Minnesota has been debating early education for many years. It’s time to get serious about finishing the job.
We all understand the problem. Minnesota has worst-in-the-nation achievement gaps, and those gaps are evident as early as age 1. At the same time, nearly half of children are arriving in kindergarten unprepared, so our early education system obviously hasn’t been good enough. Too many of these children don’t catch up in later grades, and when that happens it has devastating consequences for Minnesota’s children, taxpayers, communities and economy.
We all know that early education gives taxpayers an enormous return-on-investment. Economists like Art Rolnick and Rob Grunewald at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Nobel Prize winner James Heckman and many others have proved it with a mountain of research.
Rolnick and Grunewald have found that taxpayers can earn up to a $16 return for every $1 they spend on helping low-income children access the kind of high-quality early education programs that prepare them for kindergarten. The reason: Children who are prepared for kindergarten are much less likely to drop out of school, and children who don’t drop out of school are less likely to need expensive taxpayer-funded services.
We also have identified a research-based approach that works. Starting in 2006, business and civic leaders with the Minnesota Early Learning Foundation raised $20 million in non-government money to develop, pilot and evaluate a Minnesota Model of early learning that works — targeted, flexible Early Learning Scholarships and the Parent Aware quality rating and improvement system.
Finally, we proved that scholarships and Parent Aware work on a large scale. Thanks to the pioneering leadership of a bipartisan group of legislators and Gov. Mark Dayton, scholarships and Parent Aware have been expanded to every part of Minnesota. More than 3,000 child care providers have volunteered to adopt best practices, with about 90,000 Minnesota children currently benefiting from those programs. And, over the last five years more than 25,800 scholarships have been awarded.
Most encouraging of all, an exhaustive evaluation found that Minnesota children in Parent Aware-rated programs are making significant progress on kindergarten-readiness measures, such as vocabulary, executive function, social competence, phonics and early math skills. Low-income children, the children most in danger of falling into achievement gaps, are making the biggest gains of all.
Now Minnesota has to finish the job it started more than a decade ago. We have two critically important things left on our “to-do” list.
First, we must better coordinate and reform the about $400 million in existing early care and education funding streams. Among other things, we need existing funding streams to: 1. Demand the use of kindergarten-readiness best practices, 2. Empower parents to choose the early learning programs that best fit their unique situation and preferences, and 3. Be more accountable for efficiency and kindergarten-readiness outcomes.
This year, an impressive, bipartisan group of legislators led by Reps. Jenifer Loon (R-Eden Prairie) and Paul Thissen (DFL-Minneapolis) and Sens. Carla Nelson (R-Rochester) and Melisa Franzen (DFL-Edina) are working hard with colleagues to pass legislation to establish an Early Education Access Fund that will coordinate those existing funding streams. We need to pass that bill.
The second thing on Minnesota’s to-do list is to help the 40,000 low-income Minnesota children under age 5 who currently can’t access high-quality early learning programs. These are the kids who are most at-risk of falling into achievement gaps, so they must be our top priority. This can be done through a combination of reforming current public investments and investing more in scholarships, starting with children who are homeless, abused or in foster care.
Minnesota has come a long way over the last dozen years, and we’re close to building an early education system that can do better by our children, taxpayers and employers. But we’re not there yet. This year, it’s time to get serious about finishing the job.
Todd Otis is a former DFL member of the Minnesota House of Representatives and state DFL party chair. He is currently a senior vice president at Think Small, a nonprofit organization. Duane Benson is a rancher, former Minnesota Senate Minority Leader (R-Lanesboro), former executive director of the Minnesota Business Partnership and former executive director of the Minnesota Early Learning Foundation.