As with any new year, 2012 will be greeted with well wishes for a bright and prosperous future. But if you’re part of Maine’s business community, you may not share that sentiment.
Unemployment across the state remains historically high, above 7 percent, with more than 50,000 residents looking for work. And just as troubling, the wellspring of Maine’s work force, our education system, continues to struggle with poor academic performance.
Consider these facts: 68 percent of fourth graders in our state read below grade level. More than 60 percent of eighth graders perform below grade level in reading and math, and more than one in five of Maine’s high school students won’t graduate on time. This poor school performance impacts our businesses.
Even before the recession, a national survey of employers revealed businesses were facing major deficiencies in the work force, with many new employees lacking communication skills, a sense of professionalism and the ability to think critically under pressure.
So how can we do a better job in supplying our businesses with the workers they need?
The answer may seem unconventional, but the research is clear: Start educating our children earlier and do it better.
Studies have confirmed that kids participating in quality early learning programs are notably more likely to enter school with the underlying skills they need to succeed, both academically and later in the work force.
Such programs can increase language skills, lower the need for special education and increase graduation rates for their participants. And particularly important to employers, quality early learning programs increase rates of employment for graduates by as much as 22 percent at age 40.
And what’s more, they’re economically sound. The most recent major 25-year follow-up study of the benefits of quality early learning programs appeared in the journal Science in June, and noted that investments in Chicago’s Child-Parent Centers returned $10 for every $1 invested.
That’s a fantastic rate of return. And that’s not mentioning the immediate benefits that early education provides.
According to the national business leaders organization, America’s Edge, investments in quality early learning generate as much or more in new sales as Maine’s investments in construction, transportation or farming, forestry, fishing and hunting. In fact, every $1 invested in early learning will generate a total of $1.78 in sales for local businesses.
Conversely, we stand to lose the same amount for every dollar of funding we cut.
We should seriously consider the economic windfall that early education provides our state, before, in an effort to rein in costs, we shortchange both our kids and our economy.
The bottom line: quality early learning works. That’s why we are hoping the Legislature will protect Maine’s funding for these programs as policymakers in Augusta hash out a solution to a budget shortfall for the Department of Health and Human Services.
By chopping support for high-quality early education, we not only hurt Maine’s kids, we also damage our economy’s pipeline of skilled workers. That’s something Mainers can’t afford. It’s as simple as that.
Bill Miller owns Miller’s Drug Store and Dan Tremble owns Fairmount Market; both are in Bangor.
Maybe I should invest my savings in early education, then just sit back and watch the money roll in. Was this ghost written by Bernie Madoff?
Maybe I should invest my savings in early education, then just sit back and watch the money roll in. Was this ghost written by Bernie Madoff?
When you can convince parents to stop accepting dumbed down standards in early and elemetary school education, you might see the improvements you want.
We as a society have to stop pushing children through the system who as an end product can be classified as functionally illiterate. There is absolutely NO escuse for this.
We also need to stop expanding the Education Empire, by giving them ever more money and our children at younger ages.
The teaching unions have been salivating at the thought of mandatory preschool for four year olds.
If the authors are interested in boosting early education quality in Maine, they should advocate for voucher money that goes to private daycare and preschool providers — not preschool through the public school system.
We don’t need an expansion to a model that is already proving unsuccessful. No more public school inroads — all Day K is bad enough.
All day Kindergarten is the best thing since sliced bread. Don’t knock it?
I agree that young children benefit from “education” but in my view that education ought to come from the parents. Children do best when they receive nurturing guidance from parents while they are young. If society wants to produce well-educated adults, they ought to promote policies that encourage and enable parents to be with their children.
The tax code is one such vehicle to encourage good parenting. We offer parents deductions and credits for children in the tax code. The reason is because raising children takes money and time on the part of parents and society as a whole has a vested interest in producing well adjusted adult citizens. Now we need to demand, as a society, that parents fulfill their responsibility toward their children. Instead of asking the state to do more and more to raise their children, parents ought to be doing the job that is entrusted to them when they conceive and give birth to a child.
If better and more early education programs were really the answer to producing educated kids, then why were kids better educated 50 years ago, when such programs were less prevalent, than they are today?
And where are we going to get more dedicated parents, obvioulsy a declining commodity? Through coercion, as you seem to imply?
You bet–send them to their homes with their children and don’t let them out until the kids can read, write and cipher…
No, really, I think we start by re-defining the discourse. Discard the “it takes a village to raise a child” mantra and assert that it takes a parent, on site and actively engaged, with the TV and video games off, to raise a child. Sure, a village environment is a wonderful place for children to grow up in–but the US does not live in villages. We live in towns and cities where most people don’t even know their neighbors at all–certainly not enough to say “Hey- watch my kid while I grind the corn meal and gather firewood!”
Then we examine how the resources we spend separating parents from their children could be used to unite parents and children. We don’t need more Head Start and longer grade school days and years. We don’t need more federally and state funded day cares. We need to move back to a job market that pays enough for one parent to stay home with the kids.
I grew up in the 50’s with both my parents working. The difference was that my parents didn’t spend their free time with toys of their own. We kids were the toys, so to speak.
As children we knew that if we didn’t pass the tests required to move to he next grade level, we spent another year in the same grade. One heck of a motivator to get the job done. When I graduated from 8th grade, the entire class could read, write, and understand what they were reading. The entire class could do their math and had already had 2 years of algebra. Our parants never had to ask why we didn’t have homework in a subject, because we always had hoemwork in every subject. If we didn’t turn in our homework, the teacher would be on the phone to find out why.
Our parents NEVER sent us to school on an empty stomach. NEVER sent us to school without a lunch or lunch money. By the time I was in 2nd grade, I was quite capable of making my own breakfast. I would bet money that virtually all these kids who are getting a free breakfast and lunch today come from families who are already getting food stamps.
It is the job of the schools to educate our children. Not turn them into drug dependent ritilin heads.