European Preschools Should Embarrass USA
By John Merrow

I've just spent several weeks driving around Europe, visiting lots of small towns and villages. I noticed that every small town I visited had a sign, prominently placed, pointing the way to the local preschool.

A few months earlier while making a documentary about preschools, I visited three Ecoles Maternelles preschools in and around Paris. Although the three were in dramatically different neighborhoods, I found virtually no differences among them. The school serving poor children looked just like the one serving the children of the well-to-do. All three schools were staffed with well-trained, well-paid teachers. Today in France, essentially all children ages 3 through 5 attend preschool, most in public programs.

It's the same across Europe. Almost all 4-year-olds in England, Luxembourg and the Netherlands go to public school. So do more than 70% of Greek children of preschool age, more than 80% of Spanish children and more than 90% of those in Germany, Denmark and Italy. Virtually every industrialized country in the world provides free, high-quality preschool for children regardless of family income.

The United States is the opposite, and we should be embarrassed. We have a patchwork of preschools, many with weakly trained, poorly paid staff. Although 70% of American 4-year-olds and 40% of 3-year-olds are enrolled in some sort of preschool program, the quality ranges from excellent to abysmal, and the cost from $15,000 to zero. Teachers' salaries may be $38,000 a year – with benefits – or as little as $8 or $9 an hour without benefits.

But momentum to change things is starting to build:
• Florida has an initiative on its November ballot that will ask voters whether the state should provide free preschool programs for all 4-year-olds whose families want to enroll them.
• President Bush recently has emphasized the importance of early childhood education and proposed to improve literacy and accountability in Head Start, the federal child-development program that serves low-income children. But the problem is the president is offering little extra money to do that, and Head Start serves only about 900,000 children, not even half of those who are eligible.
• In response to the stingy Bush proposal, Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and George Voinovich, R-Ohio, have proposed giving states $1 billion per year in federal grants to improve preschool education.

The larger problem is that our government is willing to get involved in preschools only for the poor. No question: Leveling the playing field for those children is an important goal. But we should be looking at the European model and creating a system – state by state, if necessary – that would be good enough for everyone, rich, poor and in-between.

That's one of the failings of Head Start and our current preschool patchwork: There's no equal access. Because wealthy parents know that preschool is a good idea and have the means, they are willing to pay for it. Poorer parents may lack both access to Head Start and the funds for private schooling.

U.S. preschools also lack learning standards. In too many cases, they provide more child care than education. Finally, there's the issue of the quality of preschool instructors. For example, because Head Start is part preschool and part employment program for poor families, nearly half of Head Start teachers and program directors are parents, many with little more than a high school diploma. No middle-class or upper-middle-class parent would tolerate that, nor would any of the European systems. Those individuals who can afford to pay more for better service will do so until they can be assured of the quality of a more universal system.

A national, free, universal, high-quality preschool system would be difficult to build from scratch – and costly. By one estimate it would cost $30 billion a year to run nationwide programs just for low-income 3- and 4-year-olds.

|We will get there, but in steps. Some states need to lead the way with high-quality preschool programs. They will prosper, and other states will follow.

Georgia would be a good starting point. The state is at the head of the preschool class. It requires all school districts to offer preschool classes to all

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students, and it pays the bill with money from its state lottery. Overall, 70% of Georgia's 4-year-olds are now in some form of publicly subsidized preschool. The program was the brainchild of former Georgia governor Zell Miller, now a U.S. senator, who has said he believes that "preschool is more important than the 12th grade in high school."

New York, Oklahoma and the District of Columbia also have programs that provide preschool for a substantial number of their children. New York City, for example, is starting preschool in many of its public schools; it uses a sliding scale, with parents paying only what they can afford.

These examples show that we can, and should, be creating a preschool system that would be good enough for everyone. Public preschools should be built the same way we constructed our highway system: the same road available to all Americans, rich and poor.

President Bush's favorite education saying is "no child left behind." But unless we find a way to tailor our programs to the European model, we're giving its children a big head start.