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Sen. Clinton ties pre-K education to Iraq, business development
By Dan McCue
Staff Writer
Striving to provide enhanced peace of mind for working parents and to help grow a future work force to fill high-skill jobs that now go unfilled, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., has proposed the creation of a universal pre-kindergarten education program for every 4-year-old in the nation.
Clinton, who discussed her proposal with the Charleston Regional Business Journal during a conference call from Washington, D.C., said statistics show that across the country many children are already behind the learning curve when they enter kindergarten, rarely manage to catch up and often drop out.
And not just out of school, but also out of being productive members of the nation's work force.
"Business organizations across the country look at the same statistics we do, and have made universal pre-K one of their top agenda items," Clinton said. "They understand that having such a program will provide working parents with the opportunity to have their children in a meaningful program while at work, rather than just warehousing them.”
This, she said, would provide immediate peace of mind and sense of satisfaction for those parents, making them better able to focus on their jobs and be more productive. At the same time, Clinton said, a universal pre-K program would help better grow and prepare the work force of the future to compete in a highly competitive global marketplace.
"This is a competitive race, and one that's taking place in a technologically advanced world," Clinton said. "Everyone points to the jobs that have gone overseas, but the reality is that there are jobs in America that go wanting because we don't have workers with the skills to perform them.
"There's a miss-match there. Personally, I think universal pre-kindergarten is the smartest way to begin to address this in the short term, and, in the long term, will provide better employees."
Clinton described her universal pre-kindergarten proposal as an extension of her belief that every child, no matter what their family's means, deserves the opportunity to succeed.
“That's something I've fought for for over 35 years,” she said.
To support her position on the benefits of pre-kindergarten education, Clinton pointed to the work of professor James Heckman of the University of Chicago, which proposes that a disparity in student achievement is apparent well before children start school. She also referenced an examination by the Yale Child Study Center that found students who have attended pre-K classes score higher on fourth-grade math and reading proficiency tests.
Right now, more than 80% of the nation's 4-year-olds, roughly 3 million children, are missing out on early education, Clinton said.
"The shame of it is, we know that for every dollar invested in early childhood education, we get $7 in return," she said. "It's better than the stock market."
Critics, however, point to 2003 Georgia State University study that tracked students in Georgia’s statewide preschool program and found that any test score gains from preschool “were not sustained in later years.”
Georgia is currently one of only two states with a statewide pre-K program. California is the other.
Clinton's proposal calls for the federal government to provide $5 billion in matching grants to states that participate in the universal pre-K program, escalating to $10 billion within five years.
She said she would pay for the program by immediately ending the federal government's relationship with 500,000 private contractors currently engaged in the war in Iraq, bringing a swift end to the war itself, and then taking a hard look at how government services have been privatized over the past several years.
"Privatization was supposed to save the federal government a tremendous amount of money, and to date, there's really no evidence of that," she said "So I think we need to really look at what's been done, determine those areas where it might be better and less expensive to have government workers do the work, and reallocate that money to our children."
Congressman Dennis Kucinich, another contender for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, immediately issued a statement on Clinton’s proposal, which is similar to legislation he introduced in the 107th and 108th Congress.
“I appreciate the fact that Sen. Clinton’s announcement is now attracting wider attention to this crucial issue,” Kucinich said, “but it would be more meaningful if I and the co-sponsors of H.R. 6114, which I introduced in September, could secure her support for companion legislation in the Senate.”
In addition to universal pre-K, Kucinich’s program calls for providing tuition-free education in state universities.
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