In his New York Times column “Occupy the Classroom,” (October 19, 2011) Nicholas Kristof said expanding early childhood education is “the single step that would do the most to reduce income inequality.” The Pulitzer Prize winning columnist cited an impressive body of research documenting the economic and societal benefits of investing in children from birth to age 5.
Click on the link to read the column on the New York Times website. Here is an excerpt from the column:
Occupy Wall Street is shining a useful spotlight on one of America’s central challenges, the inequality that leaves the richest 1 percent of Americans with a greater net worth than the entire bottom 90 percent.
Most of the proposed remedies involve changes in taxes and regulations, and they would help. But the single step that would do the most to reduce inequality has nothing to do with finance at all. It’s an expansion of early childhood education.
Huh? That will seem naïve and bizarre to many who chafe at inequities and who think the first step is to throw a few bankers into prison. But although part of the problem is billionaires being taxed at lower rates than those with more modest incomes, a bigger source of structural inequity is that many young people never get the skills to compete. They’re just left behind.
“This is where inequality starts,” said Kathleen McCartney, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, as she showed me a chart demonstrating that even before kindergarten there are significant performance gaps between rich and poor students. Those gaps then widen further in school.
“The reason early education is important is that you build a foundation for school success,” she added. “And success breeds success.”
One common thread, whether I’m reporting on poverty in New York City or in Sierra Leone, is that a good education tends to be the most reliable escalator out of poverty. Another common thread: whether in America or Africa, disadvantaged kids often don’t get a chance to board that escalator.
(Posted November 1, 2011)