Our Economic Future Depends on Investing in Children Now

You’ve heard the arguments before, but last week the Partnership for America’s Economic Success (PAES) hosted a National Economic Forum on Early Childhood Investment in Washington DC. This conference continued to champion the importance of investments in early childhood education as essential to the economic prosperity of our country.

Attending the conference were a wide range of business leaders, policy experts, educators, and government officials, Democrats and Republicans, united (surprisingly) in their recognition that investing in children is both a moral and economic imperative. In his opening remarks, Robert Dugger, Managing Partner for the Hanover Investment Group and founder of PAES, outlined 5 key principles for allocating state and federal resources:

• Human Capital – To achieve growth and fiscal sustainability, government should place its greatest emphasis on strengthening the skills and capacities of every American
• Young Children – Our nation should focus especially on children, from before birth to five years of age, and their families
• Evaluation – Return on investment should be a key consideration in public resource allocation decisions
• Transparency – Government should enable citizens to understand and participate in the assessment of all revenue and spending decisions
• Sustainability – State and federal budgets should be viable over the long term

While Michael Mandel, former Chief Economist of Business Week, made a compelling economic case for investing in early childhood education, Representative John Spratt (D-South Carolina) provided a sobering reminder of the broader economic challenges facing our country and the competing priorities for our limited resources.

Investments take time and patience, and political horizons are often short, seeking only immediate returns. While it is easy to feel skeptical, disillusioned and disenfranchised with the muddled state of affairs in Washington, it is more important than ever to raise your voice on behalf of your children and children throughout our country.

Our representatives need to know that children come first and that our economic future and security depends on that investment—and, in turn, that your support depends on their wisdom and courage to stand up for children. Reach out to your local and national representatives with this message.

Let your voice be heard. Every year more than 4 million children are born in this country, and every year that we compromise their future is a year that they can never get back–nor can we.

Learning is Everywhere

A great resource for families, complete with appropriate, fun and educational activities for children is the Learning is Everywhere calendar, which comes out of the Pennsylvania’s Office of Child Development and Early Learning (OCDEL).  

Every month this activity guide provides suggestions for families to use at home with children from infancy through kindergarten. It also provides suggested books for young children as well as helpful hints for parents.

The recommended activities are aligned with Pennsylvania’s Early Learning Standards for Infants and Toddlers, Pre-kindergarten, and Kindergarten children.

Although developed by the Pennsylvania Department of Education and the Department of Public Welfare, these early learning standards are highly consistent with early learning standards from states around the country and, quite frankly, with the curriculum framework that you should be able to see at any early childhood education program that your child attends. They are designed to ensure that children in early care and education programs receive the skills and experiences they need to enter school ready to learn, but also to ensure that children learn these skills in a developmentally appropriate, fun and engaging way.

Pennsylvania’s Early Learning Standards cover key learning areas including Approaches to Learning through Play, Creative Thinking and Expression, Social Studies Thinking, Health Wellness and Physical Development, Cognitive Thinking and General Knowledge, Mathematical Thinking and Expression, Scientific Thinking and Technology, Early Literacy Foundations, Partnerships for Learning, and Social and Emotional Development.  Thus, they are quite comprehensive as are the suggested activities in the Learning is Everywhere calendar.

It’s a great resource and very well done—not just for families from Pennsylvania—and we all appreciate the great work of Pennsylvania’s OCDEL on behalf of children everywhere.

The Grove School Celebrates Its Grand Opening

This week,  The Grove School held its grand opening celebrations in Plano, Texas and Cary, North Carolina.

The Grove School prepares children ages 2 to 5 for both today and the future, providing an extensive curriculum that offers them a head start on understanding our quickly evolving world. In fact, after extensive research, a group of professionals with more than 35 years of expertise in early childhood education discovered that many parents nationwide were seeking a preschool that includes both traditional early learning curriculum and instruction in social purpose and a healthy lifestyle to deliver a high-quality and well-rounded education.

The Grove School goes beyond serving organic food and using sustainable products to fully implement its overarching philosophy in every element, from curriculum and materials to types of activities and models for the way the children interact with one another, their parents and their community

Periodically, I invite a guest to write a post. This week, Lisa Wohlschlaeger, an early preschool teacher at The Grove School of Cary, is our guest blogger. She is a mother of 3, had run her own preschool and is currently working on a Master’s Degree in Education. She writes about her son Augie who is attending The Grove School of Cary and the positive impact this new type of preschool has had on him in such a short time:
http://blog.groveschool.com/2010/02/27/a-place-for-augie/

First Lady Michelle Obama Calls on Governors to Help Fight Childhood Obesity

Speaking at the National Governor’s Association Winter meeting this past Saturday, First Lady Michelle Obama called on the governors to “give our kids the future they deserve,” and join her in the fight against childhood obesity. Earlier this month, Mrs. Obama launched her campaign entitled Let’s Move, designed to solve the national problem of childhood obesity within a generation.

Citing the staggering health care costs of obesity-related diseases such as heart disease, cancer, and high blood pressure, she described 4 pillars of Let’s Move as part of a comprehensive, coordinated approach to this problem:

• Provide parents with the information they need to make healthier choices for their children through public information campaigns, more informative food labeling, and collaborating with the American Academy of Pediatrics to provide education to doctors and nurses nationwide about childhood obesity and ensure that they provide information to parents to promote healthy eating and active play. 
• Ensure that children receive healthier food in schools by increasing funding for the National School Lunch and Breakfast program to expand the number of children served and ensuring that children have healthier food choices such as additional fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat dairy products, while working with food suppliers to decrease the amount of sugar, fat, and salt in school meals.
• Increase access to healthy, affordable food by eliminating food deserts (communities where access to affordable, quality, and nutritious food is limited due to lack of supermarkets) and providing grants to establish and improve access to farmers markets.
• Encourage increased physical activity by expanding and modernizing the President’s Physical Fitness Challenge, creating a Safe and Healthy Schools Fund to support efforts to get children to be more physically active in and outside of school and improve the quality and availability of physical education programs, and working with professional athletes to promote “60 minutes of play a day.”

To support these efforts, President Obama signed a Presidential Memorandum creating a Task Force on Childhood Obesity, which will conduct a review of programs and policies related to child nutrition and physical activity and develop a national plan within 90 days.

While schools, community organizations, and government agencies can play an important role in addressing childhood obesity, the real opportunity lies in the hands of us as parents. There is no need to wait for 90 days for a Presidential Task Force to outline steps that the government and play in promoting healthier lifestyle choices for your children.

You can start by encouraging portion control, more outdoor play time, reducing your child’s intake of fat and sugar and, as much as possible, providing more home-cooked meals to encourage healthier food choices for you and your children. You can start your child on a path to a healthier future today.

Visiting Early Childhood Education Programs Half a World Away

I just returned from a wondrous trip to Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore, where I had the opportunity to visit early childhood education programs half a world away from the United States, some that are part of our company and others that are not. What an inspiration to see the quality of care these children receive—some ex pats, some local children.

The programs I saw compete with the very best we have here, with one very notable advantage. All the programs I visited were dual language, where children, even the very youngest, are exposed to both Chinese and English. The advantages of learning two languages at an early age and in a natural context are profound, not just in promoting bilingualism, but also linguistic and cultural diversity and general academic achievement.

One phenomenal program that I observed was the Odyssey Global Preschool, which is run by Knowledge Universe in Singapore. This unique and remarkably beautiful program not only promotes fluency by having both English and Mandarin speaking teachers in all classes, it embodies a truly international approach, combining the best elements from the United States and Reggio Emilia, Italy among many others. 

The Reggio Approach,  which was initiated in Northern Italy, emphasizes an emergent approach to learning, where daily activities are guided by and build upon the children’s own interests.  Nature and the outdoors are a key part of the classroom experience, capitalizing on a child’s natural wonder about their environment.

Another cornerstone of this approach is the use of long term projects that flow from and develop a child’s natural curiosity and interests. For example, in one classroom for 5 year olds, the children were working on a project to re-design an area of the outdoor playground, complete with riding paths and traffic flow signs after observing some disorder in an outdoor tricycle riding area. The project included a discussion of the problem to multiple drawings of suggested designs to a clay representation of the space.

The project will culminate in redesigning the actual play area for the school, complete with painting the ground and traffic signs. Throughout this project children shared their ideas and work with each other, their teachers, children in other classrooms, and their families—developing their self-confidence and speaking skills along with skills in measurement, writing, drawing, design, and fine/gross motor development among many others.  In this program and the many others that I visited, there was an overwhelming sense of respect for each child as a unique, creative individual, whose interests and skills were at the center of all activities.

Whether in China or Singapore, Africa, the UK, or the US, the wonder in a child’s eye when they experience something new for the first time, the pride they have when they show you a leaf they have found or picture they have drawn-these precious moments of innocence are truly universal.  The opportunity to visit early childhood programs around the world reinforces how much we have in common and how much we can learn from each other about how to support the growth and development of all children, everywhere, as the wonder of childhood knows no bounds.

President Obama Proposes to Increase Tax Credit for Child Care

Periodically, I welcome a guest to join me on my blog. Katie Kinsfogel, Government Relations Specialist for Knowledge Learning Corporation has authored the following article on the President’s proposal to increase the tax credit for child care .

Recently, President Obama announced a series of initiatives to provide relief to overburdened middle class families, the cornerstone of which is a dramatic expansion of the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit.  This credit assists families with employment-related child care expenses by reducing the amount of income tax they owe.

The tax credit currently varies based on income and ranges between $600 and $1,050 per child, for up to two children.

The child care tax credit has been increased only once in the last twenty-eight years, and has failed to keep pace with the cost of care.  For some families, the cost of care for two children is greater than the average cost of rent, and nearly as much as monthly mortgage payments for homeowners.  The President acknowledged this disparity in his announcement, showing a distinct understanding for the strain child care expenses places on family budgets. 

In his budget request for the fiscal year which begins on October 1, 2010 (FY ‘11), President Obama will ask Congress to approve tax cuts for all families with children in care with Adjusted Gross Incomes (AGI) under $115,000.  Families with incomes under $85,000 will see their child care tax credit nearly double.

If approved by the Congress all families with incomes under $85,000 will be able to deduct 35% of the first $3,000 in child care expenses for one child and the first $6,000 in expenses for two or more children.  Between $85,000 and $115,000, the credit will be phased-down from 35% of allowable expenses to 20%.

The President’s proposal is similar to several bills introduced in Congress by Representative Ruppersberger and Senators Boxer, Lincoln and Snowe, giving the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit an advantage over a number of competing initiatives.

In light of challenges facing families in the current economy, President Obama’s proposal is a timely change, with bi-partisan support, that will provide meaningful tax relief for middle-income working parents. 

About Katie Kinsfogel, Government Relations Specialist, Knowledge Learning Corporation
Katie Kinsfogel is a Government Relations Specialist for the Knowledge Learning Corporation, the nation’s largest private provider of early childhood education.  Katie oversees the company’s government relations efforts for the West.  In this role, Katie is responsible for developing strategic communications, monitoring legislative activities, leading grassroots advocacy, strengthening strategic alliances, and building coalitions to drive public policy in support of high-quality early childhood education.

STEM Gathers Steam with Public and Private Sector Support

I want to continue to update you on activity related to STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) issues as it gathers steam with the Obama Administration, with the support of key industry representatives, foundations and thought leaders.

Recently, a colleague and I attended a briefing hosted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to provide an update on the President’s Educate to Innovate initiative that was introduced last November. This campaign is designed to

• Improve the participation and performance of America’s students in STEM by increasing demand for STEM education
• Improve STEM teaching in the schools to make our children more competitive on international exams such as the Programme for International Student Assessment, where American student ranked 21st out of 30 in science literacy and 25 out of 30 in math literacy among students from developed countries, and 
• Expand STEM education and career opportunities for underrepresented groups including minorities, girls, and rural children through innovative programs.

This “call to action” builds on the 2005 report by the National Academies, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” which warned that the U.S. is falling behind in math and science education, endangering America’s competitiveness and national security. Several private-public partnerships have already been announced including: 

• Time-Warner Cable, Discovery Communications, Sesame Street, and other partners will get the message to kids and students about the wonder of invention and discovery.
• National Lab Day will help build communities of support around teachers across the country, culminating in a day of civic participation. 
• National STEM design competitions will develop game options to engage kids in scientific inquiry and challenging designs. 
• Five leading business and thought leaders (Craig Barrett of Intel, Ursula Burns of Xerox, Glen Britt of Time Warner Cable, Antonio Perez of Kodak, and Sally Ride of Sally Ride Science) will head an effort to increase private and philanthropic involvement in support of STEM teaching and learning.

At this briefing we heard from representatives of the Carnegie Corporation as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who are providing leadership and financial support for this critical initiative as well as representatives from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. We also had time to brainstorm possible collaborative efforts among all the supporting agencies to ensure that this initiative will have a transformative impact on STEM.

As both an educator and the daughter of a Nobel Prize Laureate in Science (and the first American-trained woman to achieve this honor), the challenge of preparing the next generation of scientists, mathematicians, technologists, and engineers is both personally and professionally important to me. I will continue to follow this issue and keep you apprised as work progresses.

In the meantime, I ask that you help your own children appreciate the wonder of science and inquiry, give them the needed vote of confidence that they can succeed in these areas if they have the will to do so, and find opportunities to expose them to the wonder of scientific discovery from museums, nature walks, star gazing, science camps, gardens, and even the kitchen. 

Science and STEM more broadly can be discovered everywhere, and your children will take their cues about it from you, their parents and their first and most important teachers.

Supporting the Children of Haiti

Periodically, I welcome a guest to join me on my blog. David Roy, Director of  Community Partnerships for Knowledge Learning Corporation has authored the following article on the value of teaching children about community involvement.

Last week, like so many people around the globe, I sat transfixed as images poured in from Haiti.  The reach of destruction, the level of despair—it was all but incomprehensible, even while seeing it with my own eyes.

Friday evening, there was a report about an orphanage run by two sisters–young  American women, both volunteers.  The earthquakes had rendered the orphanage’s compound uninhabitable, and there were mounting security concerns.  The situation was even more dire by Saturday, when water ran out.

That story had a happy ending, which you can read more about here. For perhaps two million other children, things are still holding in the balance.  For many, lack of access to basic medical care, food and water threatens their health, their safety, their lives.  For all children in Haiti—indeed, for all Haitians—the longer-term challenge is surviving in a country that started with profoundly limited economic opportunity and social services infrastructure, and now has close to none at all.   

Knowledge Learning Corporation is supporting Mercy Corps and Medical Teams International, two aid organizations that were among the first on the ground in Haiti.  We are also in the process of shipping thousands of items of children’s clothing to Haiti, along with hundreds of dolls. Our hope is that our contribution will be a small part of the huge effort to assist children who now face monumental challenges. 

We hope that you will consider joining us, either in our support of Mercy Corps and Medical Teams International, or in our ongoing efforts—working with our community partners—to bring access to quality experiences to underserved children.

About David Roy, Director, Community Partnerships
David Roy oversees grants, government-sponsored funding opportunities and corporate giving activities for Knowledge Learning Corporation, a leading national early childhood care and education company. David directs efforts to access grant and other funding for Knowledge Learning’s centers and programs, and helps facilitate the company’s philanthropic efforts, including those through Knowledge Learning Foundation.

David directs KinderCare’s national philanthropic fundraising campaign, which has generated over $12 million since 2000. He also directs the Knowledge Universe Early Childhood Educator Awards program, and serves in a leadership capacity for other organizational projects and initiatives, including KLC’s new preparatory school brand.

Ensuring At-Risk Children are Ready for School

It is difficult to start writing about anything else with the backdrop of last week’s horrific devastation in Haiti. While our life goes on and our work continues, it is sobering to realize that not that far away, a country and a people struggle to regain even the most basic necessities while facing the overwhelming loss of everything they once knew.

This human tragedy does not diminish the challenges we face here in the United States. But it does provide a sobering reminder of how fortunate many of us are and the role we can play in helping others, whether in Haiti or here at home, who lack access to the privileges that we can easily take for granted.

So, with that in mind, I wanted to recognize one Oregon organization that our company, Knowledge Learning Corporation, has supported for several years. The Children’s Institute  is dedicated to improving the lives of Oregon’s at-risk children by ensuring that they enter school ready to learn.

One of the initiatives they support is called Ready for School. This initiative, led by business and community leaders, encourages investments in early childhood education, recognizing its beneficial impact not just for the individual child and family, but for society as a whole. The benefits include reduced crime and school drop-out rates, reduced need for adult social services and, ultimately, an enhanced economic competitiveness.

While you have heard this information before, Ready for School has added a very engaging feature to their website–weekly, two- minute videos from Professor James Heckman, the Nobel prize winning economist whose research is widely cited in making the case for investing in high quality early childhood education programs. In these videos, Professor Heckman covers a range of topics from early health care to crime to the role of the family.

As an acclaimed economist, Professor Heckman transformed the debate about investing in early childhood education from primarily a moral imperative to one that also recognized the broad reaching economic benefits of doing what is right. I thought you might enjoy hearing and seeing him for yourself.

President Obama Recognizes Importance of Science and Math In Education

Just last week, President Obama announced a $250 million funding package new and innovative public-private partnerships with companies, universities, foundations, and government agencies to reward and encourage outstanding educators in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). In addition, the President honored over 100 outstanding mathematics and science educators for excellence in teaching and mentoring. In his remarks, President Obama acknowledged the critical role of educators in shaping the success of the next generation to address critical issues that will shape our future.

“The quality of  math and science teachers is the most important single factor influencing whether students will succeed or fail in science, technology, engineering and math,” President Obama said. “Passionate educators with issue expertise can make all the difference, enabling hands-on learning that truly engages students—including girls and underrepresented minorities—and preparing them to tackle the grand challenges of the 21st century such as increasing energy independence, improving people’s health, protecting the environment, and strengthening national security.”

There is no doubt that passionate educators play a significant role in promoting a love of science and mathematics in young children. But with all due respect to the President, as parents, our role is even more significant in starting our children off on the road to scientific literacy. A love of science can be nurtured and developed in very young children, capitalizing on their natural curiosity about themselves and the world around them. Basic scientific skills such as observation, prediction, and classification can be promoted by encouraging children to ask questions, describe the world around them, make predictions, and even just spending time outdoors observing nature.

The November 2009 edition of Young Children, the Journal of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, focused on ways to promote an interest in science in our youngest learners, whether in school or at home. Supplemental programs for children such as the Science Adventures program that is offered at KinderCare Learning Centers and in partnership with many school districts further develop children’s inquiry skills and their natural interest in the world around them.

As our society wrestles with complex issues such as climate change and national security, we need an informed citizenry who can ensure that we make critical decisions based on facts, not rhetoric. And if we are to continue to lead the world in technology and innovation, we must ensure that our children are prepared to meet this challenge. Recognizing and rewarding outstanding STEM educators is an important step in this process as they partner with you to develop your child’s natural curiosity–the key ingredient to developing the inquiry skills needed to unlock the next generation of young scientists.