JONATHAN COHN NOVEMBER 17, 2011
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Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series further exploring “The Two Year Window,” my feature story on babies, the brain, and poverty that appears in the new issue of TNR. Click here to access all of the supplemental material.
Ongoing abuse, neglect, and adversity early in life can have long-lasting effects, changing and potentially damaging the way the brain develops. Controlled studies of children who spent infancy and early childhood in Romania’s orphanages have shown that those children are more likely to end up with significantly diminished cognitive and emotional abilities.
OK, so what does that mean for children here in the U.S.?
Obviously, they’re not subject to the same conditions as the Romanian orphans were. But pretty much every expert I interviewed for my story agreed that large numbers of children are getting shoddy care. And by shoddy care, they meant everything from being ignored all day while strapped into a car seat to more clear-cut, and physically dangerous, forms of abuse or neglect. If you have the stomach for it, go to Google and type in “infant died locked car.” Or read the recent St. Louis Post-Dispatch series on 45 infants who died in local day cares for reasons other than disease.
In other words, there's a spectrum of shoddy care – from mediocre to poor to awful. The hard part is figuring out exactly how many kids fall into each category. And despite considerable research and consultation with experts, I came up with only two reliable sources.
One was a study of day care in four states, by researchers in Colorado. The other was a more comprehensive national survey, by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. The results were similar: In the Colorado study, only 8 percent of day care centers were “good” or “excellent” while 40 percent were “poor.” The NIHCD study found that three out of four infant caregivers give only minimal intellectual and cognitive stimulation. But the categories, obviously, involve some subjectivity. They tell us something, for sure, but not enough.
To be sure, measuring the quality of day care is difficult. It's hard to find good ways to measure quality, let alone collect the information. In that sense, it's the same problem that plagues efforts to measure quality of elementary and secondary education.
But the contrast between the available studies on the two age groups is revealing. Our data on the quality of grade school may not be the most reliable or insightful, but at least we have a lot of it – and are hard at work at improving both the quality and quantity. When it comes to care for children younger than 5 and, in particular, younger than 3, we have very little information and don’t seem to be generating much more. That’s indicative of the priority we put on very early childhood – or lack thereof.
By the way, it would be a mistake to take any of this as indictment of day care per se. Children can get poor care from their parents. And quality day care can be a huge plus. Based on the evidence I’ve seen, the problem isn’t that too many kids are in day care. It’s that too many kids are in lousy day care.
4 comments
In Pa. they had Spark pre-school, which is about as good an institution as you can get. "Like an annual spring ritual along the lines of the swallows returning to Capistrano, so it is every year that the Bethlehem Area School District looks at cutting what it says is its most expensive non-mandated education program when it deliberates its budget. This time, though, it looks as if the days of the SPARK Early Childhood Center on Linden Street may truly be numbered. This year, even the administration is advocating closing the building where 280 at-risk 3- and 4-year-old children are prepared for Kindergarten, saying it would reduce district expenses by $1.5 million annually....Under the administration’s plan, the program would be cut by more than half. Only 100 or 120 children would get pre-school in five or six elementary building classrooms scattered around the district. SPARK would be replaced with a less extensive pre-school program through the state’s Pre-K Counts program, which provides grant money to school districts to provide pre-school to some children. The district would be forced to “tighten” its admission standards to only allow the very neediest pre-schoolers into the new program, Silva said. Most of the cost savings would be generated through closing a building and cutting personnel, Silva said. The district would eliminate 10 teaching positions and at least 13 other jobs, including teachers’ aides, custodians and a school nurse. School Director Aurea Ortiz said she found the proposal “unacceptable,” saying it proposed to balance the school budget on the backs of the district’s neediest students. She was also upset with the proposed cuts of after-school programs at Donegan, Marvine and a few other elementary schools. “How can we close the achievement gap when we are picking on the neediest ones?” Ortiz asked." They closed the main school and have limited classes for 4 year olds. It is a disgrace thanks to the new Republican Governor. Kids who went to Spark go to Kindergarten with a leg up on other children because it wasn't just quality day care, it was a school designed for the needs of 3 and 4 year olds. How and why this is not standard in every school district is beyond me. But hey, we gotta give the rich tax breaks and if in a generation we are saddled with billions more in societal costs due to an undereducated workforce, well so be it. I truly and completely fucking hate the Republican party.
- blackton
November 17, 2011 at 12:41pm
Thank you for drawing attention with in-depth reporting on this issue. When I worked as a day care teacher in the early 70s, our state (or it might have been the feds) began a certification program to rate centers on the quality of care provided and help parents chose a program. Day care providers were very low paid, salaries in 4 figures. Still the cost to families was high and still can eat most of a paycheck. It's hard to get people to appreciate the fact that you pay for this one way or the other, and we all pay when the needs of young children are not addressed.
- s.trabka@frontier.com-old
November 17, 2011 at 9:43pm
"I truly and completely fucking hate the Republican party."
Amen, blackton!
- GSpinks
November 18, 2011 at 1:00pm
Back when this blog had the tagline about being in search of the best policy, I was waiting for these posts about early brain development. Along with climate change avoidance, what we're not doing here is the definition of short-sighted policy. In the past couple of decades, we've figured out which strategies in early life halve the chances a kid will repeat a grade, halve the chances he'll be abused or neglected, and double the chances he'll go to college. Think of the difference it would make in our global competitiveness if we started applying what we know. And what's it say about us that, instead, we don't acknowledge the simple fixes at all?
- amayi
November 19, 2011 at 9:30am