Network Schools – Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for

A recent article in the Economist titled “Republicans and Democrats Are Taking Early Education More Seriously” describes the recent consensus that is emerging among politicians in both parties that public schooling needs to extend to younger children. Here;s the paragraph that describes this phenomenon:

The share of three- and four-year-olds enrolled in pre-school has not changed much in two decades. While the average country in the OECD, a club of rich nations, enrolls 80% of its three- and four-year-old children in school, America enrolls just 54%, lagging behind Chile and Mexico.This is true despite abundant evidence of the benefits of early education, especially for disadvantaged children. High-quality pre-school programmes can have lasting benefits, including improving the odds of graduating from school, earning more and staying away from drugs and out of prison. For parents there are gains, too: when their children are in day care, they can work.

In the shadows of a government shutdown and chaotic governance generally, one achievement of President Donald Trump’s administration has gone unnoticed. In 2018 Congress approved more than $5.2bn in “child care and development block grants”, which subsidise child care for low-income families, nearly doubling available funding and indicating a rare example of bipartisan collaboration. Head Start, a federal programme that educates poor children before they enter kindergarten, has also received more funding.

The article, while extolling both the Trump administration’s additional funding that the widespread support for funding at the state levels does NOT look at how that funding will be allocated. If they had examined this, they would find that politicians in both parties are using this expansion of schooling to younger students to promote either vouchers of privatization models for schools. By doing so, they can sidestep the need for government funded buildings, the hiring of teachers at union wages, and the pushback they are likely to encounter if they shift young children out of existing privately operated pre-schools into public pre-schools. If our federal, state, and local governments wanted to do this right, instead of using the expansion of schooling to younger students as an opportunity to privatize they could use it as an opportunity to get the funding for public education more equitable.

Progressive-minded voters need to look closely at how seemingly progressive issues like the expansion of pre-school are being formulated. As I’ve blogged about earlier, the expansion of these programs could well be a means of introducing vouchers into the public schools… an idea I am certain Betsy DeVos has come up with.