State praised for educating the very young
Posted on Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Arkansas’ early childhood education program for 3- and 4-year olds remains in the top tier of the nation’s preschool programs in terms of child access to the program, financial resources and quality standards.
Those are the findings of the National Institute of Early Education Research at Rutgers University in New Jersey in its latest review of state-funded prekindergarten initiatives.
The institute’s study was critical of Arkansas only for failing to require all of its preschool teachers to hold bachelor’s degrees in early childhood education or child development.
State officials, however, have drafted proposed rules that — if approved this spring by the state Board of Education and the legislative Committee on Administrative Rules and Regulations — would make that degree a requirement for newly hired teachers as soon as next school year.
Authors of the study also urged the state to be mindful of the potential for yearly decreases in state aid per child, such as occurred in 2006-07.
Nationally, Arkansas ranked 15 th in the access it provides 4-year-olds to state-supported preschool programs. It is fourth in the nation in access for 3-year-olds to the statefunded programs.
The state ranked 12 th in country in state funding per child and seventh in the nation when all state, local and federal funds per child are considered.
“Overall, Arkansas does a good job,” W. Steven Barnett, lead author of the preschool yearbook, said in a national teleconference announcing today’s release of the data. “But there is a question of whether funding is keeping pace with expanding enrollment. I think that is something to watch for in Arkansas.” The Arkansas Better Chance program and its companion Arkansas Better Chance for School Success program served 12, 216 children ages 3 and 4 in centers around the state in 2006-07. That number is up 1, 553 from the previous year, and it doesn’t count 5, 351 children of the same ages who were served through a home-visiting program in 2006-07. A total of 21. 4 percent of the state’s 4-year-olds were served by the state-supported programs as were 10. 8 percent of 3-year-olds.
WELCOME PRAISE Tonya Russell, director of the Childcare and Early Childhood Division in the state Department of Human Services, welcomed the study’s findings. “We’re very excited,” Russell said Tuesday. “We’ve continued to maintain our quality, meeting nine of 10 of the quality education standards. “ I also think we need to praise ourselves for the access rankings,” she said. “We are No. 4 in the country in serving 3-year-olds. A lot of states do not serve 3-year-olds. I think we need to applaud our state for taking a pretty bold step in serving 3-year-old children who are at-risk” of school failure. “I think our ranking for 4-yearolds is very good, too.” The North Little Rock School District is one of the school districts in the state that offers preschool programs to both 3- and 4-year olds. The district that started preschool with an $ 80, 000 state grant in one classroom in 1991 now is now serving 530 preschool children at nine elementary schools including the Redwood Early Childhood Center.
Jody Veit-Edrington, North Little Rock district’s coordinator of early childhood programs, said Tuesday that the state’s high rankings are “well-deserved” and a credit to the state’s lawmakers who provided laws and funding for the programs, as well as to the Child Care and Early Childhood Education Division, which worked cooperatively with the Arkansas Department of Education and even the Department of Higher Education, to craft the Better Chance programs. “Even before we had all the pre-K money, we started very early on setting state standards and early childhood frameworks — long before many other states that are held in higher esteem in education even looked at it,” Veit-Edrington recalled. “The thing that made it go so well in Arkansas is we decided what we wanted programs to look like before the system got too big. We’ve worked very hard as a state.” 9 OF 10 STANDARDS North Carolina and Alabama are the only two states that met all 10 quality program standards. Arkansas is one of eight states that met nine out of the 10 standards set by the institute for early childhood programs. Those standards require content standards for what is taught the children, a minimum 15 hours of teacher training a year, a cap of no more than 20 children per classroom, a staff-to-student ratio of 1-to-10, health screenings for the children, provision of at least one meal a day for the children, and site visits by a monitoring agency to ensure adherence to program standards.
Arkansas does not currently meet the standard calling for the lead teacher in each classroom to hold at least a bachelor’s degree. The current rules require private providers of state-funded preschool programs to have one teacher with a bachelor’s degree for every two with associate degrees. However, proposed revisions in the Arkansas Better Chance rules would change that. If approved, the revised rules would require lead teachers in each public school or education cooperative preschool classroom to hold a standard Arkansas Teacher license for teaching preschool. Similarly, teachers in all other types of state-supported preschool programs who are hired after May 15 this year would have to have at least a bachelor’s degree. Teachers currently employed who do not have a four-year degree are “grandfathered,” into their positions, meaning they can keep their jobs as long as they hold a minimum of an associate degree or meet the requirements established for them on a “Staff Qualifications Plan.” A LOOK AT FUNDING The national institute’s annual yearbook is based on 2006-07 enrollment and financial data from the states and does not take into account the $ 40 million addition to the Arkansas program in the current 2007-08 school year, Russell said.
A total of $ 111 million is budgeted for the Arkansas Better Chance programs this year by the Arkansas Board of Education, compared with about $ 70. 6 million last year.
In the past school year $ 7, 194 was provided per child, according to the national institute’s study. The state’s share was $ 4, 316 per child, a decrease of $ 519 compared with the previous year’s state expenditures but still above the national average of $ 3, 642 for last year.
The remainder of the total $ 7, 194 per child came from the federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program and local funding. Arkansas Better Chance programs require each local preschool provider to make a 40 percent match to the state contribution to its program.
“All of the Arkansas funding does not come from the state level. If you look at total funding per child, it’s still over $ 7, 000,” said Barnett, the study’s lead author.
But Barnett also noted that Arkansas isn’t spending as much on its preschool programs as it is on traditional school programs.
“That isn’t equivalent to what Arkansas is spending on kindergarten and first grade,” he said. “It does mean that standards can’t be quite as high [for preschool ] as they are for kindergarten and first grade.” Only 38 of the 50 states provided support for prekindergarten programs, Barnett said.
Oklahoma served the greatest percentages of 4-year-olds at 68 percent, but served no 3-year-olds.
Financial resources were greatest in New Jersey, $ 10, 494 per child, and least in Florida at $ 2, 335 per child.
States providing no financial support or program guides for preschool were Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming.
Barnett said high quality early education programs is less expensive than funding remediation programs for teenagers who were ill-prepared for school.
“Practically everyday we see reports on the benefits of early learning for children’s learning and development over the course of their lifetimes,” Barnett said. “This has consequences not just for the children who attend pre-K programs but for the nation. It has consequences for the later cost of their education. It has consequences for their economic productivity, and it has consequences for crime, delinquency and even health.”
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