ABC and FIND aim to improve outcomes for infants and children by altering their home environments in incremental but ultimately profound ways, slowly changing the basic tenor of their relationship with their parents. But other programs based on similar psychological principles seek to transform the environments where children spend time outside the home in their early years. The most intensive of these interventions is Educare, a network of early-childhood-education centers across the country that provide full-day childcare and preschool for children from low-income families, beginning as young as six weeks and continuing through age five.
Educare, which serves more than 3,000 children at its 21 centers, is intended primarily as a demonstration that even highly disadvantaged children can enter kindergarten ready to learn—but that in order to achieve that goal, they will need early interventions that are intensive (not to mention expensive). Right now, Educare costs about $20,000 per year per child—more or less the same as a year of public high school in a well-off suburb. (Educare families pay no tuition; an average of 16 percent of the funding comes from philanthropic support, and the rest comes from federal Head Start and Early Head Start funds and other government subsidies for low-income parents.)
In general, children in Educare live in high-poverty neighborhoods and in families with serious disadvantages, and children from those backgrounds are statistically more likely to be significantly behind their peers, by a broad range of measures, on the first day of kindergarten. Researchers have found, in fact, that most of the achievement gap between well-off and poor children opens up before age five; for most children, the gap then stays pretty steady from kindergarten through the end of high school. The premise behind Educare is that kids from disadvantaged backgrounds need two things in order to eliminate that gap: At age three and four, they need a high-quality preschool that provides them with a solid grounding in letters and numbers as well as a stable base of interpersonal, motivational, and psychological capacities. But first, before they set foot in preschool, they need to spend their first three years in an environment with plenty of responsive, warm, serve-and-return interaction with caring adults. And if they can’t get that at home, they need to get it at a place like Educare.
The Educare centers I visited, in Tulsa, Chicago, and Omaha, were all beautifully designed and smoothly run, full of natural light and well-constructed play structures, and staffed by trained professionals. The Educare model puts as much emphasis on the development of children’s noncognitive capacities as it does on their literacy and numeracy abilities, which means that kids in Educare centers are surrounded by lots of the interactive nurturance that fortifies their prefrontal cortex and leads to healthy executive-function development. The environment in the preschool classrooms I visited was invariably engaging and stimulating, yet still calm and warm. In the infant rooms, babies were being held and rocked, spoken and sung and read to. Even if conditions in the children’s homes are chaotic and stressful, Educare’s directors believe, the large dose of responsive care they experience each day at the center will allow them to transcend the potential ill effects of that instability.
Educare is currently conducting a long-term randomized controlled trial that, when it is completed in the next few years, may be able to conclusively demonstrate the program’s effectiveness. But preliminary results already show powerful gap-closing effects for Educare students: If disadvantaged children enter Educare before their first birthday, they usually are, by the first day of kindergarten, essentially caught up with the national average on tests of basic knowledge and language comprehension, as well as on measures of noncognitive factors like attachment, initiative, and self-control. The economic case that Educare advocates make is that the savings that result from having those children caught up in kindergarten rather than lagging behind—savings down the road in special education, juvenile justice, and social services—more than offset the cost of Educare.
Because children spend so many hours each week at the Educare center, beginning at such an early age, the program has, more or less by default, a significant amount of control over their development up until their fifth birthday. And it may well prove to be true that children growing up in serious disadvantage require that kind of comprehensive, immersive intervention in order to catch up with their more advantaged peers. But there are other early-childhood experts who are testing out less intensive (and less expensive) interventions to see if it is possible to have an outsize effect on children’s outcomes by altering certain critical elements in their daily environments in precisely targeted ways. One example: All Our Kin, which currently operates in three cities in Connecticut and reaches 1,500 children at a cost of less than $900 per child per year. All Our Kin achieves these efficiencies by focusing its energies on improving an environment that is almost always overlooked in discussions of early-childhood interventions: the informal, and often unlicensed, childcare providers with whom so many young children spend so much of their time, often in minimally stimulating or even dangerous conditions. All Our Kin does intensive community outreach to recruit these informal providers to enroll in the group’s Family Child Care Network, where they receive, free of charge, regular professional-development training, plus biweekly visits from master educators who model high-quality childcare techniques for the providers and offer them long-term mentorship and guidance.
The help that the providers receive makes a difference in the care they give to the children they look after. Data shows that childcare sites in the network are significantly more conducive to children’s development than other sites in the cities they serve. I visited two All Our Kin locations in New Haven, and while they weren’t luxurious—both were in small, somewhat rundown homes in high-poverty neighborhoods—the childcare spaces were clean, bright, and organized, filled with books, art materials, and toys for make-believe play. The providers were engaged with and focused on the toddlers they were caring for (just five or six kids at each site)—always ready to offer support and redirection or just hugs when the children got frustrated or if minor conflicts broke out.
Another example of a high-leverage environmental intervention is the Chicago School Readiness Project, or CSRP, a professional-development program developed by Cybele Raver, a psychologist at New York University, that aims to enhance the self-regulatory abilities of children in low-income pre-K classrooms by making the school day less stressful for both teachers and students. Teachers in CSRP receive training in classroom-management techniques: how to set clear routines, how to redirect negative behavior, how to help students manage their feelings—all intended to provide students with a calm, consistent classroom experience. Mental-health professionals are also assigned to work in the classroom but are concerned as much with the mental health of the teacher as with that of the students.
Raver calls this approach “the bidirectional model of self-regulation.” She believes that classroom climate is the result of a kind of feedback loop. When children whose self-regulatory abilities have been compromised by early toxic stress encounter the demands of a prekindergarten classroom, they often act out or otherwise misbehave. And when teachers are not trained in handling conflict or dealing with the disruptions that a child’s poorly regulated stress-response system can produce, they often respond by escalating the conflict—which provokes a further escalation from the child. The classroom becomes a hostile, angry place. Children feel threatened, teachers feel frustrated and burned out, and behavior becomes the dominant issue for the entire school year.
But Raver contends that that feedback loop can function in the opposite way as well. If from the beginning of the year the classroom is stable and reliable, with clear rules, consistent discipline, and greater emphasis on recognizing good behavior than on punishing bad, students will be less likely to feel threatened and better able to regulate their less constructive impulses. That improved behavior, combined with the support and counsel of the mental-health professional assigned to the class, helps teachers stay calm and balanced in the face of the inevitable frustrations of teaching a group of high-energy four-year-olds.
The results of a recent randomized trial of CSRP showed that children who spent their prekindergarten year in a CSRP Head Start classroom had, at the end of the school year, substantially higher attention skills, greater impulse control, and better performance on executive-function tasks than did children in a control group. The children’s improved self-regulatory capacity was evident both on the behavioral level—in their ability to sit quietly, follow directions, and maintain attention in the face of distractions—and on the cognitive level. The CSRP kids also had better vocabulary, letter-naming, and math skills, despite the fact that the training provided to teachers had included no academic content whatsoever. The students improved academically for the simple reason that they were able to concentrate on what was being taught, without their attention being swept away by conflicts and disagreements. Changing the environment in the classroom made it easier for them to learn.