April 2003

Featured stories from this issue:

Demand, but no money, for universal preschool

Better teachers, more space, easier access for parents

Pre-preschool an option for children birth to 3

Fiscal woes threaten access to universal preschool

Navigating the maze

Network connects neighborhood preschools

Briefing page

From the Editors

Research

Portraits

Letters

Comings & Goings

Eye on Education

by Debra Williams

Until recently, Chicago Public Schools and the state of Illinois have been viewed as leaders in early childhood education.

In the 1960s, CPS was one of a few pioneering school districts to create child-parent centers in low-income communities. As their name indicates, the amply staffed centers worked with children and their parents.

In the 1980s, Illinois joined a handful of other states in launching a state-financed pre-kindergarten program for youngsters who were considered at-risk of educational failure due to poverty or other socioeconomic factors.

However, in the 1990s, other school districts and states, including Georgia, New Jersey and Oklahoma, shot ahead by offering early childhood education to all 4-year-old children and some 3-year-olds in their states.

Now, Illinois is playing catch up, and it’s playing hard. Not since the Chicago School Reform Act was passed in 1988 have so many diverse groups rallied around a single issue in Springfield. Early childhood advocacy groups have joined forces with child care providers, school districts, state board of education officials, business leaders, even police organizations to map out an early childhood education system and build the public will to make it happen.

“This place has an embarrassment of riches,” says Harriet Meyer, president of the Ounce of Prevention Fund. “Right now, everyone is interested in early childhood—the state, the business community, foundations, Chicago Public Schools, the Mayor.

Fifteen years ago, Ounce was the only game in town.”
Indeed, in September, Mayor Richard Daley lured Lucinda Lee Katz, then the director of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, to City Hall to create an early childhood education plan for the city, which will be unveiled in mid-April.

The long-term goal is to make it possible for parents, if they choose, to enroll their 3- and 4-year-olds in an affordable, high-quality program taught by qualified teachers. Child care would meld into early childhood education.

“Parents are interested in options and choices,” says Jerome Stermer, president of Voices of Illinois Children. “They need to have quality child care and preschool organized together.”

Estimates of the cost of fully implementing a universal preschool program in Illinois range upwards of $441 million per year, a fraction of the $2.3 billion that a 1 percent hike in state income taxes would raise.
Renovating and outfitting suitable facilities would be an additional expense.

More than a third of the state’s 3- and 4-year-olds—about 148,500 children—are enrolled in government-funded preschool or child care programs. Of those, 56,000 are in state pre-k, 36,400 are in federal Head Start programs and 55,500 are in state-subsidized child care.

“A universal preschool program makes sense,” Stermer says. Drawing on a long-term study of children who attended a model preschool in Ypsilanti, Mich., in the 1960s, Stermer says that every dollar spent on preschool saves $7 down the line on special education, welfare and criminal justice.

Another compelling reason for universal preschool is narrowing the knowledge and skills gap between children from low-income families and their middle- and upper-income counterparts.

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Child-parent Center

Chart: Illinois preschool universe

Chart: Preschool proposal

Catalyst: Independent coverage of Chicago school reform since 1989.