On a gray morning at Dr. Weeks Elementary on Syracuse’s Northeast Side, prekindergarten teacher Kim Hickey asks her 5-year-old helper to give the daily weather report.
Renayjha Clark stands up, walks solemnly to the window and takes a look outside. Then she turns to announce her findings.
“Cloudy,” she says, to no one’s surprise.
She shuffles back to her spot on a colorful area rug in time to join a favorite class song.
“Who let the ‘a’ out? Ah, ah, ah- ah!” Renayjha and 15 other children sing. “Who let the ‘b’ out? Buh, buh, buh-buh!”
Renayjha and 15 other 4- and 5-year-olds will spend the next six hours in their pre-kindergarten class with Hickey and teaching assistant Denise Farmer, as they do every school day. They are on the first rung of a ladder of learning that – hopefully – will take them through high school graduation and beyond.
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Pre-k teacher Kim Hickey works individually with each child as he or she is called to identify the picture and the first phonetic sound. Gabriella Conway, 4, sounds out the word.
They are also in the center of a national discussion about early learning. Politicians across the country, including New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and President Barack Obama, are jumping on the pre-k bandwagon, saying it is a crucial and cost-saving investment in education.
In touting his push for “preschool for all,” Obama says a dollar spent on high-quality preschool is an investment that returns $7 for every dollar spent. Advocates say the savings come as the children go on to succeed in school, get good jobs and pay taxes, rather than ending up in low-paying jobs, on public assistance or in jail.
Critics say such talk is overblown. Far from being a magic bullet, they say, most public preschool programs are expensive and unproven. They point to a report by the federal Department of Health and Human Services last fall suggesting that academic gains made in the early education Head Start program fade by the time the children reach third grade.
Effective or not?
Rachel Sheffield, a research associate at the conservative Heritage Foundation and co-author of a March 12 paper slamming Obama’s pre-school initiative, argues that neither Head Start nor state-funded universal pre-k are getting results good enough to justify the expense.
She says the impressive long-term gains found in a few early studies -- like the Perry Preschool program in Michigan and the Abecedarian project in North Carolina -- have not been replicated in larger, government-run preschool programs.
In addition, nearly three quarters of 4-year-olds already get some form of preschool, whether public or private, she said. Her paper says that instead of expanding such programs, the focus should be on the root causes of children being academically delayed, like growing up in single-parent families.
“We want to promote families and their role in raising children, rather than government,” she said.
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Teaching Assistant Denise Farmer gives individual attention to 4-year-old Felipe Sanchez. She is using picture flash cards during an open activity time to help him with phonics.
W. Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, rejects those arguments outright in a February paper. He points not just to the Perry and Abecedarian results, but to the more recent Chicago Child-Parent Center study, a large preschool program run by the Chicago school district.
The study found that children who went through the program graduated from high school at a significantly higher rate and were more likely to land good-paying jobs.
Barnett’s work established the 7-1 return on investment, using data from the Perry Preschool study. He acknowledges that most large-scale pre-k programs are not as effective as Perry because they are not as intensive. But he says public programs like those in Oklahoma and New Jersey have shown good enough results to produce big long-term savings.
It doesn’t take much, Barnett said. If preschool can give at least some children even a modest boost going into kindergarten, the long-term impact can be enormous.
“The returns are so high because the costs of that failure are so big,” he said. “There’s a lifetime for this to pay off, and it adds up.”
Barnett said the most obvious immediate impact of quality pre-k is keeping a child from being funneled into a costly special education program when he or she reaches kindergarten or first grade.
Barnett said the Head Start study has been widely misinterpreted as suggesting the program is a failure. But he is nonetheless disappointed by its findings. He says part of Obama’s plan is to increase overall preschool quality by moving the 4-year-olds in Head Start into pre-kindergarten programs.
The quality of Head Start suffers partly because only half the teachers are required to have a college degree, and their pay is far lower than that of public pre-k teachers, he said.
“The problem with Head Start is, if the teacher is just the same as the neighbor-lady or my mom, how is this going to help?” he said. “But if it’s somebody who is way more educated and has way more access to the wider world, this is a real eye-opener.”
A 4-year-old ‘blossoms’
Hickey, the Dr. Weeks teacher who -- like other veteran pre-k teachers in New York – is fully certified and has a master’s degree, talks emotionally about the girl in her class last year whose father was a single parent. The father was well-meaning but not well-educated, she said. He had few books in the house and didn’t know how to discuss things in a way that challenged his daughter.
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Jacob Brush plays with blocks during an open playtime. Playing behind him are Gabriella Conway, left, and Alaysia Hunter.
When she arrived in Hickey’s classroom, the girl didn‘t know letters, numbers or even colors. She didn’t recognize her own written name.
But the vibrant atmosphere of the class opened her up.
“She was like a sponge,” Hickey said. “She just blossomed. I can’t even explain to you the look on her face when she learned a new skill.”
Hickey says some 4-year-olds arrive in her class with the developmental abilities of a 2½-year-old. Others are already working at a 5-year-old’s level. She can see them making progress every day, and says she knows it makes a difference.
“When we talk to kindergarten teachers it’s really rewarding to hear them say, ‘Oh my God, thank you so much, so-and-so is already spelling words and reading,’ ” she said.
As soon as the children enter Hickey’s colorful, spacious classroom each morning, they get to work on a simple math problem, counting small objects that have been laid out for them, then counting out the same number of plastic cubes.
Hickey or Farmer might then ask, “What would happen if I took one away?”
Later, during circle time, the children sit “criss-cross applesauce” and focus on both math and literacy activities – singing, identifying letters, counting the days of the week and discussing the weather, the calendar and other pressing issues.
“Everything is geared toward literacy and math,” Hickey says.
The children spend time during the day in small groups at “centers” around the room – they can choose art, house, blocks, writing, computer or a “sensory table” with water, shaving cream or other interesting substances and materials. Their artwork, on bright construction paper, covers the walls.
Each child’s progress is reviewed regularly, including math and literacy assessments three times a year.
Getting kids socially prepared for school is part of pre-k’s mission, and Hickey reminds her pupils to use their “inside voices” while in class.
In a recent class, when the children were between activities and beginning to get loud, Hickey dimmed the lights. Immediately, the room fell silent.
“It doesn’t work like that every time,” she admitted with a smile.
Charting progress
The Syracuse district hasn’t done a study on the long-term impacts of pre-k, Chief Academic Officer Laura Kelley said. But it does track how well children progress during the pre-k year.
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Five-year-old Jala Blackshear places her flash card with a picture of a dog in the "D" column in Kim Hickey's pre-k class.
In 2011-12, 15 percent of the children entering the district’s Universal Pre-k program were ready to enter kindergarten at or above their age level. By the end of the year, that number rose to 70 percent.
Maria Fitzpatrick, a professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University, says pre-kindergarten is particularly effective with children from low-income families – a conclusion drawn by most researchers. She argues that universal programs – which can draw in middle- and upper-income children who don’t benefit as much -- are not as cost-effective.
Both Obama and Cuomo take that into consideration. Although Obama labels his plan “universal,” it would be targeted at children from families below 200 percent of federal poverty guidelines. A family of four with an annual household income below $47,100 would qualify.
The president’s program would be funded through a federal-state share, but it is unclear how much either share would be.
Cuomo’s plan – codified in the new state budget -- is far less sweeping. His pre-k initiative is a $25 million competitive grant program that will reward winning districts with money to expand both full- and half-day pre-k. The state Board of Regents had recommended a $75 million allocation.
Pre-k has been a longtime priority for Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, D-Manhattan, who spearheaded the state’s Universal Prekindergarten Program under Gov. George Pataki in 1998.
That program has failed to live up to its promise to have funding available for every district. It is currently active in about two-thirds of the districts in the state, and most of those do not serve all the eligible children.
In all, about 40 percent of the state’s 4-year-olds are enrolled.
Seeking more slots
Participation is relatively low in Onondaga County, with seven of the county’s 18 districts participating, according to a 2012 report by the state Education Department. Some districts fear state money will be cut off, leaving them with an unfunded program. Others lack the space to open new classrooms. Still others simply have higher priorities.
The report said all the districts in Oswego County have programs, along with five of seven districts in Cayuga and seven of 10 districts in Madison.
Jordan-Elbridge has a half-day pre-k program, and the school board has voted to expand it this year.
The program currently serves 54 children, but has six families on the waiting list. Superintendent James Froio is confident he could fill a new class of 18 children if there is enough money to do so. The expansion would come even as the district plans to cut three administrative positions and not fill three others in next year’s budget.
“I have no doubt that it’s working,” Froio said of the pre-k program. “It’s so important that kids get a good start in school.”
He fears, though, that the district will not qualify for Cuomo’s grant program. If the grant only serves districts with more than half their students from families poor enough to qualify for the free and reduced lunch program, as some of the grant programs do, J-E, at 34 percent, would not qualify.
The grants will favor high-need districts and students, but the specific qualifications have not been established yet.
Syracuse is hoping to benefit from the program. The district – along with the 19 community agencies it contracts to run Universal Pre-k classrooms across the city, serve about 1,500 children. About 800 are full-day and 700 are half-day.
Kelley is confident that if more full-day slots are made available, they will be filled.
That would please teachers like Hickey, who can get frustrated when people don’t give pre-k the respect they say it deserves. Hickey, who has taught pre-k for 18 years, says she still sometimes hears people describe pre-k as glorified babysitting.
“It drives me crazy,” she said.
Contact Paul Riede at priede@syracuse.com or 470-3260. Follow him on Twitter at @PaulRiede.
