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Site Loader

Across the country, states and communities are mobilizing to focus attention on young children and families, and there are many benefits to be gained from integrating community school efforts with early childhood initiatives. Extensive research evidence supports such integration. Recent studies demonstrate the importance of early cognitive stimulation and early emotional development, development promoted by a reciprocal and nurturing relationship with a primary caregiver and reinforced by others. But for too many babies and toddlers, this relationship starts off badly, with parents who, due to their own circumstances, put their children in danger. To address this need for better early childhood programs, this paper explores ways to promote the expansion of school-community partnerships (S-CPs) in early childhood learning by maximizing of federal policy and the use of other new strategies.

Research and high-quality, comprehensive early childhood programs suggest that early intervention to strengthen parent-child development and relationships results in long-term positive impact on children, including significantly increased academic achievement , language and cognitive skills, and fewer behavioral problems than boys report. in control groups. However, for children in family child care or center care, poor quality is the norm, with the worst care documented for infants and toddlers. As more welfare-to-work parents take low-paying jobs, more young children spend more time in child care and early learning settings; Currently, about half of young children are in informal, unregulated childcare. Poor quality child care is a corollary of poverty, and for about half of those living in extreme poverty, the implications are sinister and compelling. Research has long documented the powerful relationships between poverty and poor academic performance and other risk factors, but mostly in older children. There is now evidence that poverty is even more damaging to young children, and the more extreme the poverty, the more damaging it is. Clearly, waiting until these children reach schools is waiting too long to develop an integrated community response with a set of outcomes that reflects the cooperative ventures of educators, human service personnel, and other community groups and family members.

The goals of school readiness include (a) providing universal access to quality preschool programs that prepare children for school; (b) enable parents to act as their children’s first teachers, with access to training and support; (c) providing nutrition, exercise, and medical care to ensure that the child is optimally prepared to learn; and d) reduce the number of low birth weight babies through better prenatal care. The focus on “school readiness” has directed attention to the development of conceptual frameworks that can capture the complexity denoted by the term, from child factors that reflect social, emotional, cognitive, and physical readiness, to family and school factors. . While many advocate for a narrow focus on children or even a child-specific focus, there are also strong voices advocating for community-wide indicators that can be used to drive strategic thinking and collaboration.

For all of these reasons, S-CPs should include care for young children that goes beyond having an on-site starter program, or even a family resource center. Current programs across the country indicate a solid foundation on which to build. These programs are sometimes held in the home and sometimes include parent education, family support, and family literacy initiatives; sometimes they funded communities or schools in designing their own mix of supports for families with young children. In addition, half of the states reported that they fund family support and parent education strategies for children from birth to 5 years of age. These programs establish a clear framework for linking the early childhood agenda with early learning goals and with the S-CPs.

Currently, only a few states have made young children a high political priority and have put in place multiple strategies to promote their well-being. Most efforts focus on family support or early learning, but, with the exception of some family literacy and home visiting programs, most programs do not attempt to integrate a variety of services. This lack of comprehensive services and family support—exactly those supports that complement a school-community-envisioned focus on learning—is why S-CPs could be such a powerful asset to the community of early childhood. childhood. Just as youth development is now part of the vision of community schools, child and family development should be too.

The quest for sustainable reform has now shifted its focus from “process is everything” to “results are everything”. Such a mindset gives little thought to what can achieve those results and provides no opportunity for partners to build a shared vision or think systematically about the links between goals, strategies and results. Because of this results-oriented approach, funds are rarely made available to develop the kind of working relationship between partners that would sustain partnerships over time. Furthermore, political and educational rhetoric, and sometimes legislative reality, creates new pressures to downplay many paths to real educational reform and focus exclusively on achieving simple goals. Concerns about teaching for the test or limited views of school readiness (eg, knowing 10 letters of the alphabet) are real. The challenge for S-CPs is to use the results to broaden the vision of how real learning, real family support, and real community collaboration can change the “learning lives” of students. Building and maintaining meaningful interagency collaboration with a vision that includes strong family engagement, linking formal and informal supports, and improving educational outcomes is no easy task. The following dicta seem critical to developing and maintaining S-CP:

– Strong and sustained leadership is key.
– Building a shared vision for change takes a lot of work and requires a combination of clear vision, achievable goals and opportunistic risk taking.
– Integrating the voices of family, students, and teachers is both challenging and essential.
– Obtaining broad community support and participation, including business support, can make a difference in political and fiscal sustainability.
– The S-CP must assume the characteristics of the local culture; They are unique companies.

Federal assistance can help overcome challenges in three key areas: integrating early learning more deeply into the S-CP movement, expanding S-CP leadership and vision to more communities, and evaluating results in a way that holds to schools and communities by students. ‘results and also provides information on maintaining and deepening associations. School programs and other federal actions have promoted greater flexibility than previously allowed in the use of federal funds and in the consolidation of resources. However, this flexibility is not yet widely used to promote S-CPs specifically or education reform in general. Furthermore, benefiting from this flexibility, especially between programs, remains enormously complex. Another emerging and not yet fully developed feature of recent federal legislation is the use of performance incentives and bonuses to reward states that exceed goals set by the federal government. These changing perspectives on federal policymaking offer new possibilities for how the community schools movement might advance federal policies that can advance this complex and critical agenda. Here, in hopes of stimulating debate, are some principles for federal legislation, along with some specific recommendations, particularly related to the challenge of early learning:

– Federal legislation could create incentives to promote system-level development that includes S-CP. Incentives can help existing and new programs focus their attention to include community initiatives for young children and families, and foster integration with any ongoing school-community efforts. Incentives may consist of implementation and bonus funds for initiatives that show evidence of systems change and improved community indicators and educational outcomes.
– Legislation should continue to promote flexibility in existing federal education programs and greater consistency in the ways flexibility is defined across programs.
– Federal agencies can promote easier sharing of resources, better strategic planning, and new initiatives among themselves.
– The federal government, both through legislation and agency initiatives, should promote a strong research and development agenda to facilitate more effective learning.

Federal policy alone is not enough to change education in the United States to meet the vision and goals set forth by the S-CPs. But it has clearly played a key role in helping to develop the S-CPs of the 21st century, and it can and should continue to play a major role in shaping and implementing the S-CP vision for the future.

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