"....you're talking about let's put all our resources into the prisons"!

Last Night's High School Reform meeting still has me upset with the arrogant and myopic condition the Department of Education is in. The cliche that when Republicans run the government they self-fulfill their complaint that government doesn't work and is a waste.

An article in the Courant called Pediatrician: Life's Tracks Set By Age 3 by Arielle Levin Becker underscores the disconnect between what's needed and what's being advocated by Rell's Department of Education.

Beginning with early childhood "is economically right, morally right, workforce right," said Janice Gruendel, the governor's senior policy adviser for children and youths and a chairwoman of the state's Early Childhood Education Cabinet. "It makes for a very good argument in a year when you're talking about let's put all our resources into the prisons."

The Early Childhood Education Cabinet is developing a plan to support children from birth to age 3, designed to link to its plans for children in preschool and beyond. The recommendations include improving maternal health and access to prenatal care, fatherhood initiatives, home visits for infants, and increasing slots for care for infants and toddlers.

Shonkoff praised the proposals and said they reflected state-of-the-art science. The science Shonkoff presented stemmed from decades of brain research in neuroscience, developmental psychology, molecular biology and economics.

Stable, safe relationships and rich learning experiences are key to brain development, Shonkoff said. Children can get them at home and in child-care programs, but they must be evidence-based, quality programs, he said. Child care must be treated as something to facilitate child development, not just to allow parents to go to work, he said.

Shonkoff recommended making basic health services and early care and education available to all children, targeting interventions for children in poverty, and providing specialized services to children experiencing significant stress.

"Forget the school budget and even forget the prison budget," he said. "The health budget would be helped even more by helping children when they're young."

It should come as no news to people who care about children that prisons are far more popular than kid advocacy efforts are.

When high school observers advocated a greater emphasis on reading in the elementary grades last night, elementary school teachers bristled as though the issue were about them and not about the fact that the sweet spot for learning language and math are these early years.

The inescapable truth of recent research all indicates that children from birth until grade three or so are voracious learners and the degree of nurturing that feeds that appetite for knowledge, comfort, and self-assurance is critical.

My suggestion last night bears repeating. If the State Department of Education wants to profoundly and effectively improve the quality of education for all children in Connecticut then the State should fully fund (no monkey business here) pre-school through third grade education and mandate no class size larger than 15 in these grades with special emphasis on developing language and math skills.

My second suggestion bears repeating as well. Instead of attempting to pass high school reform that centralizes curriculum, educational regions should be freed to become laboratories and incubators for grassroots school reform. What we need is Magnet School Districts who develop their best ideas about what schools should look like. In five years let's take the best ideas and legislate those.

To hell with sentencing more generations of kids to prison.

The Origins of Cigarette and Abusive Drug Use: Elementary School

A new study that comes out of the University of Michigan indicates early childhood academic problems in school is a gateway behavior toward drug use. That's right, early childhood educational failure leads to later drug use - the myth that drugs contribute to bad grades is misguided!

The authors outlined the policy implications of their research in these terms: “There are many good reasons for encouraging adolescents and preadolescents to do well in school, and to help them to do well. The long-term economic and cultural benefits of a good education are widely recognized and appreciated. The findings of this research suggest an additional class of benefits: Early educational success provides considerable protection against a wide range of problem behaviors, including delinquency, smoking, drinking, and illicit drug use.”

As for whether most adolescent substance use has much impact on educational success and eventual educational attainment, the authors say instead that, “…educational failures tend to come early in the sequence of problem behaviors, followed by adolescent delinquency, smoking, drinking, and illicit drug use. In general, substance use appears to be largely a symptom, rather than a cause, of poor academic adjustment, though one can easily imagine specific examples to the contrary.”

It is probably wishful thinking to suppose that reducing adolescent substance use will lead to substantial increases in educational success. Rather, whatever can be done to improve the educational successes of children and adolescents will likely have a very valuable additional benefit—reducing their substance abuse.”


The authors are careful to add that “we do not view these findings as any reason for slackening efforts to reduce adolescent substance use. There are already more than enough good reasons for discouraging such use, even if we look no further than the potential health consequences. What our findings do suggest is this: One particularly important way to reduce or prevent adolescents’ involvement in substance use is to help them succeed in school—and to do so well before they reach adolescence.”

I plea loudly and often that we are spending far too much at EO Smith and starving the local elementary schools.

Maybe someday the mountain of evidence piled in front of the faces of the public will get their attention.