Swift & Change Able

Independent Commentary on Education Policy

What's Up With EPI's Bold Approach?

06/10/08

What's Up With EPI's Bold Approach?

05:37:44 pm, Categories: Announcements [A]

It’s hard to take issue with the new initiative launched today by EPI and others, "A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education", to comprehensively address those factors that improve the quality of education. Health care. Child care. Preschool. It’s like mom and apple pie, especially for a bleeding heart liberal like me.

But since I wholeheartedly support most of what they’re saying (and it’s nice to see Rothstein back home at EPI rather than at the Cato Institute or cozying up to Charles Murray), why does something about it not smell or feel right?

First, I think Sara Mead was right on target today when she took issue with the Bold Approach’s severance of pre-K issues from K-12. As Mead points out:

"Early education investments can’t occur in isolation from K-12 school reforms. While the evidence for the benefits of early education is strong, evidence also suggests that a significant portion of those benefits is lost in the first three years of schooling—a phenomenon known as fade-out.. Researchers Janet Currie and Duncan Thomas have demonstrated that fade-out among Head Start alumni is linked to poor elementary school quality."

Second, it is only quality pre-school and child care that promote good school adjustment. Bad pre-school can actually make matters worse. In a review of the literature Lunenburg (2000) found that:

"Poor quality child care is associated with poor functioning, both during kindergarten and during later schooling (Vandell, Henderson, & Wilson, 1988). For example, a recent investigation of 227 child care centers in five major metropolitan areas in the United States found the quality of care to be "barely adequate" (Whitebrook, Howes, & Phillips, 1990). Another study of middle-class, thirdgraders from three elementary schools in Dallas determined that the children with the most extensive non-parental child care histories (beginning in the first and second year of life) functioned least well in terms of scholastic achievement and social development in school (Vandell & Corasaniti, 1990). Therefore, while child care experience can foster competent functioning during the early school years, this possibility is not always realized for many of America’s children (Belsky & MacKinnon, 1994)."

EPI’s work in education is funded by the teachers unions, so let’s get that out of the way now. Given that the teachers unions have not been guardians of quality education (remember when they unleashed 40,000 untrained teachers on California’s poor and minority children under the banner of "Class Size Reduction" and then tried to take it national?) forgive me for being skeptical about whether their desire for more dues-paying members under any UPK proposal would be secondary to concerns for the quality of programs offered to children.

Third, what makes a quality pre-K or K-12 program is exactly the opposite of the kind of severance between education and other disciplines that "Bold Approach" is supporting. The best schools are in fact multi-disciplinary.

Here is Ed Zigler, father of Head Start, on his Schools of the 21st Century project from a 2007 interview with Richard Lee Colvin (full disclosure - I studied under Zigler at Yale’s Bush Center and he was instrumental in helping me get to Washington in 1993):

"There are four determinants of kids’ growth and development. First, and by far the most important, is parents. Second is the health care system. Third is the quality of the school. And the fourth is the child care system. My schools are directed at hitting each of these domains in a big way."

The "Bold Approach" campaign seems to be going in exactly the opposite direction. They seem to want schools to have a very circumscribed role, and to assign responsibility for factors other than direct instruction to someone else at another time or in another place.

The "Bold Approach" is macro and comprehensive in its rhetoric, but it envisions reforms as unintegrated and atomistic. In practice it wants to sever K-12 from pre-K, and education from health and social services, even though it is those types of practices that the researchers cited above have shown to be least effective. Some I talked to today see it as a blame game more than a serious proposal for change, aka "hocus pocus, change the focus", though I seriously doubt that that is what more than perhaps a few its 60 signees intended.

I plan to withhold judgment. I will find it hard to take the initiative seriously, however, until its political actions match its rhetoric.

What would be truly bold would be for the unions who subsidize EPI to score members of Congress on how they vote on all of these policies in conjunction with, and not as a distraction from, strong school reform.

What would be truly bold is if the unions who subsidize EPI refuse to endorse for election or re-election any candidate that does not support their full slate of issues. (So far this year, the nation’s largest teachers union unsuccessfully backed one candidate for re-election who, among things, worked to funnel millions of dollars away from public education broadcasting into the coffers of cable companies).

What would be truly bold is if the unions who subsidize EPI lobby just as hard on health care, quality child care, and pre-school as they do on things like class size reduction and school construction. Trust me when I tell you it did not happen when I staffed Senators and Congressmen on the Committees with jurisdiction over these issues in the 90s and the oughts. And, just last year, neither EPI nor the NEA nor the AFT played much of a role when SCHIP was in play as Rotherham pointed out at the time.

I sincerely hope that the full-page ads "Bold" ran today translate into a full-court press when it really counts for something: in elections, votes, and legislation. But I’m not holding my breath.

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Comment from: Cheryl Sattler [Visitor] · http://www.ethicallc.com

"bold" - or blame?

What struck me when I saw the full-page ad in WaPo was that these very factors - health care, parent involvement, etc. - are inevitably the excuses given by those in the education community who either don't want to change, or don't believe it's possible to educate all children. Education needs to focus on the things it *can* control - and it needs to take a lesson or two from the 90/90/90, beating the odds, whatever you want to call those schools that are managing to educate kids who come to school sick/hungry/without much parent support. Perhaps the next iteration of no child left behind should be called "no more excuses." Yes, these are concerns. Yes, they need to be addressed. No, they aren't a valid reason for failing to educate so many children, for so many years.

06/16/08 @ 17:55

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