The Seed Experiment

A perennial favorite science project from preschool on up is the “seed experiment”: A child plants identical seeds in two pots. She places the first pot inside a dark cupboard and leaves it there, and she puts the second one in a sunny spot and waters it every day. She waits to see what will happen. It’s very easy for even the youngest children to figure out that their seedlings need the basics -- sunlight and water -- if they are going to survive and thrive.

The same is true for children, and “the basics” during children’s earliest years can have long-lasting effects. Arloc Sherman, senior researcher at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and one of the contributors to the new Harvard Education Press book Improving the Odds for America’s Children, put it this way:

“I think sometimes we forget to say how important for children’s futures the day-to-day basic assistance of food, clothing, shelter is... We’ve had help from the research community recently, striking studies that help make the case that when you just provide the basics, that’s one key cornerstone for children’s future success. So it’s not just that we’re meeting an important need—which would be enough in itself—but we’re also providing for opening future doors of opportunity.”

He pointed to a 2012 study on the long-term effects of what began as the food stamps program. Researchers went back to the earliest days of the program, when it was rolled out county by county to identify children who had access to food stamps in early childhood and whose mothers had access during their pregnancies. They tracked their progress from the 1960s and 1970s into adulthood, comparing them to similar children who didn’t have access to food stamps. The results showed the power of nutrition: The children who had access to food stamps were less likely to have stunted growth, be obese, or have heart disease as adults -- and the positive effects weren’t just health-related. One of the largest differences was that children in families with food stamps were 18 percent more likely to graduate from high school.

This echoes other studies on the positive effects of federal nutrition programs that found needy children who received food assistance before age five were in better health as adults and girls who received food assistance were more likely to complete more schooling, earn more money, and not rely on safety net programs as adults. Putting food on children’s plates helps build healthy minds and bodies today and helps set children up for better futures later. And the benefits don’t end there. Better graduation rates mean better jobs with higher salaries with cascading benefits to the community, the national economy, and the next generation.

The case for providing the basics for all children in America is hard to refute. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 2.2 million children were lifted out of poverty by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, in 2012. Yet right now we are fast approaching a critical time for hungry children: summer vacation. School-based federal nutrition programs have proved to be a lifeline for needy children. In fiscal year 2012 more than 21 million children received free or reduced-price lunch through the National School Lunch Program and nearly 11 million children received free and reduced price breakfast. Hunger doesn’t end on the last day of school -- yet only 11 percent of the number of children who relied on those lunches during the school year received meals through the Summer Food Service Program. Even though the program is 100 percent federally funded and can create desperately needed jobs for cafeteria workers and others during the summer months, many states and communities have created needless bureaucratic hurdles to establishing summer feeding sites resulting in not nearly enough sites to serve all eligible children. But it’s not too late to find out how you can help -- or how children you know can participate.

The Children’s Defense Fund is encouraging CDF Freedom Schools® partners to use the summer feeding program to provide nutritious meals and snacks for children attending summer CDF Freedom Schools programs. The USDA, which administers the summer feeding program, says there are many ways individuals and organizations can get involved: “You can serve the meals, promote the program, provide transportation, volunteer at summer food sites, or even go out and find sponsors.” The USDA’s “Summer Meals Toolkit” provides information on sponsors, sites, links to state agencies, and much more, or call 1-866-3-HUNGRY or 1-877-8-HAMBRE or use this online map. If there are not enough summer feeding sites in your community, ask why not. Help make sure children in your community are getting the basics and that there are no hungry children in your community this summer.

Many plants blossom and thrive all summer long. Children should be able to do the same.

Making Strides for Preschool

New York City received a lot of attention recently with a bold promise made to some of its youngest residents: Mayor Bill de Blasio ran on a campaign to fund full-day public preschool for all New York City children through a modest increased income tax on residents making more than $500,000 a year. Although Mayor de Blasio’s tax proposal was not approved by the state legislature or supported by New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo, the legislature did approve statewide funding for pre-K that included a $300 million increase for New York City’s preschool program. This means that for the first time fully funded full-day quality preschool will be available for all four-year-olds in the city. New York City is moving forward for children -- and it isn’t the only major city and school district making strides towards providing high-quality public preschool programs to as many children as possible. Several large districts that have been doing this for a while are already seeing strong results. 

In Massachusetts, the Boston Public Schools system (BPS) offers a full day of prekindergarten to any four-year-old in the district regardless of income, although funding limitations prevent the district from serving all eligible children. BPS ensures the quality of its prekindergarten program through high-quality teachers, professional development delivered through individualized coaching sessions, and evidence-based curricula for early language and literacy and mathematics. Prekindergarten teachers have the same requirements as K-12 teachers in BPS and are paid accordingly. And it’s working. A study conducted by researchers at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education examined the impact of one year of attendance in the BPS preschool program on children’s school readiness and found substantial positive effects on children’s literacy, language, mathematics, emotional development, and executive functioning. 

Tulsa is another city making great strides. Oklahoma has offered universal preschool to four-year-olds since 1998, and in the 2011-2012 school year three-quarters of all four-year-olds in the state were enrolled in the preschool program. High-quality year-round programs are also available to some at-risk Tulsa children from birth through age three through the Community Action Project (CAP) of Tulsa County, which combines public and private funds to provide comprehensive services for the youngest and most vulnerable children. Oklahoma’s preschool teachers are required to have a bachelor’s degree with a certificate in early childhood and are also paid equally to K-12 teachers. Preschool is funded through the state’s school finance formula, although districts can subcontract with other providers of early care and education by putting public school teachers in community-based settings and Head Start programs. Researchers from Georgetown University have conducted multiple evaluations of the four-year-old preschool program in Tulsa over the last decade and found evidence of both short and long term gains, with the most persistent gains in math for the neediest children who are eligible for free and reduced price lunch. A long term economic projection of the future adult earnings effects of Tulsa’s program estimates benefit-to-cost ratios of 3- or 4-to-1.

New Jersey has offered high-quality state-funded preschool to three- and four-year-old children in 31 high poverty communities since 1999 in response to a series of state Supreme Court rulings starting with Abbott v. Burke that found poorer New Jersey public school students were receiving “inadequate” education funding. In the 2011-2012 school year more than 43,000 children were served through these preschools, and a partnership between the Department of Education and the Department of Human Services has established a wrap-around program of daily before and after school and summer programs to complement the full school-day year-round preschool program. These programs, often called Abbott preschools after the original court decision, are delivered through a mixed public-private delivery system overseen by public schools. Head Start programs and other community providers serve roughly two-thirds of the children. Researchers at Rutgers University’s National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) have conducted a longitudinal analysis of the impacts of the Abbott preschool program on the cohort of children served in 2004-2005, and the fifth grade follow up shows participation has had a sustained significant effect on students’ achievement in language arts and literacy, math, and science and reduced grade retention and special education placement rates.

Other cities also are finding new ways to move forward. In 2011 San Antonio, Texas Mayor Julian Castro convened a task force of education and private sector leaders to identify the best way to improve the quality of education in the city. The task force concluded the most effective solution would be a high-quality, full-day four-year-old prekindergarten targeted at low-income and at-risk children. The San Antonio program was launched after city residents voted for a small one-eighth of a cent sales tax increase in November 2012 to fund it. It will serve 3,700 four-year-olds annually when fully implemented. The majority of these children will be served by model Education Centers, which include master teachers, professional development and training for teachers, aides, and community providers, and parent support, including training and education. 

We know high-quality early childhood development and learning interventions can buffer the negative effects of poverty and provide a foundation for future success with lifelong benefits, particularly for the poorest and most vulnerable children. Studies have shown children enrolled in high-quality early childhood programs are more likely to graduate from high school, hold a job, and make more money and are less likely to commit a crime than their peers who do not participate. High-quality preschool is a critical piece of the early childhood continuum — and we need to celebrate and support the cities, states, and political leaders who are successfully providing this experience for all children. Congress needs to follow their good example now by enacting the Strong Start for American’s Children Act to enable millions of the nation’s children — not just thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands — to get quality early childhood education including home visiting through kindergarten and be better prepared for school and for life. This should be a litmus test for our vote this November. If leaders don’t stand up for children, they don’t stand for anything and they don’t stand for a strong American future which requires educated children.

Improving the Odds of America's Children

“. . . We see repeated efforts in Congress in recent years to take resources away from poor and middle-class children and families, like food stamps and tax credits and education funding and access to affordable health care, and give even more to the wealthy and powerful. Bipartisanship has taken a severe beating in recent years, as has the willingness of Congress to enact or support policies driven by evidence-based research that help children and families and our country as a whole.”

--Congressman George Miller, Foreword, Improving the Odds for America’s Children

  

More than 40 years ago the earliest planning for what would become the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) took place at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. CDF began in 1973 in a Harvard University-owned clapboard house. Our beginning was bolstered by a two-volume publication of the Harvard Educational Review in 1973 and 1974 among whose top editors were CDF staff, many of them graduates of or students at Harvard’s education and law schools. Another young staff attorney, Hillary Rodham, in her first job after law school contributed an article on the “Rights of Children.” 

At the same time, CDF staff knocked on doors to look for children out of school in Massachusetts and all across America. A local group, Massachusetts Advocacy, had issued a report on Children Out of School in Boston and we wondered whether this was a statewide or national problem. After knocking on many thousands of doors in census tracts across our country, CDF documented it was a national problem with at least 2 million children out of school, including 750,000 the census said were between 7-13 years old but did not tell us who they were. We found many were children with disabilities. Other children were pushed out by discipline policies, language, and the inability to afford school fees. Children Out of School in America became our first report in 1974. We followed it up by organizing with parents at the local level and collaborating with national organizations concerned with children with mental, physical and emotional disabilities and many others to help push Congress to enact 94-142 -- now the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act -- which for the first time gave children with disabilities the right to a free, appropriate public education. CDF’s first report led to publication of School Suspensions: Are They Helping Children describing many of the practices we are still combating today with school discipline policies that suspend children for a wide range of nonviolent offenses include truancy and subjective offenses like disruptive behavior. 

After 40 years we are now blessed with a new indispensable evidence-based book from Harvard Education Press -- Improving the Odds for America’s Children: Future Directions in Policy and Practice. Dr. Kathleen McCartney, President of Smith College and former Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, was the driving force behind this volume which she coedited with Hirokazu Yoshikawa and Laurie B. Forcier. It features articles from a wide range of scholars, child and family policy experts, and practitioners. Their combined expertise documents the benefits to be gained by closing the gap between what we know and what we do for children -- and we know a lot more than we did 40 years ago. Hillary Rodham Clinton, now informed and seasoned by many years of state, national and international experience, says of the book: “This important collection of ideas about how to improve the odds for America’s children should be required reading for policy makers across the country.”

Each chapter suggests a prominent pathway for moving forward to level the playing field and improve the odds for children. In their recommendations for future directions in child and family policy and practice, the contributing authors to Improving the Odds for America’s Children affirm a foundational belief that CDF has acted on for decades: children don’t come in pieces and require a continuum of comprehensive and quality support throughout their lives. The volume starts with prenatal and infant health and development, emphasizing parent and caregiver support in a child’s earliest years, moves through the school years and adolescence, and addresses the special needs of the most vulnerable youth involved with the child welfare and juvenile justice systems.

Common threads essential to sound policy and practice emerge quickly -- including the impact of poverty and inequality on children’s well-being. Unifying refrains include the need to bring multiple supports together to seek change for children and families; the need for more intensive supports for children and parents with special health and mental health needs; recognition of the harm done to children by withholding help to children and adults who are not citizens nor legally present in the U.S.; and the call to pay attention to the well-being of parents and caregivers and all those who care for children. The book reinforces the importance of never giving up on a child.

This second decade of the twenty-first century is a crucial one for the children’s movement and the nation’s future, as poverty and child poverty have resurged in a prolonged recession and jobless “recovery,” and with wealth and income inequality at near record levels and achievement gaps among children who are poor and of color unacceptably wide. Our children, are in trouble and our nation is in trouble, and we must reset our moral and economic compasses. CDF has been sounding the siren with urgency and persistence over four decades and will not stop until it is heard.   

In our fifth decade, CDF is committed to implementing the comprehensive policy vision in this fine book and building the critical mass of servant leaders and transforming voices needed to build and sustain the political will to do for all children what we know works. We must band together across all racial and income groups and be clear that we cannot wait any longer to ensure our children’s healthy development and well-being. It is the right thing to do, it is the cost effective thing to do, and we can start right now by putting into place a comprehensive early childhood development system, including a continuum of care from birth through age five. Children have only one childhood, and it is now. We know what to do. We know what works. We must make it happen now by working together. Improving the Odds for America’s Children is a blueprint for action.   

'Mama, Get Me Away From Around Here!'

Almost one year after I first wrote about Ka’nard Allen, his story—and the stories of several other children whose lives are connected to his—remain a searing example of how pervasive gun violence in our nation’s cities is killing, injuring, and traumatizing our children. As Pulitzer Prize-winning New Orleans journalist Julia Cass reports for the Children’s Defense Fund, on May 29, 2012, Ka’nard celebrated his 10th birthday at his grandmother’s house in the Central City neighborhood of New Orleans. He and his friends and family members were playing games in the front yard and on the porch. “We was having a party and then it’s a shooting,” Ka’nard said. Four young men carrying guns and an AK-47 ran up and unleashed a volley of bullets. Police said they were attempting to kill members of a rival group at or near the party. Ka’nard felt the sting as he was struck in the calf and on the side of his neck. 

 His mother, Tynia Allen, saw blood running down his neck. To get help she had to step over Ka’nard’s 5-year-old cousin Brianna Allen’s lifeless body on the porch. The reach and power of the assault rifle was so great that a bullet fired near the party also struck and killed Shawanna Pierce, 33, in her car at a stop sign three blocks away, leaving three young boys without a mother. 

That year, along with many before it, New Orleans had one of the highest per capita murder rates of any city in America—close to 95 percent of them committed with guns. The carnage at Ka’nard’s party, as well as at other shootings before and since, sent out waves of fear, grief and anger that linger on in the lives of the children affected.

Shawanna Pierce’s youngest son, now 3, doesn’t remember his mother. But her two older boys, Kelby, now 12, and Kolby, 8, began to cry when asked about their mother. Their maternal grandmother, still deeply grieving herself, asked them to recall things they did with their mother, who worked in the coding department of a local hospital. Disney World, she prompted, the zoo, the Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival. “I can’t,” Kelby said. “I’m too sad.” Both boys have photos of their mother on their cell phone cases. Their grades suffered, although now, almost two years later, the boys’ school work is beginning to improve.

Ka’nard became frightened. “I always think somebody wants to shoot me,” he said. Less than a year after he was shot at his birthday party, he was shot again—in the cheek—when he and his mother went to a Mother’s Day parade last May. Two gunmen fired into the crowd, wounding 19 people, including Ka’nard and a 10-year-old girl. 

“He panicked,” his mother said. “He said, ‘Mama, get me away from around here!’”

The body of Londyn Unique Samuels, 1, lies in the casket at her funeral as her sister, Paris, 3, looks up at her. Londyn was killed by a gun on a street in New Orleans while in the arms of her babysitter. (Photo by Chris Granger,Nola.com /The Times- Picayune/Landov)

That could be the cry of every child and teenager growing up in a violent neighborhood. Some never have the chance to grow up. In the last six months of 2013 in New Orleans, a 1-year-old girl was shot to death on the street in the arms of a babysitter, an 11-year-old girl was killed in bed by stray bullets entering her home, and a 7-month-old boy was shot in the head while riding in a car with his father. 

Even children who are not directly hit by gun violence suffer the collateral damage of living in an unsafe environment saturated with guns that are routinely used to settle conflicts or to exact retaliation. A striking number of low-income children in New Orleans have witnessed gun violence and murders, according to a 2011-2012 screening of children between the ages of 11 and 15 who participated in a teen pregnancy prevention program. Of the 700 interviewed by the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies, 29 percent had witnessed assaults with guns; 14 percent had witnessed gun homicides. More than half cited concern about “personal safety” as a source of worry, more than twice the number who worried about “being unloved.” Not surprisingly, the children reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress and depression at a much higher rate—about one-third—than typical teenagers.

The Children’s Bureau of New Orleans, a non-profit agency that offers mental health counseling, runs a program called Project LAST—the Loss And Survival Team—that works with some of the city’s children who have had multiple exposures to gun violence. “They’ve had loved ones murdered by guns, they’ve seen people carrying guns, they’ve been threatened by guns, they’ve seen a dead body in the street—three or four different exposures to gun violence,” said its president and CEO Paulette Carter.

The trauma these children suffer—depression, anxiety, anger, post-traumatic stress disorder—is especially hard to ameliorate because “we can’t remove the threat,” Carter said. “The best thing you can do for a child who has experienced a traumatic event is to make sure they are safe afterwards. But for kids and gun violence in New Orleans, you can’t reinstate the safety, and this makes the recovery process difficult. We can’t assure children that this won’t happen again to somebody they know or they won’t see guns again or hear gunshots because they probably will.” She said that “a lot of kids we work with have a sense of hopelessness that things are never going to change.” Their schoolwork is affected, as is their potential to go on to live productive adult lives. 

Most of the victims and the perpetrators of gun violence in New Orleans are 15- to 25-year-old Black males with low educational achievement. According to a U.S. Department of Justice study of homicides in New Orleans in 2009 and 2010, many of the perpetrators and victims knew each other; some were childhood friends. Most grew up in the city’s poor and more violent neighborhoods and had easy access to guns, legal or illegal. Under Louisiana law, anyone 18 or older can purchase a gun unless he or she is a felon.

“I think a lot of it has to do with the world they come up in—the environment, the social norms of their peers, the normalization of violence as the way to deal with conflict,” said Jamaal Weathersby, pastor of the New Hope Baptist Church in the Central City neighborhood. “They don’t see the relevance of school. They’re not thinking there is an opportunity for them to get a good job. I don’t think many of them can see past the block.”

David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and the City of New Orleans’ consultant for reducing group violence, said that most of the murders are committed by undisciplined, random leaderless groups of high rate offenders often organized around neighborhoods or blocks—and are not about money but about “personal friction, respect and disrespect, retaliation and vendettas. It is so important that they literally live and die for it.” Dr. Kenneth Hardy, a professor of Family Therapy at Drexel University in Philadelphia, believes that the reason disrespect is so often a trigger point relates to the devaluation—the “constant lacerations to dignity”—of poor young Black males who are considered a threat and a problem, with the worst rather than the best expected of them. 

Kennedy said that alienation from law enforcement underlies personal retaliation. “If representatives of the law in your neighborhood are seen not only as not legitimate but as the enemy, then when you have a grievance or somebody you know got shot, you don’t call the cops. You get a gun and friends and do it yourself.” A scathing 2011 report by the U.S. Department of Justice found that New Orleans police officers “too frequently use excessive force and conduct illegal stops, searches and arrests with impunity,” almost exclusively in Black neighborhoods. City, state and federal law enforcement agencies in New Orleans recently began focusing more on identifying and prosecuting members of the violent criminal groups committing most of the murders, including the four men charged with killing Brianna Allen and Shawanna Pierce. This strategy appears to be paying off since the city’s murders dropped by 20 percent in 2013.

Ka’nard still sees a psychologist because “I get mad real fast,” he said. His mother said he doesn’t like to go places by himself. But he attends a school he likes, has a mentor, has taken trips thanks to a local foundation, and plays drums in his school’s band. This year he was looking forward to marching in some of the city’s Mardi Gras parades—an event that should be a simple childhood pleasure, but one Ka’nard, like so many of our nation’s children, can no longer take for granted.