument that I am making here.</p>