Why I Oppose San Antonio’s Pre-K Plan As an Early Childhood Educator
I was born and raised in San Antonio and have always carried in my heart the sense that our unique history and culture has the makings of a city whose exceptional qualities will benefit many, even those far outside of our boundaries. In every sphere of society we see significant changes taking place, and as an educator of 40 years, I long to see changes in education that build on our strengths, on who we are and what we know is true. I believe that one of our strengths is our love of family and children.
It is with interest that I have been following, and now participating, in the debate over whether to give the city increased sales tax revenue to start four new city-run pre-kindergarten schools. It’s a bit of déjà vu for me because my initiation into education in 1971 was as a teacher of four-year-olds in Edgewood ISD’s federally funded bilingual Early Childhood Program.
It was through this teaching experience that I was impressed by the profound impact that a child’s early family experiences have on his learning and development. The teachers in Edgewood’s ECE program highly valued and respected the role of parents. We saw ourselves as their assistants in the child’s preparation for school, not as the professionals who would be their child’s primary educators. We listened to the parents and learned from one another. The children lived nearby, and we visited them and their parents at home.
From Edgewood, I went to the University of Texas at Austin where I studied mothers and infants for my doctoral dissertation in Early Childhood Education. I wanted to understand better how parents influence their very young child’s later intellectual, social, and emotional development. Simultaneously, I was supervising kindergarten teachers in the Austin schools. Thus, I had a window into the child’s learning both at home and at school as I considered the whole concept of early childhood education.
Allow me to contrast what I have learned with the current Pre-K4SA proposal:
While some studies have found that preschool can improve academic performance in disadvantaged students, the interventions that make a lasting difference are those that provide highly intensive services to the family and child in their own neighborhoods over a period of four to six years. But the City’s proposal targets only one year of intervention focused on child instruction at centers 30 minutes or more away from home by bus.
In the case of children from disadvantaged homes, transformation must take place in the parents and family in order for enduring changes to occur in the child, and in future generations. We’ve all heard of the “cycle of poverty.” Child poverty cannot be changed without changes in the family generational cycle. Research shows that parents are the key ingredients to their children’s school achievement. The City’s pre-K proposal ostensibly includes yet-to-be-defined elements of parental instruction, but the emphasis is on “master teachers” and classroom instruction – not on parents.
The city’s pre-K program is entirely city-appointed and city-directed. If the tax increase is approved, the city will essentially have a blank check to make all decisions without parental voice or recourse. Both the executive director and the 11-member governing board would be appointed by the City Council. They would choose the curriculum, teacher training, location for the four new schools, testing and assessments, student progress tracking, program evaluation, bus transportation, and so forth.
Leaving parents out of decision-making altogether implies that they are not the ones who are primarily responsible for their children’s education. Removing the voice of parents and physically removing children from their neighborhoods undermines the sense of responsibility and value that parents have as their children’s primary teachers. This strategy actually discourages parents as educational decision-makers. Instead, it consolidates education in the hands of government.
Since the City’s goal is to provide a year of education that will improve academic readiness and higher performance in kindergarten through grade three, it is necessary to know whether current pre-K programs are effective in meeting those outcomes. Have children in our city who have participated in pre-K performed significantly better on the third grade reading and math tests in the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills than children who do not? Have children who attended full-day pre-K performed significantly better than those who attended half-day? The City of San Antonio has not evaluated the effectiveness of current pre-K programs. How can we propose to expand a program of unknown impact?
The City of San Antonio contracts the education of young children eligible for Head Start to other providers. Are the children in these programs performing significantly better in school than those not in Head Start? Again, there is an absence of local data to answer this question. However, nationally the U.S. government’s own report shows the program has failed. U.S. taxpayers have spent $150 billion on preparing preschoolers for kindergarten through Head Start, only to find that Head Start makes no difference in a child’s later school achievement.
Knowing this, San Antonio has expanded Head Start to include two schools that serve children beginning in infancy, and has 16 new birth-to-3 centers in planning this year. Unfortunately, many excellent-sounding educational programs are being funded despite a demonstrated lack of effectiveness and without public dialogue and agreement on the long-term goals and strategies. The proposed City-run pre-K plan follows this trend. In addition, the City’s pre-K plan would duplicate a level of education that heretofore belonged to the school districts. This represents a major shift in educational policy that citizens will want to consider carefully without being rushed.
Based on the preschool research, and on the role of parents in the early years, it is my conviction that the more urgent need is educational reformation in grades kindergarten through 12.
Furthermore, there is strong and clear research evidence that promoting marriage is an equal if not greater need for those who desire improved student achievement. Considerable research, including an exceptionally large study published this fall by Robert Rector, points to marriage as America’s greatest weapon against child poverty. According to an in-depth analysis of U.S. Census data, the principal cause of child poverty is the absence of married fathers in the home.
Marriage reduces the poverty rate by 82 percent among families with the same level of education. For example, married-parent families in which the head of the household is a high school dropout are less likely to be poor than a single-parent family in which the head of household has had some college.
Other studies show that children of single parents are twice as likely to be suspended or expelled from school, and a third more likely to drop out before completing high school. City policies and public education need to emphasize the critical role of marriage in the educational and life success of children.
It may surprise you to know that most out-of-wedlock mothers are not teenagers but adult women who desire the fulfillment and purpose that motherhood brings. Tragically, they are the product of a generational pattern in which childbearing has become disassociated from marriage. Adolescent students need to be taught, coached, and encouraged throughout their youth about the benefits of delaying childbearing until they have found a lifelong marriage partner who will join them in teaching and providing for their children.
Preschool instructional programs can be beneficial to disadvantaged children under highly controlled and designed conditions, but they are not a silver bullet for society’s ills. The far greater influence on children is the presence of a mother and father in their lives, and the wisdom and income that parents can best provide together.
If we are serious about fighting poverty and helping children out of generational cycles of academic and social impoverishment, I believe that we must teach them the true causes of their suffering, and show them how they can attain more prosperous and fulfilling lives for themselves.
San Antonio is rooted in cultures that value family and children. I believe that as we dialogue about this strength, the whole community, both public and private, will come up with some creative ways to build up the walls of education in our beloved City
Read Thrift’s policy brief about the Pre-K 4 SA initiative here at the Heartland Institute.
Jill Thrift has a doctoral degree in Early Childhood Education from the University of Texas-Austin and has served as faculty at the University of Houston, the University of Texas-San Antonio, and the University of Texas Health Science Center- San Antonio. Currently, she is an early childhood education consultant in San Antonio.
A lot of what you say is true. In an ideal world we would have programs to address the many critical development points in a child’s life. Unfortunately we live in a world with zero-sum budgets and hard decisions must be made to figure out how to most effectively divvy up the pie. Pre-K education, accordingly to many experts, is an ideal place to make investments. Is it the best way to ensure long-term child success? Time will tell. But it is a worthy start and worthwhile experiment.
The marriage arguments seems a bit of a non-sequitur. While two-parent households may generally be the optimal situation for children, there is not much the city can do on its end to make parents stay together. There is, on the other hand, something the city can do to enhance education, which is what they are doing with this program.
I would have to agree with Jill on this one. I started reviewing the city’s info online last night about this program. There is no hard evidence in the proposal. It’s all estimates and guesswork with very few specifics about these 2300 kids. The proposal seems like they want us to just approve it and they’ll figure out the logistics later. They are projecting that they’ll bring in $40M of revenue a year so 2300 kids can go to Pre-K. Are you kidding me? Of all the things that need funding in SA, I fail to see how this is the top priority. Of course, the majority of the money will fund buildings and overhead. Did anyone else catch that the Executive Director of the program will make $160K the 1st year? What happens if they don’t collect enough revenue the 1st year? Will they pull it from somewhere else or does the program go nowhere? Even scarier, what happens if they collect a lot more? Where does that money go and is there oversight of that?
I place a lot of importance on education with my daughter but I just don’t see how this program is worth raising the tax rates. There are way too many unanswered questions
I agree that the marriage argument is off point. It’d be nice if students were raised in two parent supportive households, but the argument that poor people don’t get married is a little bit of blaming the victim. Of course it’s also important to hold up the point that same-sex couples in our city can’t get married if they choose to, anyway. But even if we’re talking about heterosexual couples, the research states that people with higher levels of education are more likely to marry and reproduce later in life, making a more stable environment for their kids. So, it’s not the marriage that makes the house stable, it’s the life situations that lead to people feeling more comfortable about getting married and having children. Just asking low-income people to get married won’t necessarily fix that problem. Of marriages that end, the biggest problem cited is stress over money. So even if we’re asking these couple to go ahead and tie the knot, we’re not removing the barriers to successful marriages. Obviously, low-income couple can get married, have kids, and even make these decisions early in life, but they are generally the exceptions. Until we do something about poverty in this city (and country as a whole), the issues that destabilize children’s lives are going to continue to hurt them. Single parent families aren’t what causes the problems; in most cases, it’s the problems that cause the single parent family. Education is as close as we can get to evening the playing field, and this is at least an attempt. Kids that go to pre-k have been found in several studies to do much better in life. They graduate from high school at higher rates, face less incarceration, less rates of divorce, and more finish college and find financial stability. I’m actually in favor of universal pre-k funded by the state, something that Oklahoma of all states, has done and seen tremendous results. Giving kids a stronger foundation in life will lead to more stable marriages (if that’s what they eventually choose – although you can look at research in Western Europe where marriage rates are going down but long term cohabitation rates are going up, and the children are doing much better in school there than we are here so it may not correlate as easily as just asking people to get married), and that’s the part we can and should be working on.
Here’s some info that cites the Oklahoma initiative http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/Main-Menu/Pre-kindergarten/Pre-Kindergarten
Those who are arguing that the married parents comments are a non-sequitur miss her point. The city is only treating the symptoms of the problem we face in San Antonio, with this $350 million program. The reason the 2300 students the city claims are not enrolled in preK each year is because their parent(s) have not enrolled them. Any school district that has more than 15 eligible 4 year olds must offer preK, and there is no data to show that there is a waiting list to get into the existing preK programs in each school district. The city has not disclosed how much of the budget is going to “educate” parents to their responsibilities, which as Dr. Thrift points out is what really matters. Even if we throw lots of money at educating those parents who, for unknown reasons, have not enrolled their children in PreK, and the “education of the parents” is 100% successful – we have not solved the problem. There are still unmarried women becoming pregnant each year – guaranteeing a constant stream of single parents to be educated each year. That my friends is how government bureaucracies work. So in 8 years the city will argue there still parents to be educated and the sales tax must be continued!
Everyone opposing the data about the “married vs. non-married” section of this editorial is missing the point. It’s hard to look at raw data and admit that it is truth. It is. That’s why it’s called data. It might not be YOUR truth. Or your opinion. But it is fact. So, that being said, while someone might argue, and be correct, that the individual nurturing and rearing of the child is most important (duh; if you have to mention that, don’t comment), the facts are that children in married homes (or, I assume, home with stable same-sex domestic partnerships) do better in life, generally, and have a far better chance of not living in poverty. People get too tied up in specificities to remember that the over-arching principle that the 2-person support unit of the nuclear family is the ideal. Not for religious or moral reasons, but because it’s f****** easier to raise a small human with two people working at it together. Poor or rich, smart or dumb. Two heads are still better than one.
David, they are not missing the point. The “data” are not evidence of a causal link between poverty and household status as “Single-parent, female-headed households” vs. “Married, two-parent families”. What is shown is correlation, not underlying cause. There are many factors that cause the higher rates of poverty. Among them is income disparity. Females (as in “female-headed households”)earned $0.81 for each $1 earned by males in 2010. That same year median income for males was $42,800 vs. $34,700 for females. Another factor is middle-class, houshold incomes have been maintained in recent decades largely by a shift from single earner to dual earner households, i.e., individual wages have been flat or declining. Those two factors alone greatly disadvantage single-parent, female-headed households. The point here being that the “marriage” argument is not “evidence” or “fact”, but a misuse of statistical data. The author undercut their credibility by bringing ideology rather than hard evidence to their conclusions. Perhaps SA should use the 1/8 cent sales tax to promote income equality for women and living wages for workers instead of marriage. That is likely to be more effective…according to the “facts”.
This is a very impressive statement for considering voting No on this issue. I did vote NO because I feel that the city has a bad habit of getting money for a purpose and then not doing what was agreed upon. This happened with the drainage on the river under Hildebrand.
Also, as you recall the Texas Lottery, was suppose to raise money for education. We never hear how that is going and where that money is spent.
I know that education is important, WE ALL DO, but I think we should have a complete plan before we give permission. I flat don’t trust the city to do what it promises.
Also, I never hear about ART as a part of these programs and THE most important thing in these early years is showing these young minds how to be creative, think creatively and the purpose of play. There is too much time trying to get children to conform and sit still.
Bad idea.
Gene Elder
Texas artist
Trinity graduate, 1973