Posted on 09/19/2009 6:50:37 PM PDT by Steelfish
Initiative Focuses on Early Learning Programs
SAM DILLON September 19, 2009
Tucked away in an $87 billion higher education bill that passed the House last week was a broad new federal initiative aimed not at benefiting college students, but at raising quality in the early learning and care programs that serve children from birth through age 5.
The initiative, the Early Learning Challenge Fund, would channel $8 billion over eight years to states with plans to improve standards, training and oversight of programs serving infants, toddlers and preschoolers.
The Senate is expected to pass similar legislation this fall, giving President Obama, who proposed the Challenge Fund during the presidential campaign, a bill to sign in December.
Experts describe the current array of programs serving young children and their families nationwide as a hodgepodge of efforts with little coordination or coherence. Financing comes from a shifting mix of private, local, state and federal money.
Programs are run out of storefronts and churches, homes and Head Start centers, public schools and other facilities. Quality is uneven, with some offering stimulating activities, play and instruction but others providing little more than a room and a television.
Oversight varies by state, but most lack any early childhood structure analogous to the state and local boards of education that govern public schools. A result is that poor children, even many who have access to government-financed early care or learning programs, tend to enter kindergarten less prepared for school than those with wealthier parents.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The initiative, the Early Learning Challenge Fund, would channel $8 billion over eight years to states with plans to improve standards, training and oversight of programs serving infants, toddlers and preschoolers.
And of course this will include the mandatory “homosexuality is good” curriculum
They need teaching before they can think. Help is needed.
Even supporters of Head Start will tell you there has not been a longitudial study that shows improvement in students that went to Headstart.
This is a welfare proposal to assist - no enable - irresponsible teens that get pregnant and need childcare. We need to quit enabling bad behavior (besides the fact that federal welfare programs are unconstitutional)with programs such as WIC, Food Stamps, Medicaid from conception through birth, etc.
$8 billion for babysitting - nice.
Is this part of that U.N. program that wants to teach toddlers to masturbate?
Is this where Ayers inserts his “curricula”?
Which was the original rationale for Head Start, back about 40 years ago. Hundreds of billions down the toilet and "poor" kids still start out a lap behind. Nothing accomplished except looting by connected welfare mothers who got some cushy jobs out of it.
Maybe they can listen to Obama’s books on tape in utero.
And the government weenies are suggesting that's a bad thing? Boards of education make things so structured that teachers can't teach -- they just provide the programs provided by the boards.
Unfortunately, these programs are needed (though not necessarily the way they’re being run, or going to be run under this latest “new initiative”. But the real problem is people having babies long before they’ve reached a level of intellectual and financial development to be able to take responsibility for raising their own children. A big chunk of the problem is teenage girls, but it doesn’t matter a whit whether they’re married or not. A clueless teenage girl doesn’t magically get a clue — or earning power — when she and a clueless teenage boy have the government issue a piece of paper saying they’re “married”. They’re still two clueless teenagers who have no idea how to earn enough money to support themselves decently, much less a child, nor do they have any idea what a child needs to be learning to lay the foundation for responsible productive adulthood.
Just a couple of days ago, I talked to a young woman who called about an apartment I’m have for rent. Married to a fellow who has some low-paying factory job, and with a 3.5 year old son (thank God the local/state family planning outfit got to them before they pumped out a couple more babies). They’re in a big hurry to find a place to live, because they just found out they can’t stay at their current apartment, where they’ve been for about 9 months. Reason? The apartment was originally her grandfather’s, and when he moved, he told her he talked to the landlord and it would be okay for her and her husband and toddler to live there. Now the landlord says he never said any such thing, and that they can’t stay because they’re subletting (she doesn’t seem to have a clue what that word means). So I ask her what the lease says about subletting. “I never saw no lease so I don’t know”. So I ask if there even IS a lease (this is in a small town, and some landlords just rent month to month without any written lease). “Yeah, my grandad signed the lease but I never saw it, I just trusted him ‘cause he said he talked to the landlord.” So I ask if she even knows when it expires, since most leases are only for a year? “No, ‘cause I never seen it.” Then she tells me about the 8 month old Rottweiler they have, how she’s really gentle, would never bite anyone, is great with her son even when he pulls her tail and stuff. So while I’m doing the math in my head and realizing they got a Rottweiler puppy just a few weeks after moving into an apartment that they knew had a lease, but which they’d never seen the terms of, and the owner/agent of which they’d never met (I’m really starting to feel for this landlord now), I ask if the dog is spayed. “No, they can’t do that until she’s at least a year old.” Uh, huh, riiiiight. Dogs usually come into heat for the first time at 7 months, and often as young as 5 months, and vets recommend spaying before their first heat. I see puppies on the horizon. I do NOT see these people moving into the beautiful just-renovated apartment I’ve got open.
The scary thing is, these two have no idea what they’re doing wrong. They followed all the rules they know about. They got married, he got a job, they had a baby, they got a dog. But they’re spinning their wheels and sinking into the mud. The only good news in all this is that their little boy just started in the local Head Start program. At least there’s a chance he’ll get some exposure to some adults who have a clue, and that maybe a little of it will rub off on him. If they didn’t have a kid yet, maybe they’d be able to get a bit more education, and a bit more life experience, and be better prepared for adult responsibilities. But they do have a kid, and none of those good things are going to happen, because they’re barely keeping their heads above water as it is.
If these two had had their first child 10 years later, they’d most likely have a comfortable, self-sufficient family life ahead of them, and not be leeches clinging to the taxpayers and voting Democrat because they’re in favor of all the government programs they can get their hands on because they can’t fathom any other way to get by. As it is, I guarantee the child is on some sort of public health care program, the parents may be too since I’m sure their income is quite low, the Head Start program is taxpayer funded, and the public schools that the kid will attend later are taxpayer funded, and these parents will NEVER come anywhere close to paying enough in taxes to cover the cost of educating even one child (and they’ll almost certainly end up having more, and the kid will start reproducing in his late teens or very early twenties, before paying a dime in school/property taxes).
We can bitch and moan all day about these ever-expanding government programs, but if we don’t get serious about dealing with the underlying reproductive engine that’s driving them, we’re just going to be bitching and moaning forever, because the programs will never shrink and will never go away. These people are breeding socialist voters and raising them at our expense.
You seem to be for this. I therefore do not trust your mindset. Go crawl into your own sick corner, don’t take me with you.
You have a very good heart; I can tell how caring you are by your writing. However, it’s still NEVER the role of the federal government to take my tax money at gun point and give it to others. If your state wants to do that, that’s fine. It’s up to you whether you want to live in such a state or not. I believe it should be left to charities and churches as it always was until the 1930’s (the first 150+ years of our nation’s existence).
Fine observation!
Any time government starts financing immoral behavior, it just multiplies that behavior. ALL government incentives for teenagers having children should be taken away. The innocent babies should be put up for adoption if the homes are unfit for the emotional and physical well-being of the child or they have no means for caring for the infant. That is pretty easy to determine. Sorry, this cycle has got to be broken and preventing the destruction of babies is a start.
Let us not forget that the president’s good friend who he claims not to know that well is a professor of early childhood education.
Is this a Bill Ayers initiative for incremental Soviet style indoctrination of little ones ala Cuba, North Korea etc?
With a lot of these kids, the only reason they’re even surviving to the age where they’d start going to Head Start is because of all the government programs that have been subsidizing their parents, both before and after they had children. People graduate from high school (if they graduate) with at least a $100,000 debt to society JUST for their public school education (and it’s closer to $250,000 in many areas). Then they start popping out babies and stick them in the public schools 5 years later.
I’m not in favor of ANY of the government programs, but we have to get rid of them in the right order. All the housing, food stamps, “job training”, Medicaid, etc, that’s enabling these people to even think for a second that they can afford to have a child, has got to go FIRST. We can’t subsidize everything except the children’s education, because they’ll go right on breeding them, and then the children grow up with no clue what to do except breed some more.
People who aren’t even fully supporting themselves need to get a loud, tough message that having children is absolutely 100% out of the question. Instead, when some teenager shows up at a hospital in labor, to get her free medical care for the delivery, she gets a free epidural too! Hey, we wouldn’t want it to *hurt*. And she knows in advance from her friends that she’ll get this, and she knows the housing subsidy and food stamps and AFDC/WIC will follow quickly. We’re sending the message loud and clear to go ahead and have babies, regardless of your ability to support them. From the “conservative” end of the spectrum, the only modification to the message is “Make sure you get a piece of paper from the government saying you’re ‘married’ first”. Once they’re born, we might as well pay to start getting them out of the house a few hours a day, before their brains are too hopelessly atrophied to be educable, or we’ll just end up paying more later on, to house them in prison. But we need to focus a lot more on preventing from them being born to parents who aren’t equipped to support them, financially or logistically.
I don’t believe in government interference into child birth (except that I believe it should be against the law to murder a baby via abortion), but I believe if you quit enabling a behavior with “safety nets,” girls will once again start telling hot-and-horny Johnnie in the backseat to back off because she wants to take no chance in getting pregnant. Also, you would have parents watching their teens again because, rightfully, mama and daddy would be responsible for the teen daughter’s pregnancy and the costs related to it until she’s at least 18. Of course, these costs should be shared with Johnnie’s parents too.
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