Battling Poverty in Preschool Classrooms

Studies show that girls born to teenage mothers are more likely to become mothers before the age of 18 than girls born to more mature women (Flanagan). Children whose parents smoke are twice as likely to begin smoking between the ages of 13-21 than children whose parents do not smoke (Schwarz). In a more positive light, children of college graduates are more likely to do well in school and go on to graduate college themselves than children with parents who did not graduate college (Hick). These statistics are just a few examples of how familial cycles are difficult to break. The same is true when it comes to poverty. A child born into poverty is more likely to remain in poverty into adulthood and to continue the cycle. Since the Great Depression many presidential administrations have designed and launched programs to end poverty in the United States. By and large these programs failed to realize that the most effective strategy to eliminate poverty is to ensure children of poor parents break the cycle and never enter poverty as adults. One way children can break the cycle is by succeeding in school. Educational reforms today focus heavily on improving K-12 schools. A well needed and admirable pursuit yes, but the level of achievement a child reaches later in life is largely determined by the quality of preschool education he or she receives early on in life. The problem remains that preschool education in California for low income families is sparse and not as effective as it could be.  Local and state governments, as well as the federal government, must create and direct funds towards preschool programs specifically designed to counter the adverse effects of poverty on a child’s academic and social success. These programs must address the psychological, familial, physical, social and cognitive needs of children in poverty in order to ensure they build a strong educational foundation. Investing in this foundation will pay off over time as the children will be less likely to continue in poverty, less likely to turn to crime and more likely to be productive citizens.    

For decades education reform tactics have failed to produce a long lasting effect on children in America. The reason for such minimal success stems from a variety of factors. One important factor is the decrease in money spent per child nationwide and the increase in educational budget cuts across the country. This budget cuts hit the children in low income areas the hardest because they are already victims of underfunded schools. When their schools do not receive enough funding they close and send students to equally underfunded schools. When there is not enough money for the staff school boards fire quality teachers based on the “first hired, first fired” doctrine. They cut art and physical education programs and shorten or reduce school days altogether. Over the past decade, “funding for state pre-K programs has plummeted by more than $700 per child nationwide” (McNeely). Underfunded preschool programs have a difficult time being efficient and end up nothing more than day-care centers. Another important factor for the limited success educational reform has seen is due to the over testing of students under No Child Left Behind Act. Teachers spend much of their time teaching for these tests and neglect to teach the students based on their individual needs. As a result children whose first language is not English and those who have special needs do not perform well on these tests and they are not learning beneficial subject material. It is a lose-lose situation. Most importantly educational reformed has focused primarily on K-12 education. In recent years a big push for breaking up large high schools in favor of smaller and privatized high schools has caused the destruction of many public high schools and has been ineffective as well. Public school advocates, such as Diane Ravitch, call for the madness to stop and point to many examples of privately funded high schools that have failed such as the Gates Foundation and the many small schools that Mayor Bloomberg’s administration created in New York City. The problem with aiming reform at high schools is by the time students reach that level they are too far behind to catch up in just a few years. Education reform would be most effective when directed towards children ages 3-5. It is during these critical years that children start on a path towards success or failure.

It is common knowledge that poverty adversely affects a child’s academic success. Before one can hope to combat these effects it is very important to understand exactly what it is about poverty that threatens a child’s success. According to Eric Jensen author of Teaching with Poverty in Mind there are four important risk factors children in low income families face: emotional and social challenges, acute and chronic stressors, cognitive lags, and health and safety issues (Jensen). Emotional and social challenges refer to the maladaptive behaviors children take on as result of a caregiver’s decreased sensitivity towards the child during infancy. This is in no way a claim that parents of low socio-economic status are bad caregivers. Rather, over- burdened and young parents have less time and energy to engage with their infants. Also depression and inadequate health care correlate with less sensitivity towards an infant (Jensen). The bond an infant forms, during a process called “attunement”, with his or her caregiver is very critical in determining the type of relationship the child will have later on with classmates and teachers. A lack of proper attachment during infancy manifests itself as a lack of curiosity, arousal, emotional regulation, independence, and social competence in children. Children who have not been able to bond with a caregiver also tend to, “get so easily frustrated that they give up on a task when success was just moments away” (Jensen). Stress, defined as, “the physiological response to the perception of loss of control resulting from an adverse situation or person” is actually healthy when in manageable doses (Jensen). It is what motivates humans to be productive.  Acute stress however is not healthy as it is a result of abuse or violence. When this stress is prolonged or maintained over time it become chronic. Unfortunately, children in low income families are more likely to fall victim of these type of stress: criticism, neglect, social exclusion, lack of enrichment, malnutrition, drug use, and exposure to toxins, abuse, or trauma (Jensen). Acute and chronic stress has many negative effects on children in school. For example it impairs attention and concentration, reduces cognition, creativity and memory, reduces motivation, determination and effort and it reduces neurogenesis (Jensen). Highly stressed children also become more impulsive, an exaggerated stress response that functions as a survival mechanism (Jensen). What is worse is as a child takes on more and more stress each one compounds the previous stressor leaving the child feeling helpless and unable to focus in class.         

Children from low income families are more at risk to experience health and safety issues starting with the very homes they live in. The older and poorly kept housing units that many low income families live in expose children to toxins such as lead from paint, radon and carbon monoxide. They are even at risk while they are fetuses as their mother’s work environment exposes them to pesticides. The mothers may also smoke, drink, or do drugs while expecting. Poorer neighborhoods tend to be more dangerous and put children at greater pedestrian risks and gang violence. If the child has no health insurance they do not receive the proper health care for illness sure as asthma, TB, ear and respiratory infections, or malnutrition. When these illnesses go unattended the best case scenario is the children are just distracted in school because many are more likely to die from injuries or infections than their middle class counterparts (Jensen). A risk factor that many studies have looked at is the cognitive lags children from low income families face. The five systems of the brain necessary to function in school are the executive, language, memory, spatial cognition, and visual cognition systems (Jensen). Poverty threatens a child’s language system because they are less likely to experience a rich variety of words and sentences. Similar to the effects they experience with the failed attunement process there is a critical age in which children acquire language. However, because their caregivers often use simplistic language, do not engage in meaningful back and forth, ask fewer questions and explain fewer concepts these children acquire a less advanced vocabulary (Jensen). This decreased vocabulary makes it difficult for children to learn to read efficiently a severe detriment because reading “is one of the most important factors affecting the development of a child's brain” (Jensen). It is possible for all these risk factors to diminish over time if there is an active force working against them. Local and state governments have an obligation to create such forces in the public schools.   

Now more than ever there needs to be a focus on improving early childhood education because 3-4 years old is a critical age in which children learn how to learn and also because caregivers need to begin early learning effective ways of reversing the effects of poverty.  The first step in reversing the effects of poverty is to make quality preschool available to all 3-4 year olds that need it. In his most recent State of the Union Address, Obama revealed his plan to fund universal preschool. This is a step in the right direction and this paper will analyze his plan more in depth later on. As of 2011 only 16% of 3 year olds and 31% of 4 year olds were enrolled in pre-k or Head Start (The State of Preschool). California has been a leader in early childhood education because it was one of the first state to provide the state-funded preschool programs, State Preschool Program (SPP) and Prekindergarten and Family Literacy Program (PKFLP). PKFLP offers preschool to families whose income is at or below 75% of the state median income. The two have since merged into one program called the California State Preschool Program (The State of Preschool). It is important to note that enrollment in pre-k programs has increased over time yet quality has not. Funding has decreased and teachers are not always qualified. Of the 11 benchmark requirements CSPP only met 3, failing on important benchmarks such as teacher and teacher’s assistant level of education, class size and screening, referral, and support services (The State of Preschool). This is important because the services a preschool offers to the families makes all the difference in making it a quality program. Preschools need to become central connection points where families can receive information on housing, health, nutrition and welfare (Bierda and Moses). Many families in poverty face challenges when trying to receive assistance such as WIC, Madicaid, children’s health insurance, housing assistance and unemployment insurance. Attaining these services are difficult because of locations not conducive to families reliant on public transportation, misinformation about eligibility, complicated application processes and because of the stigma associated with applying for such programs (Bierda and Moses). Situating and running these programs out of the preschools diminishes all these issues. Caregivers will be able to easily access documents and live help if the information is in the same where they drop off their children every day. They can build a relationship with their child’s teachers who can then direct them to the exact program they need. Fears of the stigma will also be relieved because no one questions them when they enter a school as they would if they were to enter a welfare office.  Locating such programs in the school will also greatly benefit the children during the school day. Health services can provide nutritious breakfasts, lunches and snacks to the students, prepared fresh on site and also provide medical care to students who teachers notice have asthma, ear or respiratory infections, or other easily treatable illness. Challenges that stand in the way of making these programs a reality are primary due to the lack of funding. There simply are not enough staff members or buildings available to create such programs. If Obama’s Zero to Five plan succeeds it may allow for many of these programs to form.

Aside from the services a preschool program provides another factor that establishes it as a quality program is the level of teacher qualification and the classroom design. Every teacher that interacts with the child on a regular basis should not only have the proper certifications to teach, but should also attend training sessions specifically designed to work with children in poverty, and yearly training sessions. Teachers should regularly undergo observation and revaluations by their peers and students’ parents. They should design their classroom so that children can learn through play. They cannot allow what happened to the kindergarten classroom happen to the preschool classroom as well. Over testing children in kindergarten has left their classrooms closely resembling first and second grade classrooms. Young children need open space, hands on activities, costumes, art supplies, and books to fully grow cognitively and socially.     

Head Start is a program that resembles the one described above. Created in 1965 by the Johnson’s administration Head Start has provided preschool education to low income families across the country. Recently however many have called into question the effectiveness of this program. Arguments against Head Start claim that cognitive effects in children nearly vanished by the time the child was in the first grade (Klein). While there are studies to support this claim there are also studies that show that the social effects of Head Start lasted well into adulthood (Rich). Children that have participated in Head Start in the long run are less likely to, “be diagnosed as learning disabled, less likely to commit crime, more likely to graduate high school and attend college, and less likely to suffer from poor health as an adult” (Deming). These positive effects seem to be a result of increased parental involvement during and after the child’s enrollment in Head Start. Although Head Start is not without its problems, quality preschools should strive to include parents in the learning process as Head Start does because that makes all the difference. These programs play a large part in fostering parent-child interaction. By learning how to help their children learn early on parents continue their involvement not only in their child’s academic lives but in other areas as well. The result is a lower teenage pregnancy rate, reduced drug and alcohol use, and reduced juvenile delinquency. Preschool programs should also strive to teach the parents of their students the importance of providing stable and consistent care for their infants so the attunement process can take place (Barnett and Haskins).  

The Obama administration seems to be in favor of supporting early childhood education. Obama recently outlined his Zero to Five plan to invest $10 billion a year to support young children and their parents. His plan includes steps to provide states funding to support zero to five efforts. State will be responsible to match federal funds and have the freedom to decide how to spend funds. He will quadruple the number of children eligible for Early Head Start, increase Head Start funding and improve the quality of both (Weinstein). Most importantly, Obama’s plan will provide funding to and encourage all states to adopt voluntary universal preschool for all 4 year olds (Weinstein). The possibilities with this plan are endless. First, improving the quality of Head Start by learning from the results of past studies, emphasizing skills that are most predictive of later achievement in the classroom, and increasing parental involvement with new technology will make the program effective in maintaining both positive cognitive and social long term effects. By increasing funds to pre-k programs they will be able to better facilitate the much needed collaboration between the federal, state, and local governments.  Increased funding to pre-k programs will also attract more qualified teachers to the schools. Steven Barnett, the Co-director of the National Institute of Early Education Research states that:

Teacher pay and retention in childcare facilities is a problem in most states. “Childcare centers have a labor shortage, and they can’t hire people because Starbucks pays more. We know how to educate kids to increase their school readiness, but we don’t do it. And the primary reason is that we aren’t willing to pay teachers enough to do the job we know they need to do” (Weinstein).

Critics of Obama’s plan fear that funding state preschools will turn the classroom into a center for testing. Children will lose the freedom of free play. This would be a step in the wrong direction because:

A disproportionate emphasis on academic skills in the preschool years violates everything we know scientifically about healthy child development: that three- and four-year-olds learn best when learning is embedded in social relationships, real life experience, and unhurried exploration. In short, young children, like all other mammals, learn through play (Christakis).

This is a valid argument because where state mandates are concerned over testing children usually follows closely behind. One major hope with Obama’s plan is that the states and local governments carefully craft programs based on studies that show positive effects. It is also a hope that states figure out a way to use their increased funding to form a smoother bridge between pre-k and the K-12 public school system. Academic skills can fade over time no matter the quality of pre-k instruction if the K-12 instruction is subpar. 

Although the cognitive benefits of early childhood education may fade over time Head Start is not the only entity to have documented the longer lasting and more profound effects of quality pre-k instruction. In the 1970s a project called Abecedarian took place. This longitudinal study took 111 infants from low-income African- American families and provided them with activities designed to support their language, cognitive, social and emotional development until they reached kindergarten (uncnews.unc.edu). 30 years later 101 of the subjects partook in a follow-up survey. The survey revealed that those who partook in the educational activities were four times more likely to have a college degree than the control group. 75% had worked fulltime in 16 out of the last 24 months compared to 53% in the control group. They were less likely to be on welfare and showed a tendency to delay parenthood two years later than the control group (uncnews.unc.edu). Another study produced very similar results. In the 1960s the Perry School Program provided, “a daily 2 ½-hour classroom session for 3- to 4-year-old black children on weekday mornings and a 1 ½-hour home visit to each mother and child on weekday afternoons” (Rolnick).  The program lasted for 30 weeks and at 27 the researchers interviewed the subjects.  They found that:

During elementary and secondary school, Perry School participants were less likely to

be placed in a special education program and had a significantly higher average achievement score at age 14 than nonparticipants. Over 65 percent of program participants graduated from regular high school compared with 45 percent of nonparticipants. At age 27, four times as many program participants as nonparticipants earned $2,000 or more per month. And only one-fifth as many program participants as nonparticipants were arrested five or more times by age 27 (Rolnick).

Interestingly this study also looked at what happened to the money invested in the children during the study and what types of returns there were. They found that for every dollar invested in the program eight were returned to society (Rolnick). Years later analysts of the study decided that the return would be much greater because the positive effects not only influenced the participants but also their younger siblings and their children. This is a wonderful example of how the chain of poverty can break with a decent early childhood education.    

            It is an exciting time to be involved in education reform. Policy makers on a federal and state level are beginning to realize what a great investment education is. The benefits of equipping children with the skills necessary to become productive citizens of their country will continue generation after generation. If there is any hope to reduce or even to end poverty in the United States it lays in breaking the continuous cycle of poverty once and for all. Catching and educating children early ensures that they will form a solid foundation from which to grow. Programs like Head Start and other smaller pre-k programs are beneficial but a reshaping of these programs is overdue. Programs now should aim to educate the whole family and create a safe place for children to learn and grow. Once local, state and the federal government collaborate to create and fund highly effective pre-k programs for all young children the county will begin to see a reduction of poverty, teen pregnancy, and crime rates and an increase in college graduates and positive contributions to society.    

Works cited

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Bireda, Saba, and Joy Moses. "Reducing Student Poverty in the Classroom." Center for American Progress. N.p., Sept. 2010. Web. Feb. 2012.

Christakis, Erika. "The Catch-22 of Obam’s Preschool Plan." Times Idea. Time Magazine, 13 Feb. 2013. Web. 25 Feb. 2013.

Deming, D. (2009) Early Childhood Intervention and Life-Cycle Skill Development: Evidence from Head Start. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 2009, 1:3, p111–134

Flanagan. "The Children of Teen Parents." FSU Center for Prevention & Early Intervention Policy. N.p., 2005. Web. 23 Feb. 2013.

Hick, Sally. "Parents Influence Children's Success, Duke Social Psychologist Says." Duke Today. N.p., 14 Aug. 2005. Web. 25 Feb. 2013.

Jensen, Eric. "How Poverty Affects Behavior and Academic Performance." Teaching with Poverty in Mind: What Being Poor Does to Kids' Brains and What Schools Can Do about It. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2009. N. pag. Print.

Klein, Joe. "Time to Ax Public Programs That Don't Yield Results." Time U.S. Time Magazine, 7 July 2011. Web. 23 Feb. 2013.

McNeely, Robert. "No Education Reform Without Tackling Poverty, Experts Say." NEA Today RSS. Neatoday, 30 Apr. 2012. Web. 25 Feb. 2013

Rich, Motoko. "How Head Start Can Make a Difference." Economix How Head Start Can Make a Difference Comments. The New York Times, 2 Mar. 2012. Web. 25 Feb. 2013.

Rolnick, Arthur. "Early Childhood Development: Economic Development with a High Public Return - Fedgazette - Publications & Papers | The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis." Early Childhood Development: Economic Development with a High Public Return - Fedgazette - Publications & Papers | The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, 1 Mar. 2003. Web. 25 Feb. 2013.

Schwarz, Joel. "Children Whose Parents Smoked Are Twice as Likely to Begin Smoking between 13 and 21." Medical News Today. MediLexicon International, 01 Oct. 2005. Web. 25 Feb. 2013.

The State of Preschool 2011. National Institute for Early Education Research, 2011. Web. 25 Feb. 2013.

"Uncnews.unc.edu." UNC News. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 19 Jan. 2012. Web. 25 Feb. 2013.

Weinstein, Anna. "Obama on Early Childhood Education." Education.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Feb. 2013.