Broader Bolder Early Childhood Education Framework:
A Ten-Year Plan for Transformation
Introduction/Framework
All young children need consistent, knowledgeable, nurturing adult caregivers and an
enriching, context-relevant early education. Young children living in poverty are least likely
to enjoy both of these. Decades of early childhood, brain development, and economic research
make clear the wisdom of investing in these foundations for optimal early childhood
development. Preparing all children to navigate an increasingly complex world requires such
investments.
Despite this imperative, federal policies have long neglected American children, especially
young children in their critical birth-to-5 developmental years. The economic downturn has
exacerbated this problem. Child poverty now tops 20% (up from 17.6% in 2007), and more
than two in five children live in low-income households. Among the most developmentally
vulnerable children ages 6 and under, the poverty rate is 22%. Yet the small share of the federal
budget devoted to children – most of which supports poor children – is projected to shrink
from 9.2% in 2010 to 8.4% in 2011 and to decline further in 2012.1
The economic crisis has also opened a window of opportunity to set new spending priorities.
We can no longer afford to incur the avoidable costs – of child welfare, remedial education,
police and corrections, individuals with addiction, and unemployed, underemployed,
unproductive, and unhealthy adults – that result from our lack of investment in consistent,
knowledgeable, nurturing adult caregivers and enriching early education. We must shape more
responsible policies that benefit children and our nation’s future.
The Bolder Broader Approach to Early Childhood Education promotes a series of policy
changes at both the state and federal levels. Over the next decade, these policies channel our
nation’s resources more wisely to ensure that all young children benefit from nurturing adults
and enriching early educational experiences.
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First Focus Children’s Budget 2011.
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We recommend changes based on these overarching priorities for young children: 1)
consistent, knowledgeable, nurturing adults and 2) enriching, context-relevant education.
Consistent, knowledgeable, nurturing adult caregivers: Supporting young children’s optimal
development requires that all adults who care for children have the skills, knowledge, resources,
and support that are needed to provide it.
·
Parents and family caregivers: Strong, positive relationships and mutual trust between
young children and the adults who care for them are critical to establishing early foundations
for learning. Policies must enable and promote healthy child-parent attachments, especially
in infants’ first year.
·
Child care providers and teachers of young children: A strong early childhood workforce
requires training, salary scales, and career ladders that spur continued, reflective professional
learning. Professionalize the field of early childhood care and education to dispel the
erroneous impression that early childhood education (“ECE”) amounts to custodial care, and
improve opportunities for adult learning and professional development.
Enriching, context-relevant curriculum: A responsive, enriching early childhood educational
experience enables all children to develop knowledge and skills as complements that enable and
enhance one another.
·
Curriculum: Much of the persistent achievement gap is actually a gap in knowledge that
results from differences in opportunities and begins in children’s early years. Preventing the
emergence of these gaps requires age-appropriate curricula that use interactive experiences to
build both cognitive and executive function. These early experiences help children develop
skills and knowledge in vocabulary, literacy, science, math, music, and the arts. They build
children’s behavioral and emotional capacities, enabling them to translate these gains into
school and life success.
·
Assessment: Assessment is often conflated with accountability, and it is in increasing danger
of being misapplied in early childhood settings. Early childhood assessments should be ageappropriate and aligned with the comprehensive early childhood development context, and
they should be designed to inform system and instructional improvements.
We envision that, within a decade, all American children will have opportunities to learn and
thrive that are currently enjoyed only by some. Achieving this broader goal requires laying the
earliest foundations immediately, and enacting increasingly bold policy changes as budgets
recover in the next two-to-five years.
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Policy Proposals
We envision the following broader, bolder policy changes within the decade:
Ensuring consistent, knowledgeable, nurturing caregivers:
State and federal policy is structured to improve the well-being of both mothers and babies and
to enable the development of healthy parent-child attachments. This requires that we:
· Build on the evidence base developed through pilot home visiting programs to scale up nurse
and other home visits; connect all low-income pregnant women to needed care and supports.
Government provides the resources that promote strong parent-child bonding.
· Enact paid parental leave, so that new parents have three-to-six months to bond with and
adjust to the experience of having a new baby.
· Change TANF work requirements to remove the barrier for this group of new mothers to stay
home for these first months and tie payments to parenting education/supports.
Ensuring context-relevant, enriching early education:
The dosage of quality early childhood education is sufficient for all children to learn and thrive
and for their parents to work productively and without interruptions.
· Provide access to high-quality early childhood education that is full-day and year-round.
This could be accomplished through federal incentives and/or set-asides to expand from nine
months, part-day programs to full-day, year-round.
Quality early childhood education involves parents in a consistent and meaningful way.
· Design programs that engage parents and incorporate quality parental time.
These policy objectives are ambitious, but by no means impossible. They are the norm in many
nations whose test scores are touted as goals by US policymakers, where there are fewer lowincome children, and those low-income children are less disadvantaged because they enjoy many
of these supports.
The foundation for these ambitious changes must be laid in the next two-to-five years:
Ensuring consistent, knowledgeable, nurturing caregivers:
As health care reform and other legislation is implemented, states can support the role of parents
as children’s nurturers and first teachers by strengthening family connections to the whole
community, enhancing parenting skills, and ensuring both parents’ and children’s physical and
mental health.
· Increase families served and funding for effective programs that bridge the home-community
gap, such as Early Head Start.
· Expand access to WIC and to primary health care services through Qualified Health Centers
to ensure comprehensive pre- and post-natal care for low-income women and their infants.
· Ensure health care/medical home services for children and families by expanding coverage
for developmental screening, follow-up, and care coordination in federal health care reform
legislation.
· Address mental health issues holistically – invest in prevention, promotion of healthy
development, and needed intervention; assure mental health equity in insurance coverage,
and provide for sufficient reimbursement to support effective, family-centered interventions.
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Ensuring context-relevant, enriching early education:
As Race To The Top Early Learning grantees and other states expand and enhance their early
childhood education systems, many will be well positioned to improve and connect quality to
compensation.
· Develop meaningful Quality Rating and Improvement Systems that span the 0-to-5 spectrum
of early childhood education, from subsidized child care to state pre-k programs.
· Offer career ladder opportunities and other incentives to improve the educational
qualifications of the existing workforce.
· Allocate federal and state subsidies based on a teacher’s level of education and experience
and other quality factors. (Louisiana STARS is the best/most comprehensive example).
Even in current austere fiscal times, immediate policy choices present many states, as well as
the federal government, with opportunities to take the first steps toward this more systemic and
productive education policy regime:
Ensuring consistent, knowledgeable, nurturing caregivers:
To counter current strains on families and communities due to government spending cuts, states
should leverage all available funds to ensure that libraries, community centers, parks, and clinics
remain open and accessible.
· Take advantage of federal home visiting and health care legislation funding to ensure that
existing programs are evidence-based and provide maximal returns.
· Make the best use of Child Care and Development Block Grant and federally qualified health
center funds.
· Reauthorize the “Improving Literacy through School Libraries” grant program and extend it
to public libraries.
Ensuring context-relevant, enriching early education:
As they continue to develop their early childhood education systems, with help from Race to the
Top Early Learning Challenge and other grants, states should recruit and retain a high-quality
workforce that is representative of children and families served:
· Strengthen early education certification programs by ensuring: high-quality course content
and classroom-based learning; and experienced and knowledgeable faculty.
· Ensure that ECE training balances the development of expertise in an enriching curriculum
with creative ways to convey it and to establish strong student-teacher relationships.
· Create opportunities for professional development in classes with master teachers, and
develop coaches to provide it in other settings.
· Integrate applicable segments of the early education workforce (e.g., pre-k teachers) into
public education training, professional development, and salary structure.
To enhance quality, states should work to develop and implement context-relevant, enriching
curricula that strengthen children’s key competencies: focus and self-control, perspective-taking,
communicating, making connections, critical thinking, taking on challenges, and self-directed,
engaged learning.
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Develop rigorous, age-appropriate curricula that present information within a familiar,
relevant context. Look to emerging state early learning guidelines in oral literacy, language,
science and mathematics, such as those of the New England Consortium, and the National
Research Council report for math and science guidelines.
Apply current research and implement individualized instructional strategies that address
cultural, linguistic, and ability differences.
Reject the “drill the basics” approach to education that has been imposed in the K-12 arena
by current testing requirements.
Ensure that curricula and guidance are available and accessible to family care providers.
Accountability for system quality is currently lacking. States can lay a strong foundation for
quality by using assessments of teacher-child interactions to hold ECE providers accountable
for students’ cognitive, social, emotional, and behavioral development. Develop quality
assessment tools to guide instruction that can be used—and understood – by parents, principals,
and evaluators.
·
·
Ensure that kindergarten readiness and other assessments are valid and fair for children
from diverse backgrounds, especially English language learners.
Exercise caution in kindergarten readiness assessments, and do not allow them to be used to
hold children back from kindergarten entry.
o Avoid testing-accountability links, such as the Value-Added Measures of teacher
quality that are promoted through No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top. The
challenges to implementation and potential to do harm that are evident at the K-12
level --- in curriculum narrowing and system-gaming – would present added dangers
in the pre-k years.
o To the extent that assessments are ever used to evaluate program or teacher quality,
employ only sampled, not individual tests, with a focus on support and improvement.
For example, use Head Start evaluations and other research findings to improve
system and site quality, not to reduce slots or funding.
Because young children’s physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development are so
inextricably linked, assessment should encompass the whole child, including family and
community contexts.
o Employ broad assessment measures that include information about the child’s
community and family functioning, in order to better understand prior experiences,
set appropriate expectations, and individualize instruction.
o Look to the National Academy of Science standards/guidelines, which place the child
within the community context and illustrate children’s needs.
o Use the Early Development Instrument and other broad measures of child well-being.
Together, these changes ensure that, ten years out, all U.S. children enjoy the high-quality
adult-child interactions and enriching educational experiences that are too often limited to
more privileged children.
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Bottom line/conclusions:
We cannot cut our way out of economic problems – investment must be part of the answer.
If we try to shrink our budget gap by ensuring that future generations are less prepared for
school, work, community and civic engagement, and leadership, we will ensure that our fiscal
problems worsen, rather than improve.
Our substantial achievement gaps are not inevitable; they are the result of misguided policy
decisions that can and should be reversed. A Broader, BOLDER Approach to Early Childhood
Education establishes an imperative for the policies set out above; rejects attempts to dilute or
overturn them as part of state, local, or federal budget decisions; and demands that young
children be, at the very least, held harmless. Failing to do so means continued wasteful
spending on remediation and a constant (losing) game of catch-up through the K-12 years and
beyond.
Current conversations on ECE too often wrongly focus on either/or – access or quality; parents
or schools; infants, toddlers or preschoolers, brain or body, basics or comprehensive
education. Enhancing low-income children’s early experiences requires moving the needle to
both and all, and to a whole-child perspective.
Increasing the professionalization of ECE is essential to cutting the human capital deficit and
our persistent achievement gaps. Assuring that all children benefit from caring relationships
with teachers who are skilled and well-resourced is essential to providing them with an enriching
educational experience.
Learning from ECE can inform current K-3 and even K-12 discussions about teaching,
curriculum, and assessment. Indeed, they must; smooth, strong transitions from pre-k to
kindergarten, including aligned curriculum and sharing of information and data are critical to
sustaining birth-to-five gains. Enriching, interactive, context-relevant experiences that take place
in a nurturing, stimulating environment benefit all children.
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Signatories
Burnie Bond*
Director of Programs
Albert Shanker Institute
Sue Bredekamp
Early Childhood Education Consultant
David Brewer
Director,
National Black Church Initiative
Former Superintendent, Los Angeles Unified School District
Retired Vice Admiral, U.S. Navy
Jeanne Brooks-Gunn*
Virginia & Leonard Marx Professor of Child Development & Education
Professor of Pediatrics, College of Physicians and Surgeons, and
Co-director, National Center for Children and Families,
Columbia University
Richard R. Buery, Jr.
President and CEO
The Children’s Aid Society
Gayle Cunningham
Executive Director,
JCCEO Head Start-Early Head Start-Pre-K Program
Birmingham, Alabama
John H. Jackson
President and CEO
Schott Foundation for Public Education
Jeanne Jehl*
Senior Consultant,
The Annie E. Casey Foundation
Sharon Lynn Kagan
Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Early Childhood and Family Policy
Co-Director,
National Center for Children & Families Teachers College,
Columbia University
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Helen Ladd
Edgar Thompson Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics,
Sanford School, Duke University
Co-chair, BBA Task Force
J. Ronald Lally
Co-director,
Center for Child & Family Studies,
WestEd
Robert Lynch*
Professor of Economics and
Interim Chair, Department of Economics,
Washington College
Susan B. Neuman
Professor of Educational Studies,
University of Michigan,
Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Elementary and Secondary Education
Co-chair, BBA Advisory Council
Bob Pianta*
Dean, Curry School of Education
University of Virginia
Dorothy Strickland*
Distinguished Research Fellow,
National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER)
Rutgers, The State University of NJ
Jane Waldfogel*
Compton Foundation Centennial Professor of Social Work
For the Prevention of Children’s and Youth Problems
Columbia University School of Social Work
Elaine Weiss
National Coordinator,
Broader Bolder Approach to Education
* indicates signature is individual, not institutional
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