By Tom Ridge, Mark Schweiker, Ed Rendell, Tom Corbett, Tom Wolf
For more than two decades, Pennsylvania has been investing in our youngest learners.
Year after year, budget after budget, across party lines and administrations, we’ve taken meaningful steps forward in growing access to Head Start and Pre-K Counts to help more children thrive in their earliest years and setting the stage for future success.
To let that progress slip away now would be a big mistake.
Research has long shown the importance of investing in high-quality pre-K education for young children to improve short- and long-term outcomes in academic achievement and even lifelong success. This is especially true for children living in low-income families, children of color and others facing barriers to achieving academic success throughout their school years.
In 2020, The University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill released an independent analysis on the effect of participation in the Pennsylvania Pre-K Counts program. The result: children who participated had significantly higher levels of language skills and math skills compared to non-participants.
These early positive gains put children on a trajectory of success making them more likely to graduate high school and better prepared for college, career, or even military service. In addition to the positive academic and social gains for children, for every dollar spent on quality pre-K, taxpayers see a strong return on investment in the form of reduced need for special education, social services, and other public support down the line.
Results like this are why Pennsylvania voters of all backgrounds, from all corners of the commonwealth, unanimously agree (98 percent) that early childhood education is important to helping our children lead healthy and productive lives.
It also explains why 73 percent of Pennsylvania voters support increasing state funding so more children can have access to pre-K.
Pennsylvanians should be proud of how far our commonwealth has come in providing pre-K to our youngest learners with more than 66,000 three- and four-year-olds having access. However, this represents only 44 percent of eligible children, leaving almost 85,000 children on the sidelines each year.
Better than anyone, we can appreciate the tough decisions that state lawmakers must make to balance the state budget. Given the strong research and public support, nothing should stand in the way of continued investment and strengthening of our commonwealth’s pre-K programs.
Lawmakers must work together to address challenges facing the system like the early learning teacher shortage that is jeopardizing the ability to serve additional children in pre-K and child care centers across the state
We must stay on the path of progress for our children, for our communities, and for the commonwealth we all proudly served.
Tom Ridge, Mark Schweiker, Ed Rendell, Tom Corbett, and Tom Wolf all served as governors of Pennsylvania.
PennLive: Oped: Get this Done – Pre-K for PA
January 26, 2024
By: Governor Rendell and Governor Schweiker
Few issues in Pennsylvania have united Republicans and Democrats over the years like the prospect of ensuring that our youngest learners are ready to succeed through high-quality pre-k programs like Pre-K Counts and Head Start. In fact, a September 2023 Susquehanna Polling and Research poll showed that 94% of PA voters believe that early learning is important, and 71% support increasing state funding to serve more eligible children in pre-K programs.
There is good reason for this support, research is clear that brain development from birth to age five sets the foundation for children’s future success. During these years, more than one million new neural connections form every second – more than any other time in life. This early foundation sets the stage for children’s cognitive ability, health, and behavior throughout life. Quality pre-kindergarten programs have been proven to reduce grade repetition and special education placements while increasing graduation rates.
We offer this piece together, as governors who championed state funding for pre-K programs during our time in office. We urge Gov. Josh Shapiro and the General Assembly to find the political will to offer this one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to all Pennsylvania children regardless of income and zip code. We know it makes a lifelong difference for children and families, we know other states are investing in universal access to attract families, and we know most Pennsylvanians support it. It’s time that we GET THIS DONE for Pennsylvania.
States (15) across the political spectrum have embraced universal access to pre-k. More conservative states like Florida, Georgia, and Alabama join states like Illinois, New Mexico, and California in this distinction. Lawmakers in our neighboring states of New York, New Jersey, and West Virginia have all pushed universal pre-k over the finish line for their youngest learners.
Research out of these states explains this move. A study published in 2021 analyzed the achievements of 458 Georgia students as they progressed through elementary and middle school while accounting for their participation in Georgia’s state-funded pre-K program at age 4. The study sought to examine the relationship between pre-K enrollment at age 4 and statewide mathematics test scores from grades 3 through 7, and then use the findings to predict student likelihood of achievement scores and performance levels. It was found that participation in the Georgia Pre-K program significantly predicted students’ mathematics achievement scores and performance levels in first grade as well as third through seventh grade. Students who attended pre-K were twice as likely as their peers who did not attend pre-K to meet the state’s minimum level of proficiency in elementary and middle school standardized math scores.
In Oklahoma, a 2022 study found that students enrolled in public pre-K went on to have many more positive outcomes in high school than their peers who never attended pre-K These outcomes include higher attendance levels, decreased likelihood of course failure, increased likelihood of enrollment in advanced courses (AP, honors, etc.), decreased likelihood of grade retention, and a slightly lower rate of absenteeism. These outcomes were strongest among students of color or students considered economically disadvantaged.
Pennsylvania has its own data! A study of our Pre-K Counts program by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found children who participated in the program had higher levels of language and math skills and gained between 4 and 5 months of learning compared to children who did not participate. These are significant gains for this age cohort.
As an election year, 2024 will likely focus more on what divides our commonwealth rather than what unites us. Focusing on our youngest learners and ensuring greater access to high-quality pre-K to the more than 87,000 children that are currently eligible but not served by Pre-K Counts and Head Start can serve as a bright spot of bipartisanship.
We can GET THIS DONE!
Ed Rendell served as the 45th governor of Pennsylvania from 2003 to 2011.
Mark Schweiker served as the 44th governor of Pennsylvania from October 5, 2001 to January 21, 2003.
Northeast Times: Op-Ed: Teaching Our Youngest Children Deserves a Living Wage
May 10, 2023 by Milagros Battiti and Adria Godfrey
Do you love what you do? Do you feel called to do a job, no matter how stressful it feels some days?
We do. We are both early education teachers in Northeast Philadelphia.
We work with 20 or so tiny souls who need us to provide a sense of safety, structure and the excitement of learning. We work with their parents and guardians, too, helping them navigate the challenges of being a working parent, of hunting for the supports their children need.
Doing all this makes us very happy. But it doesn’t pay our bills.
In Pennsylvania, educating other people’s small children while they work doesn’t pay enough to provide for your own children. Or to pay the student loans you piled up getting trained to do the work. Or, sometimes, even to go out with your friends for a modest meal.
A study by Children First found that the average pay for early education teachers in Pennsylvania is $12.43 an hour, or a shade under $26,000 a year. This level of pay covers only about three-quarters of the basic cost of living – food, shelter, health care, transportation – in Philadelphia. In some western counties, that figure dips to around 50%.
In a survey of 3,400 early ed workers across Pennsylvania, three out of five reported a surprise $400 expense would send their household budgets into a tailspin. Even though they work full-time, many said they need SNAP food benefits and Medicaid to get by. Fully half said they did not expect to be in the same job, at the same center, in five years. No wonder studies estimate the national shortfall or early ed teachers is 110,000 and growing.
Unlike many who responded to the Children First survey, we don’t plan on going anywhere. We want to stay where we are; we love the kids we get to help and relish the relationships we build with their families. We love making a difference in a child’s future.
But we also must balance that happiness with a constant financial struggle. One of us has a master’s in education, and 23 years experience. The other has a bachelor’s and is newer to the work. One of us has three kids of her own, with one looking at college, another eager to play travel sports (whew … expensive!) and the youngest still needing $1,300 worth of child care a month. The other of us works second jobs, sells stuff online and at flea markets and maxes out credit cards – but still sometimes runs out of money before the month ends. She almost never takes a vacation day, because she has to save her time off to take care of a sick mother.
Here’s a finding from the survey that came as no surprise to us: The typical early ed teacher holding a college degree gets better pay, but not enough to pay off the student loans she piled up getting that degree. The second jaw of this financial vise is that the tuition early ed centers charge is usually higher than the annual tuition in the Pennsylvania state university system. So, the centers where we work would have a hard time raising their tuition to pay us a living wage.
The support for fair wages for early childhood educators must come from our commonwealth.
Our state’s new governor just introduced his first proposed budget. We’re happy to see he didn’t ignore us totally. The proposal ups the funding for the Pre-K Counts and Head Start programs by about 10% ($30 million). But his focus is on increasing the number of slots, not reducing families’ costs, or raising our deeply inadequate pay.
As educators, we do know a little bit about basic math and logic. So, a question for our leaders in Harrisburg: What does a theoretical increase in the number of slots matter if you’re not going to pay enough to retain or attract qualified teachers to teach those kids?
Perhaps you’re not all that moved by our personal financial struggles. But please know this: Shortfalls in pre-k slots and hours of operation also spawn severe harm to the state’s businesses in the form of worker absences, productivity losses and turnover. A new ReadyNation report found that child care breakdowns cost our commonwealth $6.65 billion (yes, with a B). That, in turn, costs the state nearly $600 million in annual tax revenue, the study found. That figure, by the way, is more than double what the state spent this fiscal year to support Pre-K Counts and Head Start.
We hope our state lawmakers will at the very least endorse, if not increase, Gov. Shapiro’s proposed allocation for early childhood education.
Gov. Shapiro is also proposing a $66.7 million increase for Child Care Works in this year’s budget. We hope our legislators will go above and beyond that because this amount only keeps up with inflation. It will do nothing to stem the quality and turnover crises, nor will it ease the financial struggles we cope with every day.
If we could, we’d like to have those elected officials spend a day – just one, in our classrooms, to see what it takes to be a good early childhood educator for 20 children. What we do is not, definitely not just babysitting. We are educators, who help young children develop cognitively, physically, emotionally and academically – with benefits to themselves and society that last as long as they live. We are qualified and we do quality work.
We deserve to be able to make a decent, living wage doing it.
A couple of weeks ago, we spoke to our lawmakers from the Northeast about what we are going through, the challenges we face and our commitment to our children. We urge our fellow educators to do the same with their representatives.
Our political leaders need to hear from us about what is really happening on the ground. That’s why we’re telling our story and asking our home state to invest in us, so we can educate its children. ••
Milagros Battiti is an early educator KinderAcademy and Adria Godfrey is an early educator at SPIN, both child care providers in the Northeast.
See the full op-ed here.
The Daily Item: Editorial: Funding Early Childhood Education is Always Money Well Spent
February 25, 2023
New analysis from the Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children presents a lot of the same conclusions and data stakeholders have long known about the impact of funding early childhood education. Essentially, you can never go wrong putting money into programs that boost high-quality programs and make them more accessible to more people.
The number of families with access is slowly returning after they cratered early in the COVID-19 pandemic. The new polling also shows near unanimous support for increased funding in the next budget, the first under new governor Josh Shapiro. According to the poll conducted in the first week of February, 98 percent of those who responded said early childhood education is important.
In that same poll, 78 percent supported spending more to increase public funding for the programs.
The list of things 98 percent of Pennsylvanians agree on is incredibly small.
There is clearly a want, perhaps only topped by availability.
It is incredibly troubling to read that more than 60 percent of Pennsylvanians ages 3 and 5 had no access to proven programs like Pre-K Counts or Head Start. To fill that need, an additional 5,075 additional classrooms are needed to serve those children, the study found.
In that same poll, 78 percent supported spending more to increase public funding for the programs.
As we have noted time and again in this space, it is money well spent.
According to the National Education Association, the benefits from a solid foundation built on programs like Pre-K Counts are immense. Consider:
Children in high-quality programs are projected to make roughly $143,000 more over their lifetimes than those who didn’t take part in such a program.
School districts can expect to save more than $11,000 per child because participants are less likely to require special or remedial education.
Read the full editorial here.
Opinion: Pa. must increase its commitment to pre-K education
The Morning Call by Cereta Johnson
September 22, 2023
As the new school year begins, I feel hopeful and energized. This year, we are able to open more Pre-K Counts classrooms serving an additional 38 full-time and 21 part-time students thanks to funding provided in the 2022-23 Pennsylvania state budget. That’s 59 more children who will be leaving Children of Joy Christian Academy ready to begin kindergarten next year.
Studies have proven that students coming into kindergarten from quality pre-K programs have an advantage over their peers who didn’t get the same opportunities. A recent report, “Kindergarten Impacts of the Pennsylvania Pre-K Counts Program: A Statewide Evaluation” by Ellen Peisner-Feinberg of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, shows that children who attended one of Pennsylvania’s Pre-K Counts programs outperformed the other students who did not have this early learning experience — an advantage that equated to four to five months of learning gains, which is a substantial difference in development at that age.
Children who didn’t get pre-K education are usually not as prepared for learning and less confident when they walk in on that first day of kindergarten. They are more hesitant to make friends, less confident to ask or answer a question, are less willing to share, and aren’t as ready to learn.
The investment Pennsylvania already made into publicly funded pre-K is making an impact on the children who participate in pre-K programs. I personally get to see this each day as I watch our students grow.
As a provider of infant and toddler care as well as pre-K, I fully appreciate the impact high-quality early care and learning opportunities have on children and families. According to the Center for the Developing Child at Harvard University, brains are built over time, from the bottom up. The basic architecture of the brain is constructed through an ongoing process that begins before birth and continues into adulthood. Simpler neural connections and skills form first, followed by more complex circuits and skills. In the first few years of life, more than 1 million neural connections form every second.
Most parents understand the importance of these early, formative years and seek out these experiences for their children while they go to work. Unfortunately, according to a recent survey done by the Start Strong PA campaign, child care and early learning opportunities are becoming more out of reach for working parents as child care centers are closing, staffing for classrooms are at a crisis low, and costs continue to increase.
In our own area, I have seen the continued need as families struggle to find early care and learning opportunities for their children. I started my business in 2007 to provide care for three families. With the increased need, I have been able to grow my business to serve 120 children. And yet, according to the Pre-K for PA: All Children Ready to Succeed Lehigh County fact sheet, there are still waiting lists and many families without affordable, care in Allentown.
Without early care and learning opportunities, families are not able to join the workforce. Without employees, businesses will continue to struggle, and Pennsylvania’s economy will be unable to recover. Long-term solutions need to be made so that the tens of thousands of families who are struggling to find child care can return to work. Strides have been made to alleviate the high cost of these opportunities, but much more must be done.
We must address Pennsylvania’s devastating child care crisis — thousands of open staffing positions and more than 1,600 closed classrooms. A survey conducted by the Start Strong PA Campaign quantifies Pennsylvania’s child care crisis. According to the survey, there are more than 30,000 children on waiting lists across Pennsylvania for child care, and the industry has a staffing shortage of 7,000.
We must prioritize our children, especially in the first five years. We must hold our policymakers accountable to help solve the early care and learning crisis that we have in Pennsylvania. What better way to prioritize our children than to ensure that they have every opportunity for success, including high-quality, affordable early care and learning?
I’d like to thank state Reps. Mike Schlossberg, D-Lehigh, and Peter Schweyer, D-Lehigh, and state Sen. Pat Browne, R-Lehigh, who have continued to prioritize early care and education in Harrisburg, especially the significant increase of $79 million for pre-K in this year’s state budget. Also included was a $25 million increase allowing families enrolled in Child Care Works to continue receiving their child care subsidy even if their earnings increase to 300% of the federal poverty level. This investment in young children and their families is one of the most important the commonwealth can make. My hope is that this commitment to our youngest Pennsylvanians is one that continues in Harrisburg for many years to come.
Cereta Johnson is the owner of Children of Joy Christian Academy, Allentown. She started in the early care and education field in 2008 when she became a licensed family care provider.
See the full opinion piece here.
University City Review: OpEd: Early childhood providers navigate this crisis
May 6, 2020 by Traci Childress, MA, MEd, Executive Director, Saint Mary’s Nursery School, West Philadelphia
I have the privilege to work as the Executive Director of West Philadelphia’s Saint Mary’s Nursery School. As a nonprofit childcare center, we serve 138 children ages 18 months – 12 years. Since mid-March, we have been closed. We rely on 95% private pay tuition and 5% subsidy to fund operations. We have been fortunate to have received a couple of grants, and to have raised some funds from our community, allowing us to keep paying staff while we waited on federal support.
We operate on a very narrow financial margin, maximizing all of our resources and leaving little room for buffer beyond a small savings reserve. Making our capacity to stay afloat and support our staff’s payroll all the more precarious. We did not get the initial round of federal funding through the Payroll Protection program, and without our community’s donations, we would not have been able to keep everyone on payroll while we waited to learn that we did get round two of the PPP Loan. And yet, even as we breathe a sigh of relief for a moment, we are facing the reality of what the future will look like operating in a COVID-19 world and what implications it will have for our viability as a business, given the growing costs associated with achieving a safe learning environment.
As we’ve navigated this crisis, we’ve been meeting virtually every week as a staff community. We check in — talk about the struggles navigating regulations, loans and safety, share how our zoom offerings for families are going, what can we create for our YouTube channel, what has been giving us hope, and what visions do we have for the future.
The governor included childcare providers in thesecond phase of reopening(the yellow phase) – Philadelphia has yet to announce its reopening timeline. Despite the fact that K-12 schools will not be returning this year and will look very different when they do return, childcare will be invited to return to work before the rest of the workforce. This sector is essential to the rest of the city’s workforce. We will have to return in order for everyone else to return. And while young children are not at high risk for getting this virus, they can carry it, and many of us have families and homes where grownups live and where members of our families may have compromised immune systems. We have elementary age children who won’t have care when we return to work.
Our early childhood workforce is already grossly underpaid. Although childcare is expensive, the cost of services barely covers the cost to run childcare operations and pay our staff. Our teachers should make so much more than they do already, given the impact of early education on early learners (ages 0-5) and our economy’s dependence on our work.
The extended closure of early childhood centers is pushing many centers out of business forever, and those of us who manage to weather this closure with the help of donations, the Paycheck protection program, or state support, are afraid that the cost of reopening with new requirements and decreased enrollment will put us out of business. If we manage to get through this extended closure, we also know that we will need support, innovation, and a whole new way of working to reopen again. As we watch the changing CDC guidelines for childcare centers open right now and listen to our peers operating to serve the essential workforce, it is very clear that reopening will be another crisis for us to navigate.
Reopening will bring a host of new requirements to our work. The current CDC guidelines mention masks, no contact drop offs and pickups, temperature taking, and smaller group sizes (currently 10 people in a room including staff) just to name a few. We will need support to finance this.
Childcare, whether for profit or non-profit is already a no profitsector. The new requirements will make childcare more expensive for providers to offer, and it will decrease income capacity by requiring fewer children. And yet families cannot pay more. As we face this reopening, we will need state and federal funding to ensure we make it through the year ahead when we will be working with new practices, more needs and more intermittent closures. We’ve always needed this as a sector; but now it is so apparent that childcare is a public good like public school is, and that it needs the support of a system that ensures it can continue to operate, provide quality care to children and support for the workforce in getting back to work.
Read the full op-ed
here.
