Education Policy Recommendations

As we discuss in our Social Welfare Position, improving the quality of education in the US is essential to addressing the overall cycle of poverty. As we have also shown, however, we can’t improve primary and secondary education in poor areas without addressing the trauma of poverty that prevents children from learning and makes it difficult for even the best of teachers and schools to succeed. In order to begin to address a child’s readiness to learn, we are inevitably driven to services that support children earlier and earlier in life. One of the single biggest disadvantages of such children is the absence of early childhood learning. Preschool, despite Head Start, is not readily available or affordable for many children born in poverty. Daycare is also not often affordable, thereby preventing single parents from consistently working and therefore depriving their children of opportunities for early social emotional learning. Given all of these considerations, we have concluded that the long-term goal of improving primary and secondary education must start with daycare. We recommend the following:

Subsidize universal daycare: Follow the lead of countries like Germany and make daycare universally available. Government subsidies can be 100% for people at the poverty line and diminish as wealth and income grow. Such a program will begin to eliminate the early social emotional disadvantages that poor children have and contribute to the earnings stability of the head of the household. Additional earnings stability will lead to less homelessness and food insecurity and contribute generally to lessen the trauma of poverty.

Provide universal pre-K education: Consistent with the philosophy underlying the Head Start program and the example set by several states and municipalities, make pre-K education universal in the US. Universal pre-K in combination with universal daycare would reduce if not eliminate the early learning disadvantages that poor children have and enable them to enter primary school at the same level as their wealthy counterparts.

Equalize school spending across rich and poor communities. Do this by shifting the tax burden from a heavy reliance on local funding to a more state and national basis. This will give poor communities the same resources that wealthy communities have.

Increase federal spending in poor areas: Even with levelized spending, we have demonstrated that poor areas require more resources than do wealthy ones to overcome a higher level of disabilities, ESL learners, absence of tutoring resources, and absence of parental financial support. Only an increase in federal spending targeted at poor communities can fill these extra requirements.

Lengthen the school day and year: Charter schools that outperform do so for several reasons, but the one thing that they all have in common is a longer learning day. This gives children more learning time as well as time for supervised homework. The same observation can be made about the length of the school year. Countries with the best educational systems have a longer year. While wealthy children spend their summers in camps, summer schools, and educational programs, children from poor areas do not have these opportunities. As a result, they return to school further behind children with greater advantages. The US system was designed at a time when children were needed during the summer harvest to contribute to the family farm. The tradition has not changed since and it should be abolished.

Adopt the best practices of charter schools: Free from restrictive teachers’ unions and contracts, charter schools have the opportunity to experiment with learning approaches as well as implementing longer days and years. We should learn from the best practices of the best of the charter schools and implement them.