The Maryland House of Delegates approved legislation Monday that would expand the state’s prekindergarten program to include 1,600 more children, the Baltimore Sun reports. The state Senate unanimously approved the bill last week, and Gov Martin O’Malley is expected to sign it.
The measure, which passed on a mostly party-line vote, 102-34, would make Maryland children from families with incomes up to 300 percent of the federal poverty line eligible for pre-K.
Maryland already spends about $103 million a year to provide half-day pre-K to about 29,000 students who come from low-income families, who have disabilities, or who come from families that don’t speak English at home, the Sun reported a few months back. The state also gives grants to help run Head Start nursery schools, Montessori schools, and other private centers.
Democrats, who control both chambers of the Maryland General Assembly, want even more pre-K. Lt Gov Anthony Brown, for example, with Ken Ulman, his running mate in the gubernatorial campaign, has developed the “Running Start Maryland” program, which would provide pre-K for all Maryland children and eventually expand to full-day programs.
“Ultimately, our plan ensures that by 2018, every Maryland family will have the option of sending their 4-year-old to a quality pre-K program where they can learn and grow,” the campaign writes. “These programs will help start our children on the path toward educational success, and we will not stop working until all Marylanders have access to the education they need and deserve.”
Other Democratic candidates have put forth competing plans, but all the plans seek to expand pre-K beyond the level of the current bill.
Republican gubernatorial candidates, on the other hand, like David R Craig, who now serves as the county executive in Harford County, believe that the benefits of preschool education are unproven, the Sun reported, but that’s not because there’s any shortage of research on the subject. He has said he opposes big investment in pre-K, like the one in this bill, when the money is needed to improve the state’s K-12 education.
Pre-K benefits seen, at least in early childhood education
But there is, in fact, quite a bit of tried and tested research to suggest pre-K has benefits, some of which can be measured financially and some of which cannot. For starters, children who participate in quality pre-K programs show better academic achievement in the early years than those who don’t participate.
A study published in the November/December 2013 edition of Child Development considered a prekindergarten program that implemented a coaching system and consistent literacy, language, and mathematics curricula with about 2,000 4- and 5-year-olds. Researchers Christina Weiland and Hirokazu Yoshikawa found that “the program had moderate-to-large impacts on children’s language, literacy, numeracy and mathematics skills, and small impacts on children’s executive functioning and a measure of emotion recognition.”
“For policy makers,” they wrote, such as those in the Maryland General Assembly, “results confirm that prekindergarten programs can improve educationally vital outcomes for children in meaningful, important ways.”
In the early years, some of the improvement in academic outcomes may be attributed to an enhancement of memorization skills seen in students who attend quality pre-K programs.
A study published in the inaugural issue of the Asia Pacific Journal of Developmental Differences in January found that students who participated in pre-K programs had better gross motor skill, memory, and certain language-acquisition traits than those who hadn’t participated.
“After 18 months, sustained improvements were found in memory, a key predictor of success in early learning, as well as in gross motor skill,” noted researchers Angela J Fawcett, Ray Lee, and Rod Nicolson. “The results suggest that a balanced, multi-skill intervention may be particularly effective for preschool children.”
Still other studies point to nonacademic pre-K benefits for children who attend quality programs.
A policy report by Karen Schulman in 2005, published by the National Institute for Early Education Research and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, concludes that a quality pre-K experience “can have long-term positive effects on children’s lives.” Some of the often-overlooked benefits of quality pre-K include:
- Strengthening commitment to and attitude toward school
- Leading participants to take better care of their health throughout their lives
- Starting children on the path to financial stability and independence
- Increasing the likelihood that mothers of participating children get good jobs
- Enhancing the parenting skills of participants’ parents