Any thoughtful person.....
The Push for Universal Pre-K
By NANCY FOLBRE
The labor is going to be long and difficult, but this baby is on its way in most affluent countries. Japan and Germany, two countries long considered laggards in the child care area, are now increasing their spending. In the United States, President Obama is keeping the issue atop his domestic agenda, where it is gaining traction despite slim chances of Congressional approval. Many states and several big cities have developed innovative and successful pre-K programs.
I’ve touched on some of the reasons forresistance to increased public investment in children in earlier posts. Sometimes the issue is framed as one of disagreement over social cost-benefit analysis, but many economists, most famously James Heckman of the University of Chicago, offer powerful evidence of a high social rate of return in the form of improved outcomes for children. The net benefits loom even larger when the value of increased work flexibility for parents is added in.
Most families worry more about their own budgets and the relative well-being of their own children than the growth of the overall economy or average child outcomes. Persistently high unemployment and the decline of middle-class jobs increase apprehensions about competition among members of the next generation. Will there be enough future demand for all this human capital we are urged to invest in?
On the other hand, universal pre-K eases economic stress on parents and improves human resources. It helps counter economic forces that are bothdriving up the relative cost of child-rearing and increasing economic inequality.
Sustained below-replacement fertility will increase the share of elderly in the population, threaten national and ethnic identity, and weaken the links between present and future generations that are forged by family commitments. The taxes paid by the working-age population benefit all elderly fellow citizens, including those who have contributed relatively little to their care. In tomorrow’s global economy, the quality of future workers will matter even more than the quantity.
Entirely self-interested individuals have no reason to worry about what happens after they die. But a nation, like a family, hopes and plans to live on.
Currently, the United States ranks far below most members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (including Japan and Germany) in both public expenditure on child care services as a percentage of gross domestic product and child care enrollment among those under age 6.
Other countries are also making more rapid progress. Japanese anxieties about women’s labor-force participation and fertility recently prompted Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to promise a significant expansion of day care(enough to eliminate current waiting lists) by 2017.
In Germany, the recently re-elected government of Angela Merkel has taken a different tack, promising to increase the number of public child care slots but also creating an allowance for families who care for very young children at home.
President Obama couched his proposal as a federal/state partnership to expand high-quality public preschool to reach all low- and moderate-income 4-year-olds from families with incomes at or below 200 percent of poverty, to be financed by an increased tax on tobacco, which would also help deter youngsters from smoking. On Sept. 22 and 23, a summit of national business leaders in Atlanta mobilized support for early childhood education, though it stopped short of endorsing the president’s plan.
On both the federal and state level, efforts to cut government spending have taken a big bite out of public child care programs. This coming year, 57,000 children will lose access to Head Start as a result of sequestration.
While states vary enormously in terms of both levels and trends, average per-child spending has recently declined, leading the National Institute for Early Education Research report on the State of Preschool to characterize the 2011-12 year as “the worst in a decade for progress in access to high-quality pre-K for American’s children.” Still, the report noted that enrollment in state programs increased rapidly over the last decade and was now holding even.
It also singled out Washington for serving a higher percentage of 3- and 4-year-olds (and spending more per child) than any state. The city’s relatively large population means that more 4-year-olds are in pre-K there than in 15 states with programs. A recent post in The New York Times’s Motherlode blog vividly describes how the program changed one parent’s life.
Last month in San Antonio, Mayor Julián Castro greeted 4-year-olds taking part in a new pre-K program aimed at low-income families, financed by a 1/8-cent increase in the local sales tax. Once the program is up and running,about 4,000 children will benefit.
In New York City, the Democratic mayoral candidate Bill DeBlasio has called for an increase in the city’s tax rate on income over $500,000 (to 4.4 percent from the current 3.87 percent) to raise money for pre-K and after-school programs.
In the long run, such local conceptions could lead up to a big national delivery.
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