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Virginia C apitol C onnections, Fall 2014 17
Or what if it’s a single parent—which is the case for 30 percent of
the families inVirginia—and what if they’re living in poverty—which
is the case for 14 percent of the families inVirginia?
So what can we do?
Fortunately, my position with HII has given me some opportunities
to try and make a positive difference.
First, I’m a member of the Steering Committee for “Blueprint
Virginia.”
This strategic planning initiative, spearheaded by the Virginia
Chamber of Commerce, includes five goals related to early childhood
education:
• To improve access to high quality early childhood education—a
key determinant of both school readiness and third-grade reading
attainment.
• To address the fragmentation and gaps that exist in our current public
policy approach to early learning.
• To improve the flexibility of existing state funding for at-risk
preschoolers (the Virginia Preschool Initiative) to allow it to be more
fully used at the local level.
• To identify opportunities for public/private partnerships to promote
community-wide access to high-quality early learning.
• And to implement appropriate models from the private sector, such as
pay for performance, in publicly funded child care and early learning.
A news clip featured on the “Blueprint” website perfectly sums up
the intent of the plan.
Pete Baker, co-director of Old Dominion University’s Virginia
Early Childhood Policy Center, said:
“What we’ve found is that if we don’t provide Virginia’s kids with
high-quality educational experiences when they’re in their youngest
years, then anything that we do after that is pretty much meaningless.”
In addition to my involvement with the Chamber, I’ve had the honor
of participating in work done by the Hamilton Project, a D.C.-based
organization seeking to advance America’s promise of opportunity,
prosperity and growth.
As part of its “Policies toAddress Poverty inAmerica,” theHamilton
Project has specific proposals to promote early childhood development.
I want to highlight two:
Expanding preschool access for disadvantaged children and
Addressing the parenting divide to promote early childhood
development for disadvantaged children.
A Hamilton paper on the first proposal—expanding preschool
access—suggests:
“Poverty has little association with the cognitive abilities of
9-month-old children. By the start of kindergarten, however, not only do
poor children perform significantly worse on tests of cognitive ability
than children from higher-income families, but teachers also report that
these children have much more difficulty paying attention and exhibit
more behavioral problems. The poverty gap in school readiness appears
to be growing as income inequality widens.”
Regarding the second proposal—addressing the parenting
divide—another Hamilton paper suggests:
“Parents do more than spend money on children’s
development—they also promote child development by spending time
with their children in cognitively enriching activities and by providing
emotional support and consistent discipline. The ‘parenting divide’
between economically advantaged and disadvantaged children is large
and appears to be growing over time along these dimensions.”
Of course, the discussion has now shifted from strictly educational
issues to more socioeconomic ones, but the two are inextricably linked.
The bottom line—and this is me talking now:
The fact that some kids go to pre-K go because their families can
afford it and other kids don’t go because their families cannot … creates
a rift between “the haves” and “the have-nots” before formal public
education even begins.
We see the consequences down the line, and that’s a shrinking pool
of applicants years before most workforce development efforts begin.
In reality, you can go into a fifth-grade classroomtoday and think: “One
out of four kids will be employable.We’ll have to pay for the other three.”
Pre-K schooling can help boost the chances of those three children
to succeed because they start to learn earlier.
Depending on your age, you may not
have gone to pre-K or even kindergarten—I
didn’t start school until first grade
myself—so it’s hard to convince some
people of the value.
But in today’s economy, pre-K is critical
to the U.S. being able to deliver the product
of a globally competitive education.
I understand that a businessperson may
step back and say, “How do I invest in that?”
See Smart Beginnings, continued on page 19
Mike Petters, Huntington Ingalls Industries
Barry DuVal, Virginia Chamber
Kathy Glazer, Virginia Early Childhood Foundation
Ben Davenport, First Piedmont Corporation