Celebrating Dr. King Through Serving

"If you want to be important--wonderful. If you want to be recognized--wonderful. If you want to be great--wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. That's a new definition of greatness. And this morning, the thing that I like about it: by giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don't have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don't have to know Einstein's theory of relativity to serve. You don't have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love."

These well-known words are from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s sermon “The Drum Major Instinct,” delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church on February 4, 1968. Dr. King was explaining that we all start out with the ingrained instinct to be “drum majors”: everyone wants to be important, to be first, to lead the parade. Watch a group of children try to form a line and right away you’ll see this instinct in action. But Dr. King said too many people never outgrow this instinct—and by constantly struggling to be the most powerful or famous or wealthiest or best-educated, we forget one of the Gospels’ and life’s largest truths: the real path to greatness is through service.

Watch Dr. King's Sermon

This is one of the key lessons we should teach our children about Dr. King. Many of them have just studied Dr. King in school in the days leading up to his birthday, and many have learned to see him as a history book hero—a larger-than-life, mythical figure. But it’s crucial for them to understand Dr. King wasn’t a superhuman with magical powers. Just as the extraordinary new movie Selma is reminding a new generation of filmgoers, our children need to be reminded that Dr. King was a real person—just like all of the other ministers, parents, teachers, neighbors, and other familiar adults in their lives today. 


I first heard Dr. King speak in person at a Spelman College chapel service during my senior year in college. Dr. King was just 31 but he had already gained a national reputation during the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott five years earlier. He became a mentor and friend. Although I do remember him as a great leader and a hero, I also remember him as someone able to admit how often he was afraid and unsure about his next step. But faith prevailed over fear, uncertainty, fatigue, and sometimes depression.  It was his human vulnerability and ability to rise above it that I most remember. “If I Can Help Somebody Along the Way” was his favorite song. He was an ordinary man who made history because he was willing to stand up and serve and make a difference in extraordinary ways as did the legions of other civil rights warriors in the 1950s and 1960s. We need to teach our children every day that they can and must make a difference too. “Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.”


Towards the end of “The Drum Major Instinct,” Dr. King told the congregation he sometimes thought about his own death and funeral. He said when that day came he didn’t want people to talk about his Nobel Peace Prize or his degrees or hundreds of awards: “I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others. I’d like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. And I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison. I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity. Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won’t have any money to leave behind. I won’t have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that’s all I want to say.” Dr. King was assassinated two months to the day after giving this sermon. But a recording of “The Drum Major Instinct” was played at his funeral, and many people think of these moving words in Dr. King’s voice as his own eulogy. He knew how he wanted to be remembered.


Americans across the country now celebrate Dr. King’s birthday as “a day on, not a day off” and use this day to come together for community service and action­. But we shouldn’t wait for the holiday to come back around to remember and honor him this way. We can honor Dr. King’s legacy best by serving every day and standing together to build a movement to realize Dr. King’s dream and America’s dream and by following his lead in being a drum major for justice.


As our country faces morally and economically indefensible child poverty rates, wealth and income inequality, and grandstanding politicians who put party and politics ahead of principle and sound policy, I hope they will hear and follow our great 20^th century prophet. In his last speech in Memphis the night before he was assassinated he gave us our marching orders: “...I’m always happy to see a relevant ministry. It’s all right to talk about long white robes over yonder, in all of its symbolism, but ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here. It's all right to talk about streets flowing with milk and honey, but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here and His children who can’t eat three square meals a day. It’s all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day God’s preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do.” His mandate was not just to God’s preachers but also to all of God’s people. That’s all of us.

Every Child Deserves a Fair Chance

“A population that does not take care of the elderly and of children and the young has no future, because it abuses both its memory and its promise.” 
-- Pope Francis            

For many, the start of a new year is a chance to turn over a new leaf and take a hard look at the gap between who we say we want and need to be and who we are. As a nation it’s time to close our hypocrisy gap in the treatment of our children and value and protect our children—all of them. We need to examine with urgency how we treat our children and the gap between what we say and what we do.
If we did, we’d find: 

-- A public school student is suspended every 2 seconds.* -- A public high school student drops out every 9 seconds.* -- A child is arrested every 24 seconds. -- A public school student is corporally punished every 30 seconds.* -- A baby is born into poverty every 35 seconds. -- A child is abused or neglected every 47 seconds. -- A baby is born without health insurance every minute. -- A baby is born into extreme poverty every 68 seconds. -- A baby is born to a teen mother every 2 minutes. -- A baby is born at low birthweight every 2 minutes. -- A child is arrested for a drug offense every 4 minutes. -- A child is arrested for a violent offense every 8 and a half minutes. -- A baby dies before his or her first birthday every 22 minutes. -- A child or teen dies from an accident every hour. -- A child or teen is killed by guns every three hours and 18 minutes. -- A child or teen commits suicide every four hours and 11 minutes. -- A child is killed by abuse or neglect every five and a half hours. -- A baby’s mother dies from pregnancy or childbirth complications every 11 hours and eight minutes. *During the school year.

What do these numbers tell us about who we are as a nation and whether we value the life and potential of every child? Why do we choose to let children be the poorest age group in our rich nation and stand by as millions of children suffer preventable poverty, hunger, homelessness, sickness, neglect, abuse, miseducation, and violence? Why do we continue to mock God’s call for justice for children and the poor and our professed ideals of freedom and justice for all?
It’s time to realize the promise of a fair playing field for all children. We can and must do better.

Prayers for Our Children for the New Year

In a world rife with war, religious, racial, gender, sectarian, and political strife, when so many children lack safety, enough food, shelter, health care, and education and suffer unthinkable losses of parents to disease, violence, and war, I hope this New Year will bring adults closer to our common sense and moral responsibility for children’s well being.
If the child is well all of us are well. So I offer two prayers for the New Year.
_______________________________________________________
O God of the children of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea,
Of Nigeria and Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan,
Of Iraq and Iran and Israel,
Of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala,
Of Darfur, Detroit, and Chicago,
Of Ferguson, Cleveland, and New York City
Help us to love and respect and protect them all.
O God of Black and Brown and White and Albino children and those all mixed together,
Of children who are rich and poor and in between,
Of children who speak English and Russian and Hmong and Spanish
and languages our ears cannot discern,
Help us to love and respect and protect them all.
O God of the child prodigy and the child prostitute,
Of the child of rapture and the child of rape,
Of runaway or thrown away children who struggle every day
without parent or place or friend or future,
Help us to love and respect and protect them all.
O God of children who can walk and talk and hear and see
and sing and dance and jump and play
and of children who wish they could but can’t,
Of children who are loved and unloved, wanted and unwanted,
Help us to love and respect and protect them all.
O God of beggar, beaten, abused, neglected, homeless,
and AIDS-, Ebola-, drug-, violence-, and hunger-ravaged children,
Of children who are emotionally and physically and mentally fragile,
and of children who rebel and ridicule, torment and taunt,
Help us to love and respect and protect them all.
O God of children of destiny and of despair, of war and of peace,
Of disfigured, diseased, and dying children,
Of children without hope and of children with hope to spare and to share,
Help us to love and respect and act to protect them all.
_______________________________________________________
Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, the great president of Morehouse College, who shaped so many of my generation including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said: “I am disturbed, I am uneasy about men because we have no guarantee that when we train a man’s mind, we will train his heart; no guarantee that when we increase a man’s knowledge, we will increase his goodness. There is no necessary correlation between knowledge and goodness.” So I share this prayer for 21^st-century children of privilege.
God, help us not to raise a new generation of children
with high intellectual quotients and low caring and compassion quotients;
with sharp competitive edges but dull cooperative instincts;
with highly developed computer skills but poorly developed consciences;
with a gigantic commitment to the big “I” but little sense of responsibility to the bigger “we”;
with mounds of disconnected information without a moral context to determine its worth;
with more and more knowledge and less and less imagination and appreciation for the magic of life that cannot be quantified or computerized;
and with more and more worldliness and less and less wonder and awe for the sacred and everyday miracles of life.
God, help us to raise children who care.

The Opportunity Gap

In the spring of 1954, like so many Black families, mine waited anxiously for theBrown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. My father and I talked about it and what it would mean for my future and the future of millions of other Black children who were attending segregated but unequal Black schools. He died the week before Brown was decided. But I and many other children were able, in later years, to walk through the new and heavy doors that Brown slowly and painfully opened.

It was a transforming time that set into motion a spate of other challenges to Jim Crow laws and yet 60 years after that historic May decision the doors to true educational equality have never fully opened wide enough for millions of American children to walk through especially those living in poverty. The most recent findings from the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), called the “richest, fullest” collection so far measuring education access and equity in our nation’s public schools, show many children are still receiving an unequal education.

This is the unfinished work of the civil rights movement.

The new Office for Civil Rights data cover the 2011-2012 school year and are the first universal data collection since 2000, with information about all 97,000 schools in the nation’s 16,500 school districts serving 49 million students. Some information was collected for the first time, including one of the most startling findings: new data on preschool suspensions that show Black preschoolers are 18 percent of children enrolled in preschool programs in public schools, but 48 percent of children suspended more than once. While the data show only six percent of the districts offering preschool in public schools reported that they had suspended preschoolers, there is something terribly wrong when we are suspending any children from preschool in the first place. We now know Black children are more likely to be pushed out of school before they’ve even made it to kindergarten, and other numbers in the recent OCR release confirm those disparities do not go away.

Overall, Black students are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than White students. Boys receive more than two out of three suspensions, but Black girls are suspended at higher rates than girls of any other race or ethnicity and higher rates than most boys. Students with disabilities (those served by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) also are more than twice as likely to receive an out-of-school suspension as students without disabilities. And inequities in school discipline continue right up through the most consequential responses: Black students represent 16 percent of student enrollment but make up 27 percent of students referred to law enforcement and 31 percent of school-related arrests.

These differences in discipline can’t be explained simply by differences in student behavior. The Equity Project at Indiana University has reviewed the research on the role of student behavior and characteristics in disparate suspension rates and found that in fact schools and districts that have taken seriously their responsibility to educate all of their students have seen significant improvements by adjusting the policies and practices of adults. Both Buffalo, New York Public Schools and Denver, Colorado Public Schools are heralded as examples of school systems’ ability to change to better serve students. The Children’s Defense Fund and AASA, the School Superintendents Association, have been funded by the Atlantic Philanthropies to work with ten school districts from Texas to Wisconsin to Pennsylvania whose leaders are committed to reforming their school discipline policies to reduce the use of exclusionary discipline and address racial disparities. 

Children’s unequal chances in school go well beyond discipline. Black, Latino, American Indian, and Native Alaskan students have less access to experienced teachers than White students. While most teachers are certified, nearly half a million students nationwide attend schools where 60 percent or fewer teachers meet all state certification and licensure requirements, and racial disparities are particularly acute in schools where uncertified and unlicensed teachers are concentrated. Black students are more than four times as likely and Latino students are twice as likely as White students to attend schools where 80 percent or fewer teachers meet these requirements. There are also teacher salary disparities: Nearly one in four districts with two or more high schools reports a teacher salary gap of more than $5,000 between high schools with the highest and the lowest Black and Latino student enrollments.

All students don’t have equal opportunities to take the most challenging courses to prepare them for college and career. While 81 percent of Asian American and 71 percent of White high school students attend high schools where the full range of math and science courses are offered (Algebra I, geometry, Algebra II, calculus, biology, chemistry, and physics), fewer than half of American Indian and Native Alaskan high school students have access to the full range in their schools, and Black students, Latino students, students with disabilities, and English language learner students also all have less access. Black and Latino students are also disproportionately less likely to be enrolled in at least one Advanced Placement (AP) course. The new data also show students with disabilities, English learners, and Black students are all more likely to be held back each year. Twelve percent of Black students were retained in ninth grade— about double the overall rate.

Six decades into the “post-Brown” era, will the doors of opportunity finally open wide or continue to stay half shut on our watch? Most students know the phrase “knowledge is power.” CDF is happy that the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is taking new steps to expand the range of data about inequalities that still exist in our nation’s schools. But now that we have more knowledge—what are we going to do with it? If you are interested in learning more and taking action, you can find out how the schools in your community are treating their students at the Civil Rights Data Collection’s website, and you can find new guidance on school discipline and positive alternatives to suspensions and other exclusionary discipline practices atthe National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments’ website. It’s time to close the opportunity gap and fulfill the promise of education as a great equalizer and a strong pathway to opportunity for all of our nation’s children.

The Budget Is Not Fair, Mr. Chair

“The budget is not fair, Mr. Chair, if 69 percent of the cuts comes from programs for low-income children and families and we are giving extra tax cuts to the wealthiest among us…. If we can afford to give new tax extenders to wealthy corporations and people, we can afford to expand Head Start for every child and to make sure that every child is housed and is fed.”

That’s part of what I said when I had the opportunity to testify at the House Budget Committee Hearing “A Progress Report on the War on Poverty: Lessons from the Frontlines” on April 30. I shared my belief that the budget proposal by House Budget Chair Paul Ryan recently passed by the House of Representatives would turn progress in the war on poverty backwards by cutting critical funding to safety net programs that help millions of poor children and families while giving tax breaks to the wealthiest and most powerful among us. The Ryan budget will widen the already indefensible income and wealth inequality gaps.

 

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities at least 69 percent of the Ryan budget cuts to non-defense programs over the next decade would come from programs that serve low-income children, families, and individuals including Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly food stamps), school lunches and other child nutrition programs, Pell Grants, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the low-income portion of the Child Tax Credit and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) that helps children with very serious disabilities. At the same time the Ryan budget slashes programs for children and the poor, Citizens for Tax Justice estimates it would give millionaires an average tax cut of at least $200,000 by lowering the top personal income tax rate from 39.6 to 25 percent, repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax, and reducing the corporate income tax rate from 35 to 25 percent, as well as other tax breaks.

The Ryan budget is not the only unjust decision Members of Congress have made. On April 29, the House Ways and Means Committee approved without any offsets a permanent extension of six corporate tax breaks that would drain the treasury of $310 billion over 10 years. That same committee in the very same meeting dropped a provision in the Preventing Sex Trafficking and Improving Opportunities for Youth in Foster Care bill because of its cost. This tiny, positive provision that would have ensured foster youth had documents like Social Security cards, birth certificates and health insurance cards to help them make it on their own when they aged out of foster care would have added $12 million to the 10-year cost of the bill—four thousandths of a percent of the cost to taxpayers of those huge non-offset corporate tax break extenders.

Some of the same lawmakers who routinely support massive corporate tax breaks are among those currently opposing proposals to invest $90 billion in early childhood programs over 10 years as too expensive and refusing to pass an extension without an offset of long-term unemployment benefits that would cost $10 billion. And on April 30, the Senate voted against opening debate on a Democratic bill to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour that would move 900,000 people out of poverty, cost the federal government not one cent and in fact could save federal and state governments money by reducing the need for nutrition and other safety net supports.

I don’t know what religious texts Members of Congress read, but when I look at the prophets and gospels and the teachings of every major faith I learn that not caring for the poor, the sick, the lame and the orphan is wrong. Acting as Robin Hood in reverse and taking from the poor and needy to give to the wealthy and powerful is even worse. America’s dream and promise of a level playing field has become a nightmare for millions of poor children and families struggling to get a foothold in our $17-trillion economy.

The way to end poverty is not to cut the very programs that are making the difference between a child eating and a child going hungry. Nothing in my decades of work for poor children makes me believe that cutting vital lifelines for millions of families who have fallen on hard times because of economic downturn is the way to create well-paying jobs or help parents have the time and resources to be able to nurture and support their children. Nothing in my experience makes me believe that putting college further out of reach for low-income students will help them compete for well-paying jobs. Nothing in my experience makes me believe that the current Ryan budget proposal will help create the economic opportunity and support systems every American needs when hard times hit. And nothing in my experience will ever make me believe that snatching food and shelter and early childhood and education lifelines from children and hard-working poor families to further enrich those who already have far more than their fair share of government help is economically and morally defensible. What kind of leaders believe we can afford massive tax breaks for the richest one percent but cannot afford to meet the survival needs of all our poor children?

We don’t have poverty in our midst because we have done too much for people. We have poverty because we have done too little and have not been fair to all our people, especially our children. We should be fixing the policies that have fueled inequality and given birth to an economy that has stopped working for the majority of hard-working people in our country. Congress and all of us should be striving to ensure there is a job with a living wage for every working-age person in this country, that every single child, regardless of his or her parents’ income or skin color or country of origin, has access to nurturing and enriching early childhood programs and effective schools, that no families have to choose between paying the electricity bill or buying medicine for their sick child, or have to figure out how to make the last $20 in food assistance stretch till the end of the month. It is profoundly unjust and immoral to pretend to be trying to reduce poverty for those struggling to survive -- including 16 million children -- and cutting the very programs enabling them to survive in a hostile economy, cutting the very programs that help ensure the next generation’s adults won’t be scarred by a childhood of deprivation.

In his last Sunday sermon at Washington’s National Cathedral, calling for a Poor People’s Campaign, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. retold the parable of the rich man Dives and the poor and sick man Lazarus who came every day seeking crumbs from Dives’ table. Dives went to hell, Dr. King said, not because he was rich but because he did not realize his wealth was his opportunity to bridge the gulf separating him from his brother and allowed Lazarus to become invisible. He warned this could happen in rich America, “if we don’t use her vast resources to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life.” I hope we will heed Dr. King’s warning before it’s too late.

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.