The lives of thousands of Hoosier kids would improve if they started school at a younger age, especially those living in poverty.
Instead, Indiana keeps its mandatory attendance age at 7. All but a dozen states start kids earlier. Children are not required to attend kindergarten, but school districts must offer at least half-day programs in which enrollment is voluntary. As for state-funded preschool, only a small pilot program exists.
Glenda Ritz, the state superintendent of public instruction, tried to paint a picture of the problem in real, human terms as she spoke to the Tribune-Star editorial board Wednesday afternoon.
First, she depicted the effects of Indiana kids who miss out on quality, well-funded early childhood education. “However it might happen in the General Assembly, we need to lower the age, because we still have little ones that do not have support at home, do not go to a quality [prekindergarten program], do not enter our kindergarten classrooms,” Ritz said. “And they come to the first grade as a 7-year-old, literally a year or two behind. And then we’re always trying to catch them up.”
The difficulties of living in poverty doesn’t disappear for many kids once they begin attending school. Twenty-two percent of Indiana kids live in poverty-stricken households, those earning $24,300 or less a year for a family of four, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In Vigo County, the child poverty rate is 28 percent. Too many Indiana jobs, Ritz said, pay low wages. Schools see the consequences.
“We literally have families working two or three low-wage jobs, and they still can’t put all of the food on the table,” Ritz said. “Our schools are sending home backpacks of food every weekend with certain families that [school staffers] know, those children are not going to be fed. And there’s just nothing right about that” dilemma.
More prevalent, state-funded early childhood education tends to improve the school careers of low-income kids, according to some researchers. Though some experts conclude that beneficial results of pre-K can fade as a child advances through upper grades because of continual problems common in poverty-hit households, the positives seem to outweigh the uncertainties.
States that invest in early childhood education see improvements in children developing self-control, paying attention to teachers, corralling their emotions, taking turns, and following instructions, according to a 2013 report by the nonproft, nonpartisan MinnPost. Those qualities last into their adult lives, increasing the chances they’ll become law-abiding, taxpaying and steadily employed homeowners and family leaders.
Ritz intends to push for a lower mandatory school attendance age in Indiana in the 2017 session of the Indiana Legislature. A bill proposing to do so gets entered every year or so, but “it doesn’t even get a hearing,” Ritz said. The first-term Democrat — the lone member of her party to hold statewide office — will have to win re-election this fall to take her agenda to the General Assembly next January. Two Republicans, so far, are seeking their party’s nomination to challenge Ritz in November.
Republican legislators — some of whom have worked to circumvent and diminish Ritz’s elected authority — have given a variety of reasons for opposing a compulsory age of 5 for school attendance, and a broad expansion of state-funded pre-K. The added expense would be large.
House Education Committee Chairman Bob Behning, an Indianapolis Republican, told State Impact Indiana last year that lowering the starting age was unnecessary because 97 percent of Hoosier children already attend school at age 5. Behning’s statistics, calculated from Indiana Department of Education data, contrasted with U.S. Bureau of Labor numbers showing that fewer than 74 percent of eligible Hoosier kids attended kindergarten in 2013, putting Indiana near the bottom nationally.
Ritz asserts that she’s up against a “political agenda” of Gov. Mike Pence and his backers, while hers is “an education agenda.” It’s not been hard to see evidence of that friction since her overwhelming and surprising victory over controversial former superintendent Tony Bennett in 2012.
But early childhood education is too important to be blocked by politics. The transformational value of expanding pre-K and kindergarten for needy Hoosier kids shouldn’t be delayed again in 2017. It’s time to make that investment.