Obama Pledge Stirs Hope in Early Education

New York Times ^ | December 16, 2008 | Sam Dillon

[reaganaut1]

[T]he $10 billion Mr. Obama has pledged for early childhood education would amount to the largest new federal initiative for young children since Head Start began in 1965. Now, Head Start is a $7 billion federal program serving about 900,000 preschoolers.

“People are absolutely ecstatic,” said Cornelia Grumman, executive director of the First Five Years Fund, an advocacy group. “Some people seem to think the Great Society is upon us again.”

...

Now that new initiatives seem likely, experts are debating how best to improve America’s early childhood system, which they call fantastically fragmented, unconscionably underfinanced and bureaucratically bewildering. Some hesitate to use the word “system” at all.

“It’s a patchwork quilt, a tossed salad, a nonsystem,” said Libby Doggett, executive director of Pre-K Now, a group that presses for universal, publicly financed prekindergarten.

There are federal and state, public and private, for-profit and nonprofit programs. Some unfold in public school classrooms, others in storefront day care centers, churches or Y.M.C.A.’s, and still others in tiny centers run out of private homes.

“California has 22 different funding streams for child care and preschool, and that mirrors the crazy labyrinth of funding sources coming out of Washington,” said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is the author of “Standardized Childhood: The Political and Cultural Struggle Over Early Education.”

[Las Vegas Ron]

....more complete education than what's offered now, or when I went to school.

Same here. I was fortunate when I went to school they still taught phonetics and how to sound out words.

Both my Mom and Dad took a big interest in teaching me, my Mom reading and my Dad math. I was reading before I even started school, not because I'm brilliant or anything but my folks took an active interest.

Most parents today really don't seem to give a hoot about their kids, let alone their education (and I won't even bring up manners)...guess we can consider ourselves among the lucky ones.

[latina4dubya]

we adopted our first son through the county CFS... he was almost five when we met him... he could not talk well at all, he could not name more than two colors, he could not count to three... knew maybe two shapes... he was in a Head Start program... he was about ready to go into Kindergarten... when i mentioned to his teachers that i was surprised at how little prepared he was for school (after all, i was used to nieces and nephews who could read before they started school) they said, we do not focus so much on teaching them that here... this program is mainly focused on "nutrition." WWWWWHHHAAATTT? i thought Head Start was all about getting these underprivileged kids ready to compete on a level playing field with their privileged classmates... the bar just keeps being lowered...

within five months of living with us, our son was reading...