Sara Mead and Ashley LiBetti Mitchel have done a great public service by providing a detailed study of how the early care and K–12 education policy landscape creates barriers to collaboration. It is good to see the Thomas B. Fordham Institute focusing its considerable knowledge and prestige on thinking about this opportunity.
From the perspective of someone who has been involved with charter schools since 1993, adding preschool and pre-kindergarten arrows to the education reform quiver has been a no-brainer since 2005. That was the year we launched AppleTree Early Learning Public Charter School in Washington, D.C.
The science behind early learning is clear and compelling. With growing numbers of children living in poverty-stricken and fragmented family households, the need is clear and compelling too.
Resources are already being invested. By some estimates, federal, state, and local governments (as well as corporations and individuals) spend $70 billion each year on myriad programs for early care and education. But as the study illustrates, the sector is highly fragmented, lacks quality, and is not connected to K–12 education in any meaningful way. Few states currently even offer full-day kindergarten.
What's most lacking is a clear, compelling goal, so let me suggest one: We must ensure that all children enter kindergarten with the background knowledge and cognitive and socio-emotional skills to do grade-level work.
Setting a goal of this kind should be easy—as Mike Petrilli argues, it’s "low-hanging fruit." On its face, high-quality early learning is a purple issue. But much would need to change in order to improve the quality of early learning outcomes at scale. States would need to bring more money to the table, along with robust incentives to repurpose existing program funding.
But there is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come. A way to get things going in the right direction is for states to set clear, aspirational goals that are aligned with K–12 success. Accompanied by the necessary "entrepreneurial policy space," these ideas should encourage early care and education providers to collaborate and blend funding, program knowledge, and experience to improve outcomes.
Charter schools and charter preschools provide a publicly funded delivery system within which something better and more accountable can be designed, piloted, and brought to scale. States understand charters, so preschool charters are a good first step. Authorizers could encourage current early care and education providers to partner with existing charter schools or entrepreneurial educators to create new ones.
Visionary governors and mayors could really move the education-outcomes ball downfield in the next five years by focusing on ways to bring effective early interventions to scale.
The last fifteen years have seen a virtual research revolution in what we know about young children's brain development, along with ways that early interventions can address the disadvantages many experience simply because of the zip codes in which they were born. This study is a great framework for building a better understanding of how enterprising policymakers might partner with new and existing early care and education providers to do the twenty-first century's education equivalent of the moonshot.
Jack McCarthy is the president and CEO of AppleTree Institute for Education Innovation and AppleTree Early Learning Public Charter Schools, which operate eight charter preschools and support instructional quality at charter schools and community-based organizations in Washington, D.C.