The Indiana Senate has before it a bill to provide $7 million to pay for a pilot program for 1,000 young children to attend preschool classes. That’s good, but we would suggest that Indiana needs no “pilot” program to learn if 1,000 children would benefit from attending prekindergarten classes. The term “pilot program” suggests a test to determine if such a program would be beneficial to young children. Rather, experts in early childhood education have been telling us for years that the most important brain development in young people occurs in children 3-5 years old.
But Indiana is one of the few states that has no state-supported early childhood educational program. Fortunately for some children attending the Evansville Vanderburgh School Corp., it does offer early childhood classes in several elementary schools. But statewide, Indiana is missing a bet on helping children most in need of formal learning opportunities.
Those are children mainly from low-income families whose parents cannot afford to send them to private early childhood centers, other than those fortunate enough to attend Head Start classes. Sadly, those who don’t have those opportunities are many of the same homes where children are not regularly read to and where children do not enjoy learning experiences such as travel that help them prepare for their formal educational.
We often hear of the learning gap between children from homes that can afford early childhood education and those from low-income families. Former EVSC Supt. Vince Bertram, an advocate of early childhood education, once pointed out that by age 4, the difference between children who have been exposed to reading and life-experiences in the home and children who have not is 18 months. He said that by third grade, children on the high end of learning have a vocabulary of 12,000 words and those on the low end have a vocabulary of 4,000 words. And we wonder why so many children do poorly on standardized tests.
If the experts are correct, and there is not reason to doubt them, the state of Indiana could make a difference by giving priority to early childhood education in school districts all across the state. Maybe other district could learn from the EVSC’s leadership on this issue.
We understand that this is an expensive proposition; thus, the $1 million may be the place to start, as long as carries with it a promise to grow the opportunities in subsequent budget years.
This measure has already passed the Indiana House 93-6, but it is running into opposition from those who are opposed to Indiana’s voucher program and see this somehow as an extension of the voucher program. They reason that if a child begins in the early childhood program, they will eventually jump to the voucher program.
Nonsense. The point is to help our 3- to 5-year-old children learn at a higher level, not engage ourselves in policy politics.