The Saturday before last, my local newspaper published a
front-page story about the Missouri and Kansas state budget cuts. The story said the cuts would be “A threat to
children’s learning.”[1] In Missouri,
the specific program with reduced funding is Parents as Teachers (PAT)[2], a
service (according to the newspaper) in which workers conduct home visits to mentor
parents with little kids.
In reply to this article, I emailed a letter to the editor[3]
suggesting that the state could help more parents using less money by supplying
each new parent with a copy of June Oberlander’s book, Slow and Steady, Get Me Ready.[4] The book is an outline of five years of
activities that parents can use to help their children. The book, coupled with a publicity campaign, could
give needed visibility to easy activities for young children, reduce PAT
personnel costs[5], and put
the goal of effective parenting within the reach of everyday moms and dads.
By using Slow and
Steady, Get Me Ready, parents could regain confidence about raising their
smaller children. Added to that, schools
could again focus on their legal responsibility of serving children of
compulsory attendance age. How much
money is diverted from compulsory schools by the mission creep of cradle to
grave school?
Groups have successfully used publicity programs to focus
awareness, develop support and give people knowledge about many issues. With sustained,
low-key publicity the idea about the need for quality baby play would reach new
parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends and co-workers. A blanketing awareness of useful, inexpensive
early childhood exercises ought to influence more people about the small
children in their lives. A book for each
baby would give more information to more people at a lower cost.[6]
Returning to the letter to the editor, by the following
Saturday, the newspaper had not responded about my email, not even an
auto-reply (and no mailer daemon message indicating I’d used an invalid
address).
On Monday the newspaper’s Opinion page featured a “blog bit”
that again pushed for “high-quality early childhood programs[7].”
On Tuesday (today), the Letters page includes a letter[8]
titled by the Letters editor, “New school funding” about support for a federal
“Education Jobs Fund.”
After seeing this, and after decades of hearing that ‘education’
is ‘at risk’ (and according to the continued media reports, it never seems to
improve, no matter how much money is added to fund basic schooling[9]),
I’m feeling that the point of the newspaper’s publicity for programs is the programs
themselves, not helping parents bootstrap.
Buying a book for the parents of each baby born would cost
perhaps 1/10th the amount of the PAT program[10]
at its lowest funding rate. The
newspaper’s movers and shakers seem to prefer to lodge useful knowledge about early
childhood know-how within programs instead of broadcasting the idea of trusting
parents with a book containing five years worth of simple, useful child
development tools,
A country that spends a half-trillion dollars[11] in
one year on K – 12 schooling could afford a publicity campaign directed at
parents about early childhood learning. Parents
are the first teachers of their children, and that is where the work must focus. The example of home visits teaches that parents
need supervision to live in a family. Instead of encouraging dependence, we
need to build a structure of confident family life, starting with each family’s
mom and dad. Publishing a letter to the
editor would be a small start.
[3] Letter: “In
reference to Saturday’s article about children’s learning threatened by budget
cuts to the Parents as Teachers program, one way the state could slash costs
could be to change from the home visitation program to giving each new parent a
copy of June Oberlander’s book, Slow and
Steady, Get Me Ready. The book provides five years of weekly birth-to-five
activities for parents to do with their children, complete with explanations
and self-evaluations.
“Distribution and publicized use of the book would
allow for the reduction in staffing costs in state programs, and allow schools
to focus on their legal responsibility, ie, children of compulsory school
attendance age.
“Slow and Steady,
Get Me Ready is online at Google Books.
Low-income parents can use a library card and branch library computers.
“Children’s learning is not threatened, you just have
to know where to look.”
[5] “Missouri budget cuts …”
$34,000,000+ in 2009; $28,000,000+ in 2010; projected $13,000,000 in 2011
Individual copies of Slow and Steady, Get Me Ready run
just over $16.00 (plus postage) at Amazon.
($13 million divided by $20 [cost plus s+h] = 650,000 books)
[9] “Last
year, as a nation, we spent more than half a trillion dollars on K-12
education. This was on the local, state and federal levels. Our nation's
educational efforts are a large financial endeavor—rivaling spending on the defense,
agriculture, transportation, telecommunications or entertainment sectors.”
Remarks by Secretary Paige at the Executive Leaders
Forum, Committee of 100, San Francisco
Chamber of Commerce. U.S. Department of Education, 28 June 2004 http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/2004/06/06282004.html
[10] The
number of births in 2006 divided by the reduced 2011 program funding = ca. $160
per child. ‘Books for all,’ based on
$16.00 per family, would cost 1/10th of the home visitation program.
[11] Remarks
by Secretary Paige
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