Well Connected
The Roles Grownups Play
My young friend Lauren was as excited as any parent when her daughter, Stella, started kindergarten. But she quickly grew disillusioned by the insipid paperwork she saw coming home and, by October, had accumulated a laundry list of complaints about her daughter’s teacher, Mrs. Darling, a much-beloved member of the community whose teaching style had become stale from recycled themes and overuse of coloring books and other dated materials. “This makes a 1950s Sunday-school class look progressive,” Lauren sputtered to me one day when Stella proudly unveiled a photocopy of a wan bunny rabbit pasted to a popsicle stick. “They call this critical thinking?” she laughed bitterly as she pulled out a particularly uninspired work sheet problem featuring a “Mr. and Mrs. Triangle.”
Lauren was ready to storm into the principal’s office, loaded for bear, as my Southern brother-in-law might have put it, but I advised her to hold off until she’d had a chance to chat with Mrs. Darling directly, since nothing frustrates a teacher more than being bypassed for the principal when a problem arises. I also suspected there might be value in getting to know this woman’s perspective since, after all, she’d been teaching for something close to forty years. So my friend agreed to bite her tongue until the November parent-teacher conference, to which she and her husband grudgingly submitted, armed with their litany of grievances and dashed hopes.
Mrs. Darling disarmed Lauren immediately. “I just love that Stella!” she exclaimed. Lauren’s ears pricked up and she leaned in expectantly. “What a hoot this kid is!” Mrs. Darling continued. “I really can’t believe how hysterically funny she is. My husband asks me at dinner every night, ‘So what did Stella say today?’” Lauren sat dumbfounded as Mrs. Darling described Stella’s remarkably distinct likes and dislikes, her hilarious attempts to instruct her peers in proper toilet etiquette, and her stories about “continents that are actually moving a little tiny bit every day all over the whole planet.” Lauren couldn’t believe how well Stella’s teacher understood her and could uncannily mimic her locutions. She was surprised to learn that Mrs. Darling had allowed Stella to skip library that morning to finish the picture book she was enjoying. (“We wouldn’t want to let a librarian get between a good reader and her books!” Mrs. Darling laughed with a little wink.)
“We just didn’t see any of this before,” Lauren explained, a little defensively, when she explained her startling 180-degree shift in attitude. “We had no way of knowing how much that personal connection really mattered.” For the rest of the year, Lauren was singing a new tune. “Honestly, I don’t even really care that her teacher isn’t setting the world on fire with her teaching innovation. It’s kindergarten!” she said, shaking her head in bemusement.
Would Stella’s parents have preferred a more stimulating curriculum? Well, yes. Who wouldn’t? But there was no question in their mind that Mrs. Darling’s admittedly limited pedagogy nevertheless contained the key ingredient to unlock Stella’s learning potential: she knew and loved her students. In fact, I’ve noticed that many of these very seasoned teachers have unexpected strengths to offset their out-of-date pedagogic practices. Mrs. Darling, for example, observed her children very carefully and clearly, and took an old-school approach to expressing affection with them. If I were forced to choose between a Mrs. Darling–style teacher and a more pedagogically correct but less empathic and playful one, I would vote for the child’s relationship with the teacher every single time.
We shouldn’t have to choose, of course. And I’m not trying to undermine the careful case I’ve made for a stimulating curriculum free of arbitrary nonsense. But neither should we forget that children learn through their relationships, and a child can learn much when a relationship is strong. Conversely, they learn surprisingly little in a resource-rich classroom with limited interpersonal connection.
Children’s relationships with adults are the center of our key concern, but don’t forget that there is also a complex relationship between a child’s teacher and parent. Sometimes, navigating this bond between parent and teacher (what educator Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot calls the “essential conversation”) can seem more like walking through a minefield than having a mutually supportive dialogue.1 Lauren discovered this before she even walked in the door to her conference. Her own anxiety and lack of experience clouded her judgment.
It’s also easy for teachers to forget that preschool attendance sometimes feels like a public referendum on the family. Bringing your three- or four-year-old child to preschool for the first time, even if she is only transitioning up in the same daycare program, is a milestone fraught with apprehension. Crossing that pre-K threshold implies a kind of supplication: Here’s our child! Here’s what we’ve done for her. Please don’t judge her too harshly. (Please don’t judge us too harshly.)
Parents’ anxieties can loom over a teacher like a threat, as Lauren may or may not have understood, especially when the parents in question are wealthier (which is often the case) and better educated than the teacher. But it usually feels as if it’s the teacher who holds the power in the relationship. She has the power to pass judgment, and even to dictate the child’s trajectory, whether it’s making a determination about something as extreme as preschool expulsion or passing along information to the child’s next school or simply doing little everyday things to make a family’s life more (or less) comfortable. It’s a strange state of affairs given what a small fraction of their time young children actually spend away from home.
Even assuming a ten-hour day, five days per week, with only two weeks of vacation per year, we still find less than one third of the child’s time spent away from home, and, for most American preschoolers, it is far less. Quibblers will note that children spend a lot of their home lives asleep, but sleep is part of what makes us whole and healthy people, and shouldn’t be discounted from the equation. Moreover, my point here is how little time children spend in preschool, not what they are or aren’t doing outside of preschool. Plus, I allowed for ten hours per day, which is on the highest end of time that children are in preschool each day.
Whenever I tell parents how little their children are in preschool, I sense a certain indignation, and I have even been accused of exaggerating or misrepresenting the percentages. When we patiently calculate the hours together, the families are genuinely surprised. This may be because school reformers and politicians have been so effective at convincing the public that nonschool factors are relatively insignificant compared to the impact of teachers. This assumption is patently false, and, at the preschool level, it feels especially ridiculous.
Some preschool programs have made family involvement a cornerstone of good early education, our federal Head Start program being the most obvious model. A complete evaluation of the strengths and limitations of that program would consume too much space here, but some of Head Start’s more promising outcomes are associated with the more holistic features of its mission, including fostering parent involvement and improving child health and nutrition. Some researchers have argued that the diminishing impact of Head Start in the later years may be at least partially explained by the relative lack of parental involvement as children progress through school.
Still, it’s difficult for teachers and families to develop healthy, respectful relationships with one another when being welcome often means parents going through criminal background checks just to step in the door, or being asked to sell tchotchkes for a fund-raiser or to sit through tedious back-to-school nights. And even when programs do incorporate family themes or invite family members to classroom events, it’s rare that parents are welcome to join in substantive discussions of the curriculum or partake in real decision making or even participate actively in the classroom unless they happen to belong to one of the nation’s small number of cooperative preschools, which typically cater to dual-parent families who have time for regular volunteer service.
The default assumption tends to be: “Teacher knows best.” I think parents and teachers collude in this misunderstanding of the purpose of preschool. It serves multiple interests to hive off preschool from family life and attach it more formally to real school. It raises the professional status of the teacher (and often her salary), for one thing. But, developmentally, all of this is a bit of a fiction, especially when we consider that most preschoolers are just beginning by age two and a half or three to make their most basic needs comprehensible to non-family members. (Before that age, parents often serve as simultaneous translators for young children who are able to converse easily with their immediate family members but who often mystify those unfamiliar with their linguistic and emotional quirks.)
Sometimes, parents’ efforts at involvement are rejected out of hand. A friend described an episode at her daughter’s nursery school class, where a father and mother newly arrived from Venezuela had brought a big sugary homemade cake and several liters of Coke to school for a celebratory gift. The offering was unwelcome. “It was like they had dumped their dirty laundry on the floor,” my friend observed. She was embarrassed by the teachers’ icy smiles as they whisked away the offending drinks, which violated school policy, and grudgingly offered each child a microscopic sliver of the toxic cake. She wondered then—and I do, too—who was inflicting more harm: the new parents eager to join the community who were offering illicit snacks or the tone-deaf adults who recoiled from an act of human kindness? Had the teachers gently offered any suggestions to this culturally unacclimated family before the party? Could they have made an exception on this one occasion?
Even parent-child conferences can be a lost opportunity for mutual understanding. How many parents have slogged through what my husband used to call the “Death March Through the Curriculum”? By the time children reach kindergarten, their parents find that most teachers stick to the big picture of what the class as a whole is working on, highlighting the recent unit on hibernating animals or the lesson on r-controlled vowels rather than the most recent developmental milestones of the child. From the teacher’s perspective, it’s much safer to talk about content than risk a judgment about a child that might offend, alarm, or simply miss the mark. But most parents of preschoolers really aren’t so interested in the newest curriculum module purchased that year; they want a straightforward answer to the fundamental question lurking behind even the most trivial exchanges between these wary allies: Do you actually like my kid? (Embedded in that question, of course, are more urgent questions: Is my child normal? Is my child going to be a success?)
Parents can tolerate a lot of unsettling feedback if they know that the answer to that first question is a resounding yes. But that yes depends, of course, on knowing young children—because to know them is to love them. I think that if teachers could only appreciate the extraordinary vulnerability that parents feel in turning over their child to a stranger (even one wearing a puppy sweater), they might communicate their affection more directly with them. The teacher’s imprimatur is such a priceless currency (She likes my child!), and it should be offered unreservedly and often. As the perpetrator of some occasionally slipshod teaching practice myself, I can vouch that parents will put up with a lot of glitches in a school environment if they feel that their child is known and loved. (Whether the parental impulse toward generosity is always warranted, I can’t say.)
My 1960s childhood took a thrilling turn midway through first grade when my teacher, Mrs. McDonald, came to live with my family for several months. From the perspective of today’s educational norms, this story seems so implausible that I thought I might have implanted a wishful fantasy; I had to check with my parents to confirm its veracity, and the story is indeed true: Mrs. McDonald slept in the bedroom down the hall from the room I shared with my sister before later leaving my school permanently to join her husband, who had taken a job in New Mexico. For generations of schoolchildren, this arrangement wouldn’t have seemed strange: teachers routinely boarded with local families, and anyone who’s read These Happy Golden Years will recall Laura Ingalls Wilder’s unhappy experience as a new teacher living with the knife-wielding Mrs. Brewster.2 But the idea of a teacher sharing such intimacy with a young child today, in an educational environment tainted by performance anxiety and the threat of litigation, seems almost inconceivable.
I doubt that many adults require scientific proof that loving-kindness is the manna of human development. Controversial studies in the 1960s showed that infant rhesus monkeys raised in total isolation grew up with profound emotional and cognitive deficits.3 Fast-forward to the early 2000s, when studies emerged showing PET scans of the atrophied brains of Romanian children who’d spent their critical years in what scientist Charles Nelson called “breathtakingly awful” conditions.4 Horror stories of feral children raised with animals or shut up in dark closets have captured people’s consciousness since before the Middle Ages, and they derive their special fascination and noxiousness from the difficulty of imagining such a brutal rupture of life’s essential contract between adult and young child, a contract that feels, even to relatively impaired caregivers, inviolable.
But if we can all agree that teachers, parents, and other concerned adults crave deep bonds with our young children, and they with us, what gets in the way of making that possible? Why is it sometimes so hard to connect meaningfully with young children, to understand them, and to care for them?
The obvious culprits—time, money, and fatigue—don’t tell the whole story.
Sometimes the distance between a caregiver and child comes from something as mundane as a teacher’s inability to keep up physically with an active group of preschoolers. The growing obesity epidemic has hit early childhood educators and providers hard. Knowing the importance of eye-to-eye contact between teacher and child, an architect who designs award-winning early learning spaces for preschoolers told me about the challenges of incorporating foam ramps and other physical aids to encourage obese and physically inactive teachers to get on the floor with their students. But there are deeper obstacles at work, too.
Notwithstanding the lip service paid to developmentally appropriate practice, today’s early childhood classrooms don’t provide much motivation for healthy human relationships between teacher and child, much less between the teacher and family. The joint goals of professionalism and risk management have conspired to keep teachers quite literally at arm’s length from their charges. Early childhood teachers are sometimes discouraged from hugging children, for example, implicitly or explicitly, for fear of litigation.
One of my colleagues described seeing a male African American teacher, a rarity in a preschool setting, cautiously picking up a little girl who’d approached him for a hug with his arms rigidly outstretched before depositing the child carefully on the floor, like a piece of hazardous material. The man was not being unkind but ruefully noted that he couldn’t possibly hold this small child in his arms.
The fact that respectable early childhood organizations like the National Association for the Education of Young Children feel the need to offer official policy defenses for the role of human touch in healthy child development tells you a lot about the default position of American early education.5 Why do we accept that a measure of professional, good-quality care is an enforced emotional and physical distance between teachers and children?
Much of this anxiety can be traced, I believe, to the outbreak of daycare abuse litigation in the 1980s. Taking on the form of a kind of mass psychogenic illness (aka “hysteria”), this dark period in our recent history resulted in many wrongful convictions based on lurid claims of sexual and physical abuse that were flatly untrue. When I describe these cases to my college students, they can scarcely believe such things could have happened in their parents’ lifetimes. But indeed they did. The outlandish accusations of satanic rituals, bludgeoned animals, flying witches, and sacrificial babies seem laughably implausible viewed from a couple of decades’ remove, and the ease with which otherwise well-adjusted adults gobbled up this lunacy may explain in part why it so quickly receded into the mists of our collective memory, despite being front-page news for years.6 It’s simply too embarrassing to admit! (To refresh our memories of one such incident, Gerald Amirault, a teacher at the Fells Acres Day Care in Malden, Massachusetts, served almost twenty years in prison for allegedly plunging a butcher knife into a child’s rectum, which, mysteriously, left no physical injury and was alleged to have been done in plain view of other staff.)7
To be very clear: no serious person can dispute that children need protection, or that staff require oversight. Unfortunately, even adults who don’t remember hearing about predatory clowns brandishing magic “rape-wands” can still experience the awful pall cast by these contemporary Salem witch trials, decades later, in the guarded and overanxious ways that caregivers of young children conduct themselves.8 Standards of care still vary hugely, and in the Wild West atmosphere of American early education and care, horrifying true stories abound of daycare fires, gross negligence, and even death.9 Although the landscape is improving rapidly, at least for children in federally subsidized care, almost half of the states don’t require a license at all to operate an early childhood center, including South Dakota, where a provider can care for as many as ten children in his/her home without any oversight. Child Care Aware, an advocacy organization, estimates that approximately one fifth of American children receiving government subsidies for childcare are in totally unlicensed care.10
The problem is that the programs operating with egregious impunity—the ones we hear about on television when a child is shaken to death or suffers an intentional leg fracture11—seem strangely immune to oversight, whether because the providers simply can’t be bothered or don’t know how to comply with basic standards, or, as is the case in some states, because there are so few basic legal protections in place. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the continuum, where the quality of programs is decent enough, concerns about psychological and physical boundaries can sometimes become an easy excuse for simply not caring properly for young children, who actually need physical affection from somebody during their waking hours. There’s no doubt it can be discomfiting to imagine an adored child throwing her arms around a nonfamilial adult in an institutional setting. But in order to thrive, young children need physical and emotional affection from the adults who look after them, and we simply can’t ask them to be exempt from this human connection because it makes us feel jealous or uneasy.
Parenting blogs and online comments are replete with evidence that male early childhood teachers face a special degree of scrutiny, or harassment, depending on one’s perspective. As one parent explained at the Boston Globe:
Men are born guilty of what some might call “pre-crimes,” which is the penalty they owe society for the males that have committed crimes before them. The vast majority of sex offenders are male. Is it reasonable for people to use gender or other risk factors in determining who cares for their child? Of course.12
The squeamishness about men as loving caregivers may explain in part why so few men are drawn to early childhood teaching. (Another reason has to be the dismal salaries.) One of my graduate students at Yale, a young man who’d been a Teach for America kindergarten teacher, told me that mothers of his students not uncommonly questioned his motivation for being an early childhood teacher and asked his principal to keep him from engaging in any physical contact with their children.
What a lost opportunity. There are well-described differences in how men and women interact with young children and, especially for the growing percentage of children living in households headed by single mothers, where a father figure is either absent or a malign presence, it would seem that a physically affectionate male teacher could play a positive role in a young child’s life. It’s also a missed opportunity for classroom teachers to model healthy interactions between men and women for children who don’t have that experience at home, since it’s a near certainty that a male teacher, where we find him, would be paired with a female teacher. We also have to question the economic implications of turning off fully half of the human adult population from a profession. The kind of extreme gender stratification you see in American early childhood education (where the workforce is 98 percent female) is a kind of de facto labor apartheid reminiscent of countries like Saudi Arabia that legally exclude women from many jobs.
The near total absence of men in the early childhood education profession is even more troubling when we consider that the pool of well-qualified female teachers has also shrunk in a generation. In previous eras, teacher quality was artificially elevated through sexist discrimination practices that restricted women to nursing and teaching jobs. The nursing profession figured this out a while ago by professionalizing their workforce and raising standards and salaries, gradually recruiting men, too. Early childhood educators have yet to do this, although the K–12 public school system is beginning to absorb some of the better qualified preschool teachers, who are now achieving some economic parity with other teachers. But those who are shut out of, or choose not to enter, the publicly funded preschool market are living, essentially, on the edge of poverty.
There’s an urgent need to pay more attention to the human relationships in early learning settings because they are associated with all kinds of healthy outcomes. Somehow, in our quest for new skills, we’ve lost sight of the ones children already possess, such as the ability to form close bonds. Fortunately, there is a growing movement in the early education community to place more emphasis on the quality of teacher-child interactions.
Alas, this aspect of preschool quality has been ignored in favor of easier-to-implement assessment tools that track cleanliness, child-teacher ratios, safety regulations, and other structural variables.13 Even today, with most states working admirably hard to improve programs through Quality Ratings Improvement Systems (QRIS), there’s proportionately little emphasis on what’s going on in the classroom compared to, for example, admittedly laudable efforts to prevent criminals from gaining employment as teachers.
Still, education researchers are testing new measurement tools to try to capture the more process-oriented or soft measures of quality, such as the nature of interactions between teacher and child or the degree of collaboration between teachers. The Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) measures whether a teacher gets down on the floor to talk to a child at eye level or poses the open-ended questions that improve language use.14 The Preschool Mental Health Climate Scale,15 developed by Walter Gilliam, is another example of an assessment scale that focuses more on the overall classroom climate, and specifically its emotional health, capturing emotional health at various levels of classroom interaction. Gilliam’s scale, in particular, strikes me as valuable because if we really want to home in on the elusive, but nonetheless quantifiable, concept of preschool climate, we have to look carefully at all the possible variables that trickle down to the child’s level, including, for example, the way that a preschool director interacts with her staff and the way that a lead teacher and teaching assistant might interact with each other; it’s not enough to examine only the child or only the simple tie between a child and teacher to assess effective teaching and learning.
It’s still early to know how much these promising quality measures will improve educational practice, whether they will become widely adopted, and whether—as often happens—teachers will adhere to the letter of the law (“Look, I’m down on the floor with the kid!”) but fail to internalize the underlying pedagogic philosophy that requires it.
It’s clear that we need to strengthen the relationship between teachers and parents and children. That’s one piece of the puzzle. But what happens when adult agendas are in conflict with children’s interests? Is family friendly really the same as child friendly? Posing such questions raises hackles all across the political spectrum because, in our society, the parent is supposed to put on her oxygen mask first. In fact, we have a longstanding cultural investment in the idea that what’s good for parents is necessarily good for children. This belief system explains many observations about how we parent kids these days—for example, the well-documented sleep deprivation we see in young children who stay up late to spend quality time with their parents.
This posture may also partially explain why the United States joins only Somalia and South Sudan in not ratifying the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which reads, in part: “The best interests of the child shall be the guiding principle of those responsible for his education and guidance.” Much of the way we organize early learning in the United States badly neglects this principle and betrays some disturbing truths about our attitudes toward children through the centuries.
One of the country’s leading historians of childhood, Steven Mintz, explains that Americans have always been “deeply ambivalent about children. Adults envy young people their youth, vitality, and physical attractiveness. But they also resent children’s intrusions on their time and resources and frequently fear their passions and drives.” And he argues, as we have seen, that “many of the reforms that nominally have been designed to protect and assist the young were also instituted to insulate adults from children.”16
I think the administrative and caretaking functions of early education aren’t acknowledged often enough—perhaps because we like to imagine it’s altruism, not desperation, that fuels so many of our child-rearing strategies. But, as Mintz points out, virtually every child policy intervention in American history was motivated primarily by adults’ need to put distance between themselves and their children or, at a minimum, to put children somewhere while the parents went about their adult business. School is no different.17 Daycare centers are at least more nakedly honest about the underlying motivation than stand-alone preschools.
In addition to child tending and learning, preschools also implement a kind of mass acculturation process whereby our littlest citizens learn the merits of waiting in lines and subsuming their whims to the will of the collective. Schools are, at least in theory, a civilizing force. But if we require preschools and kindergartens to be places not only for learning but also for social control and cultural indoctrination, we need to acknowledge that there are downsides to this extreme version of multitasking. And one of them is that the learning impulse, which can be so easily fueled in the right kind of home environment, is too often crushed in preschool. We saw a little of this crushing effect in the difference between the pro-literacy environments that foster self-taught readers (who don’t rely on phonics rules) versus what we see in most contemporary American preschool classrooms (where direct instruction of phonics concepts is standard practice).
A key reason for this mismatch of adults’ and children’s needs is that access and affordability directly affect adult lives (and voting behavior) whereas the mysterious concept we call quality is most consequential for the children themselves, who are powerless.
We’ve seen repeatedly that preschool quality really matters, and that preschool is not monolithic. Indeed, one of the leading experts in early childhood education, Robert Pianta, cautions us not to ignore quality as a pillar of good policymaking, and he concludes, rather dispiritingly:
There’s no evidence whatsoever that the average preschool program produces benefits in line with what the best programs produce. On average, the non-system that is preschool in the United States narrows the achievement gap [between poor and well-off kids] by perhaps only 5% rather than the 30% to 50% that research suggests might be possible on a large scale if we had high quality programs.18
Yet it is taboo to discuss unsettling questions about teachers’ competence or the possibility that early education and child care might have been forced into a marriage of convenience. The conundrum we face is both logistic and philosophical. Most professionals agree that it makes no practical, financial, or even pedagogic sense to have separate silos of preschool and wraparound services (e.g., before- and after-care or summer programs). At the state and federal level, there has been a lot of progress in trying to dismantle silos through better coordination of services. Some states, such as Massachusetts and Connecticut, have merged child services under one umbrella of early education and care, which addresses the problem of having separate licensing and regulatory systems, for example, or having two separate systems for implementing and tracking quality improvements or collecting data on children’s needs and outcomes.
At the same time, there are some downsides to lumping everything that happens to a child between the hours of eight A.M. and five P.M. together under the same terminology and infrastructure; when we do that, we slip all too easily into thinking that preschoolers require nine hours of instruction every day, and this can become a rather pedantic and exhausting model of care. Equally concerning, it’s also a very expensive one. It’s hard enough to pay an untrained babysitter at minimum wage to care for a group of children for forty or fifty hours per week, fifty-two weeks of the year; it’s quite another to provide a licensed teacher in the same scenario.
There are two questions, really: Do young children require the uniformly high standard of quality we have been discussing for all hours of the day that they are in someone else’s custody? And if we think they do, are we willing to pay for it? These are difficult questions, and I want to take some time to explain how we might arrive at an answer. But first, we have to understand a little more about what we mean by high quality. Since preschool quality is so closely linked to teacher variables, we turn now to human capital, not curricula or classrooms.
Despite the endless studies, defining quality and then plotting a course to get to it has proved surprisingly difficult. Take teacher credentials, to begin with. The National Association for the Education for Young Children has pushed for accredited early childhood programs to be staffed by teachers with bachelor’s degrees, but the data on teacher preparation are equivocal. Some studies have shown no correlation at all between a bachelor’s degree and teaching quality (which shouldn’t surprise us given the range of quality in teacher preparation programs).19 In the absence of randomized controlled trials to compare the impact of different levels of teacher training and preparation on randomly assigned children, it’s hard to make sense of the mixed results. Some policy makers believe that the requirement of a bachelor’s degree helps to professionalize the workforce; but others worry that raising the entry-level job requirements without a compensatory rise in salary will simply push qualified teachers into the public school system, where they have better benefits and job security.
In fact, as we’ve seen, teacher salary is arguably the most important structural variable of all in predicting quality,20 as well as a teacher’s knowledge of child development and his or her empathic, child-centered teaching style.21 Those traits aren’t necessarily learned in early childhood education programs, though they obviously should be, and, equally, they can be acquired through the right kind of apprenticeships and mentorship, not only in college.
But there’s another fundamental barrier to healthy child development that resides in the psychological orientation of many caregivers: a lack of confidence and comfort with themselves. This is the problem that doesn’t really have a name. A painful reality of preschool policy is that early childhood teachers sometimes go into the field of early education because of personal insecurities about interacting in the adult world. If I had a dime for every time a preschool teacher has expressed profound discomfort about interacting with parents, or a fear of having to develop a new curriculum or conduct a parent-teacher conference or speak in public—or even read a story out loud in front of another adult!—I would have collected enough money to launch my dream school a long time ago.
So here is our dilemma. On the one hand, we have a growing need for child care. And on the other hand, we face the reality that preschool quality depends on a steady supply of knowledgeable, loving, and well-paid teachers. The situation reminds me of a sign I once saw at an auto body shop: SPEED, COST, QUALITY: PICK ANY TWO. But when it comes to children, Americans are hard-pressed to prioritize even one of the troika of childcare goals: access, affordability, and quality.
The problem of providing effective early education and care doesn’t have an easy solution in the United States, and it’s particularly challenging for disadvantaged children who need a whole suite of supports at the family level, beyond what happens during classroom hours. But there is an easy solution for the lackluster workforce problem. Talking about poor teacher quality is the third rail of education policy. We either ignore it completely, which is what liberals like to do, or we simply insist that teachers are the problem for every conceivable bad outcome, which is what conservatives like to do. The easy—American—solution is this: we need to pay teachers more so that we can attract the best candidates to the job; and we need to do a better job supporting them and helping them to improve once they become teachers so they don’t leave for greener pastures.
Unfortunately, the conversation about teaching quality has focused primarily on discussions about making better use of the existing teaching workforce we have—through schemes for merit-based pay, calls to jettison the egregiously incompetent, and an unending cycle of quick professional development fixes—rather than attracting a different kind of teacher to begin with. I understand the obsession with putting our educational house in order. Who wouldn’t want to help a beleaguered teacher learn a few new strategies? It’s worked in other fields. People watching the major innovations seen in professional sports and manufacturing over the last thirty years are puzzled by the comparative lack of progress in “building a better teacher.”22 And, as I’ve argued here, teachers do need the infrastructure to work more creatively and in greater depth than they are generally allowed to do in our current preschool and kindergarten settings.
But at the end of the day, we have to stop fooling ourselves. Markets are generally held to improve quality in every other area of life, and we should accept their role in education, too, and start raising salaries to get some new blood into the profession. The gender imbalance among early childhood educators would also likely be corrected.
Salary is a key predictor of teaching quality, even when controlling for all other pertinent variables, such as education of teacher, class size, and teacher-child ratios. There is no way around this. But educational reformers are often loath to acknowledge this problem, and as a result, the early childhood education profession attracts the least qualified pool of applicants.
A common retort to this kind of financial incentivizing is that we first have to get rid of the existing dud teachers by crushing the unions or whatever other accountability strategy is proposed. Otherwise we are just throwing good money after bad. I don’t follow the logic. This is like suggesting that we halt the building of all new roads, hospitals, housing, and shopping malls because there’s graft in the construction industry. It also ignores the fact that virtually all of the best educational systems in the world, and the best state systems in the United States, are strongly unionized; but in any case, this is only a small part of the picture, given that most preschool teachers don’t belong to unions unless they teach in our publicly funded preschool system. It’s a bit of a red herring.
Let’s do a thought experiment: Imagine being tasked with looking through a pile of educational dossiers in order to pick a surgeon to repair your hernia. Would you pick a doctor whose GPA and SAT scores were in the bottom quintile of his college class? Would you pick a surgeon who had completed a surgical residency of four to seven years, performing operations of increasing complexity and autonomy under the close supervision of experts? Or would you prefer to choose a surgeon who had undergone a ten-week practicum, learning the rest of his surgical knowledge from videos, online sources, and the occasional professional development workshop?
Let’s continue the thought experiment. Would you pick a surgeon whose hospital required her to buy her own retractors and suction tubes, and to sanitize them with her own handmade disinfecting solution? And would it bother you if your surgeon had been told to improvise a scalpel (borrowing a secondhand X-Acto knife procured from a college art department, for example)? Maybe you’d feel comfortable with a surgeon who didn’t have the benefit of working with colleagues? No scrub nurse? No one to hold the clamps? No one to clean the blood off the walls in between surgeries? No one to talk through a mistake—in real time—to prevent a catastrophe?
And here’s the most important question: Would you prefer to be operated on by a surgeon who was well compensated for her work? Be honest here. Leaving aside any resentment about fairness, if you had a clear choice, would you feel good about being operated on by surgeon who was horribly undercompensated for her work?
I understand that choosing a surgeon is quite different from picking a preschool teacher. A patient puts his life in the hands of the person wielding that scalpel. The stakes are certainly higher in acute terms—there’s no denying that—but the long-term consequences of shabby early childhood education are not so trifling either. That surgeon had a preschool teacher, let’s not forget, who may or may not have helped shape those aspirations to become a surgeon. The thought experiment is important because it forces us to take quality issues in education as seriously as we take them in other areas of adult life.
One of the problems with both our thought experiment and real life is that in early education, but not in surgery, there will always be some small fraction of people who are naturally effective teachers without any training, without the salary, and without the professional support. Those magical people seem to get young children, and their innate observational ability and natural warmth can appear effortless. It’s important to acknowledge that some adults truly are naturally good with children in a way that one can’t be naturally good at tax law or brain surgery. A medical student may discover he has a unique gift for understanding the planes of human anatomy, but even the most gifted surgeon has to become a surgeon. I’ll concede here that some people don’t have to become good early childhood educators; they just are good early childhood educators.
But should we base policy on the existence of these unicorns? It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, particularly when the proportion of these teachers is clearly shrinking as fewer women are raised to believe they should be natural caregivers to other people’s children; and the ones that are so inclined can head to more lucrative professional pastures such as pediatrics or psychology.
More and more states have made publicly funded preschool available to four-year-olds (and some three-year-olds), but there are still huge gaps in access and quality. And the promise of universal pre-K, as yet unfulfilled, will likely not be able to meet our inflated expectations. There’s a vocal minority of educational advocates, such as Stanford’s Bruce Fuller and his colleagues, who worry that the same mess we’ve made with public kindergarten will be pushed down to preschool, resulting in more assessments, more canned curricula, more outcomes, along with less choice, less freedom, less play. He worries that the innovative and culturally variable preschool models seen in community-based organizations in places such as Tulsa, Oklahoma, will be gradually subsumed by the one-size-fits-all hegemony of public school, to the detriment of young children and their families.23
Fuller is skeptical of the commonly held view that bigger doses of preschool automatically result in better outcomes. Noting that some studies have found that half-day preschool programs are just as effective as full-day programs, he cautions, “We must avoid squandering scarce dollars on full-day programs for children who gain little from preschool—essentially to buy the political support of their well-off parents. The rekindled push to expand preschool is welcome. But unless public dollars are focused on high-quality programs for poor families—while bolstering the neighborhood organizations that serve them—good intentions will turn into dashed hopes.”24
If a heavy dosage of preschool isn’t always necessary in order to meet our learning objectives for young children, but it is always necessary in order to meet our childcare needs, perhaps it’s time to have a more honest conversation about our goals and how to pay for them. By clinging to the currently unrealistic expectation that resources are suddenly going to materialize for every child in America to receive an excellent level of subsidized (or free) child care year-round, do we end up settling for mediocre (or occasionally terrible) care that tries to make up in quantity what it fails to deliver in quality? Once we separate adult and child interests (child care versus learning), we can be more creative. If this makes people uneasy, it’s probably because we are so unused to talking openly about the potential clash between young children’s and adults’ needs.
One imperfect solution to solving our trifecta of challenges might be found in more clearly defining the specific aspects of preschool programming that require higher-salaried work. Unanswered research questions about optimal preschool dosage remain, according to many experts, but there seems to be a relatively high minimum threshold of quality, and not only quantity, that is necessary to produce the outcomes we care about.25 Might we see bigger learning gains with at-risk children from a strategy that involves pairing an increase in quality for certain portions of the day with a relaxing of expectations (but not safety conditions) for other parts of the day? Some creative rejiggering might better address children’s learning needs while providing the coverage that working parents need in order to go to their jobs each day.
We might, for example, reserve the high teacher-to-child ratios (that are in any case only indirectly associated with high quality) to some fraction of the child’s day, rather than insisting that high-quality programs provide those exacting ratios for eight or ten hours of the day. Loosening the adult-child ratio for part of the daily schedule has an immediate cost-saving effect, because salaries constitute the vast majority of a preschool operating budget. I realize that seasoned policy experts have devoted enormous energy to improving teacher-child ratios, and, in a more favorable political environment that placed greater value on early learning, I, too, would demand the widespread adoption of these measures.
Tinkering with staffing and salary levels has clear consequences for adults, which we will explore in a moment; but from a child’s point of view, if done thoughtfully, it does not have to be a recipe for disaster. Let’s not forget that home-raised young children have always had varying levels of quality in their interaction with adults throughout their day. If we’re honest—and I say this as someone who did a long stint of stay-at-home parenting myself—few home-raised children receive anything close to nine or ten hours per day of intensive, high-quality instruction. On the contrary, they tend to receive loving one-on-one attention for parts of the day and spend the rest of the time trailing around busy parents or finding ways to entertain themselves, alone or with other kids. Even very well-cared-for children sometimes sit in playpens, or their electronic equivalent, and do idiotic things with their time. It’s what children have been doing for thousands of years: running to a loved one for a quick chat and a pat on the head or a snack, and then running back to fool around with their pack.
A leisurely afternoon full of free play, snacks, a nap, and aimless downtime is often the perfect antidote for a child who has spent her morning being actively challenged in her peak learning zone. I believe all these features—free play, snack time, and sleep—are essential parts of the holistic “education and care” model; however, does the recognition that they are all-important components of a child’s day necessarily lead to the desire for a skilled lead teacher (or a competent assistant teacher) to supervise nap times when she could be designing curricula or talking with parents instead?
I warned that this might be an incomplete solution, and it is. There is a problem with trying to mimic a home-based model of child rearing in an institutional setting. At home, it might seem quite natural: Grandma reads a few stories with a child in her lap and then sticks him in the backyard or in front of TV while she makes dinner. But in a preschool setting, the bifurcation of teaching on the one hand and babysitting on the other invites inequalities in the workforce that most sensible educators have long since tried to abandon. It’s also a little hard to stomach the idea of non-family members blithely switching back and forth between good pedagogy and, well, what do we call it? Reality-based child rearing? We can’t easily transpose what happens in people’s homes to institutional settings. The two-tiered system (teachers versus babysitters) I’ve described here certainly saves money (a de facto system of this sort operates in various kinds of “after-care” programs), but it pits skilled and well-paid professionals against a poorly paid workforce of ancillary-care providers. Our current system of lead teachers and assistants has never been a good model for fostering the collaboration and good communication associated with high quality. All of this gets us back to our problem of silos of “school” versus “care.” Kids themselves of course don’t understand the conceptual and financial switcheroos involved in bifurcated care. (In some programs, children are given healthier snacks such as fresh fruit during their “real” program and are then shifted to cheap crackers during the after-care portion of the day.) None of it seems to make sense, philosophically or programmatically. We’re right back where we started.
Huge numbers of American parents struggle to afford child care and wonder why less affluent countries can make this a national priority. Okay, then, but what is the solution if we aren’t willing to pay for the year-round, all-day, high-quality services we say we want? What is the solution if we go on believing that a heavy dose of mediocre or outright inadequate care will solve our problems?
Until we can answer our dosage questions with more certainty—or magically turn into Finland, which underwent a dramatic professionalization of its teaching workforce—I wonder if American parents and licensors might do better to demand a much higher level of quality than is typical in the vast majority of preschools, but for a smaller part of the day. This would require tougher trade-offs. Are parents of children in excellent programs willing to accept that a group of thirty kids might watch a Disney video together in the afternoon with a different staffing ratio? In our current system, these two experiences rarely coexist, because the former is considered “best practice” and the latter is considered unacceptably lowbrow.
None of this is ideal, and most industrialized countries have found better solutions. But we must do something more. Recall the study of seven hundred preschools across eleven states in which only 15 percent of classrooms were found to exhibit effective teacher-child interactions. That can’t be a good sign either!
At a minimum, it’s critical that we unmuddle our thinking, because, as more young children spend greater numbers of hours in institutional care, we run the risk of thinking that institutional care is perforce the only way for them to learn. But the reality is that families will always matter most, and strengthening families and the locations where we find them, as much as preschools themselves, may be where we see the greatest impact.
This is particularly true for families who, for whatever reason, do not send their child to preschool day in and day out, but who may nonetheless need support to raise a healthy child. Latino families in poverty, for example, have lower rates of preschool attendance than other groups; are we prepared to say that if they won’t, or can’t, get to preschool, we can’t help them? I hope not.26 The evidence actually suggests we should shift more resources and attention to what goes on at home.
Does parenting matter? Studies of identical twins raised apart seemed to put a damper on the idea that what we do for our children has much effect. Nonetheless, there is a lot of evidence that parents have a much bigger impact on their preschool-aged children than teachers do, and that programs to support good parenting practices in vulnerable families pay off in the long run, especially in the early years. Some researchers estimate that as much as one third of the parenting gap we find between poor-quality and high-quality parenting could be closed by better support to families,27 which is at least equal to the fraction of the gap that could be closed by changes in preschools, as we saw earlier.
Too often, our perceptions and our policies treat children as if they exist in a vacuum. Political liberals are often loath to ask parents to take any responsibility for child-rearing choices because it appears to be a form of victim blaming. Voicing the belief that adults shouldn’t bring children they can’t support into the world is taboo in certain, mainly academic, circles. Conservatives, on the other hand, sometimes seem to want to foist all responsibility on parents, ignoring the larger societal stressors that make it so hard to meet children’s needs. But the research is clear that there are ways to close the so-called parenting gap between affluent and poor parents, and a more consistent effort to fund parenting and multigenerational family programs is an effective way to do it.28
A parent’s relationship with his or her young child is so central to healthy development that it hardly seems to merit stating. Again and again, research has reaffirmed the importance of this bond.29 But to say that parenting matters is painting with too broad a brush. A good relationship between a parent and young child encompasses more than the one-to-one physical connection they share. While that is central, the relationship also embodies the early childhood habitat—or scaffold, to use our educational phrase—a parent helps to build for his or her child. That, too, is a central feature of the parent-child relationship.
To understand why this is so, we first have to explore something that puzzles parents and researchers alike: why, when parents face ever-greater demands on their time, do we feel we need to be such busybodies in our young children’s lives? More than ever before, we are in frantic overdrive to be with our children as much as we can, getting right down on the floor with the Legos; doggedly attending every soccer game, every parent-teacher conference, every dance recital, every karate practice; clocking more hours of quality time with children than in any previous generation.
It’s not uncommon for parents in competitive environments such as New York City to start the day at five A.M. to allow time for drilling their four-year-olds on pattern recognition in the hopes of securing a place in a magnet school or Gifted and Talented program—and that’s before putting in a full day of grownup work, too. In my suburban New England childhood in the 1960s, the only parents who made anything close to this kind of punishing effort were harboring realistic hopes of producing a professional hockey player.
Unbelievably, the absolute quantity of hours parents spend with their children has increased, too, according to some studies, with full-time employed mothers now spending more time with their children than 1960s housewives did!30 Why, then, if we’re spending so much time with our young children, are they having such trouble? There’s a kind of smug gotcha quality to the reporting on these time-use studies confirming how much more involved and committed today’s parents are compared to the prior generation. How could we possibly do more than we’re already doing?
And yet, deep down, don’t we also have a sneaking suspicion that at least some of this parent-child intensity might be a bit of a sham? When deciding whether we’ve adequately nurtured a young child, shouldn’t we shift the unit of analysis from number of hours in direct contact with a child to a fuller assessment of that child’s development? Does the child have room to make independent choices and take risks? Can he find ways to slake his natural curiosity? Is he talked to and listened to? Do we give him the space to be quiet with his thoughts and to experience life at a child’s pace? And on a more down-to-earth level: do little children get enough sleep and time to play?
Is it remotely possible that the mythical 1950s mom who tossed her kids outside to mess around in a slag heap while she lounged at the beauty parlor (summoning them back at sundown after she’d had her martini) might have been . . . wait for it . . . a better parent? Maybe we’ll find that when we look at a child’s whole habitat, we can abandon these unhelpful comparisons about how much time adults are spending directly with their children (which are demoralizing if you’re on the “bad parent” side of things, and inappropriately triumphant if you’ve logged the right number of hours on your time card).
In an ideal world, the school-home divide should be more porous than it is for preschoolers. While few children are as lucky as I was to have a teacher come live in their homes, there are nonetheless some good models to support adults’ bonding with their children. This is especially helpful in disadvantaged communities. High-quality home visiting programs, such as the Nurse-Family Partnership,31 have been effective at reducing child abuse, infant mortality, and other serious problems associated with vulnerable families in poverty.32 In New Haven, the community-based MOMS partnership,33 which provides group cognitive behavioral training and other coping-skills supports to poor and depressed mothers, and Minding the Baby,34 an intensive home visiting program for first-time mothers, are both animated by the simple observation that parents can’t be expected to teach their children emotional skills that they themselves don’t know. Parents struggling with substance abuse, depression, poor literacy, and low levels of impulse control and ability to plan for the future need concrete skills to be attentive to their children’s developmental needs.
The numbers of such parents are worrying. One study found more than 40 percent of infants in poverty had mothers who suffer from depression.35 Trauma and comorbidities (accompanying physical and mental health problems) are common, but Early Head Start, which spends 50 percent of its programming resources on home visits for at-risk families with children under age three, only serves 4 percent of the almost three million eligible children.36 Given the effectiveness of early interventions, it’s frustrating that the home visiting model hasn’t been more widely adopted. But, of course, this costs money.
Regular home visits were a key service in the Perry Preschool/HighScope Project and the North Carolina Abecedarian Project, the famous preschool experiments from the 1960s and 1970s whose promising results have formed the basis of so many subsequent interventions and policies that we were introduced to in Chapter One. Some preschool teachers still do occasionally make home visits (I found them an incredibly effective way to get to know children in their natural environment, and to bond to parents, as well), but, in general, today’s early childhood providers have limited exposure to the lives of their young charges. With an increasingly diverse student body, teachers often don’t speak the language used in their students’ homes. In upper-income communities, wages are so low that oftentimes teachers can’t live in the neighborhoods in which they teach, so they don’t run into families casually, in the grocery store or at Halloween.
Dr. Sanam Roder, Maternal and Child Health director of the Codman Health Center in Boston, Massachusetts, has grown increasingly frustrated with the problem of rushed clinical visits that barely cover basic health and vaccine needs and don’t allow any time to offer meaningful support to mothers figuring out “how to raise kids in the setting of poverty, poor housing, language barriers, marginal education, and violence.” The Codman Health Center is experimenting with group health visits lasting about two hours that allow families to learn from each other, to create lasting social bonds, and to gain confidence in themselves as parents and in their children as “these incredible little people,” according to Roder. She has been amazed by the richness of discussion that emerges from these group visits, where parents are invited to think about their family’s values and understand their child’s unique temperament (even as a newborn).
In a session devoted to play, one mother complained that her infant daughter never wanted to play with her toys and would throw them out of her playpen, but the group of mothers helped her understand that her daughter’s behavior was actually an attempt to engage in play, as she waited for her mother to retrieve the toys on the floor and bring them back to her. By the end of the session this mother was thanking the other moms for helping her better understand her daughter. “I had no idea that she was playing, or that the play meant so much, or that I was doing such an important thing for her by playing along,” the young mother told Dr. Roder, who notes that, through the group-visit format, “parents learn to value the little things they do to show their children that they are paying attention, trying to understand, responding to needs and creating a positive environment. Instead of walking away from these group visits with a shopping list of toys and baby paraphernalia, parents leave with the confidence that they are what their babies need.”37
The point of Dr. Roder’s group visits is not simply to transfer a calibrated dose of child-rearing information to the largest number of patients via the most efficient delivery mechanism possible. Insurance companies might see the model in those terms, but the staff understands that the group visits are effective for a different reason: they reveal and shore up parents’ own overlooked caretaking abilities—abilities that the young mothers themselves may not see. By valuing the peers’ role in the parenting process, the group sessions give mothers who are too often viewed as failures a chance to build confidence. I suspect that even if the Codman Health Center could find a way to pay for each patient to have a two-hour visit alone with a clinician, the staff might still prefer group visits for these impoverished mothers who are discovering for themselves the happy news that good parenting is both important and possible.
These stories give me hope that if families in such economically demanding environments can find a sense of personal agency and pride, surely we should be able to incorporate their lessons into all places where we find young children.
It’s so easy to fall back on the experts. Rich and poor parents alike have colluded with the caretaking establishment in this transfer of expertise from home to the outside world, and I understand why it happens. Parents aren’t superhuman; we rely on other people’s feedback and guidance to make our child-rearing decisions, and this is doubly the case for parents who have full-time jobs and aren’t with their children for large parts of the day.
Sometimes our well-intentioned support systems fall into the same trap with families that we find with the children: we adopt a deficit view of family life that zooms in on the problems without zooming out to see the strengths. We need to incorporate more of the ethos of places like the Codman Health Center directly into early childhood classrooms, where the expectation becomes the norm that we can support the good in families, not the bad, and help parents become accountable to themselves and to their young children.