Virginia’s goal should be high quality for kids.
When it comes to outcomes for our children, it’s all about high quality. Expanding mediocre programs that are underfunded and inadequately monitored is NOT good for children.
It turns out that program quality varies across the state and not all children experience the same level of quality specified in the program model, the program is underfunded and inadequately monitored.
When you think about the issue of early education, there are usually two camps: believers and non-believers. The believers will tout all the studies from the Perry Preschool Project to the Chicago Child Parent Centers. The non-believers will tell you those programs produced outcomes for children and showed long-term benefits, but are too costly and can’t be replicated.
That is why it is critically important that we get the program model for quality right before we even think about expansion and determine sustainability and the cost per child. Take a look at what other states are doing in this brief from Ready Nation.
UVA CASTL, E3 and philanthropists have partnered to create a demonstration model school that focuses on the most important elements of high quality that improve child outcomes for children 1-5 in a socioeconomic diverse setting. Students will be tracked to third grade.
This “recipe for high quality” has the potential to have widespread impact and be replicated in Virginia in all kinds of early learning settings with a per child cost of $10,000.
Right now in Virginia, we spend about $6,000 per child through the Virginia Preschool Initiative (VPI). If we were to invest in a high quality program model, increase the investment per child to $10,000, utilize a continuous improvement model to ensure program quality and track children from VPI to kindergarten and through third grade. Then we would know what works best for our children and we could prove it. The problem is that this is not a “quick fix” for one governor to tackle. It will take time, but let’s really think about what is best for our children and truly prepares them for academic success. The kindergarten of today is the new first grade. We owe it to all of our children to make sure they are up to the challenge.