EXCERPTS:
BARACK OBAMA likes to call education "the currency for the information age". His presidency has brought a big shift in America's priorities, devoting more effort and resources-and an extra $2 billion-to children who have not yet started their formal schooling.
That is part of an international trend. South Korea plans to extend their early-education provision for all three- and four-year-olds this year. Turkey has ambitious plans too. Pre-school education was long neglected. "90% of the brain develops between the ages of zero to five, yet we spend 90% of our dollars on kids above the age of five," says Timothy Knowles of the University of Chicago. That is now changing. Academic studies, including in neuroscience, have highlighted the long-term effects of experiences in a child's early years.
The most recent report by the OECD, a rich-world think-tank, in 2009,
found that 15-year-olds who had attended pre-schools for more than a
year performed better (even accounting for socioeconomic background)
than those who had attended for only a year or not at all. In Belgium,
France and Israel pupils educated at pre-schools had much higher reading
scores than those who had stayed at home.
Yet establishing the precise link between time in pre-school and
later achievement is difficult. Even defining the term is difficult: it
is also known as nursery, pre-K, and early-child education, and the
children range from tiny tots in some countries to six-year-olds in
others. Measuring its quality is hard. The amounts taxpayers devote to
it vary, as does the balance between state and private provision.
National attitudes to the right way to spend early childhood years
differ. Too much pressure too early may set children up for failure
later, notes Alan Smithers, a British education expert.
Israel starred in the OECD report (see chart) and since a wave of
social protests in 2011 has put effort and money into further reforms.
Aliza Marriott, a public-relations consultant living in Jerusalem, is
proud that her children in pre-school are “much more advanced” than she
was at their age.
Yet the key to success, if any, is unclear. Measuring other data, a
report on pre-school availability and teaching standards called
“Starting Well” (compiled for the Lien Foundation by the Economist
Intelligence Unit, our sister company) placed Finland top (it scored
direly in the OECD study). At least 98% of children aged five or six are
in pre-school education there. Finland also dominates the overall
league tables for education performance, so perhaps the scope for
improvement is slight. Other enthusiastic providers of pre-school
education like Sweden, Norway, France and Belgium and Denmark do not
score particularly highly on attainment in later education, whereas
Japan, which combines early-years provision with a fiercely competitive
exam culture, excels. So too does South Korea, where the state until now
has provided under half of pre-school places. So pre-school is no
panacea, says Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the OECD’s big triennial
PISA report on educational attainment. “Drilling children” in early
years does not lead automatically to learning gains, he says.
The greatest success in pre-school provision probably comes from
reaching the children who need it most, from poor, neglectful or
unstable families. But this is hard. Britain’s Sure Start scheme,
introduced in 1999, proved popular: motivated parents liked the extra
stimulation for their children. But it failed to reach some of the
neediest children, whose parents could not or would not ensure their
attendance.
Elizabeth Truss, Britain’s minister for child care, wants tougher
qualifications for pre-school teachers, but less regulation of how they
work (a row is raging over her proposal to allow them to look after up
to six children each, instead of four). Early-years education spending
in Britain is just below the average of developed countries, at an
annual $6,493 per student (New Zealand spends twice as much).
Some of the fastest changes, however, are happening where local
politicians have free rein. Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, is
opening its first “cradle-to-kindergarten” school later this year for
130 under-fives from poor families, an idea copied from a similar scheme
in Chicago. Pre-kindergarten enrolment has increased in New York from
40,000 a decade ago to 58,000 in 2012 and the mayor wants to add 4,000
full-day places in the most deprived areas of the city. Early-years
learning is not a magic solution to the elusive modern quest for social
mobility. But it can help focus tiny minds on aspiration and bigger ones
on how to support it.
-reprinted from the Economist