Introduction of the Universal Pre-Kindergarten and Early Childhood Education Act of 2007

Floor Speech

SPEECH OF HON. ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON
OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
TUESDAY, JULY 31, 2007

* Ms. NORTON. Madam Speaker, I am introducing today the Universal Pre-kindergarten and Early Childhood Education Act of 2007 (Universal Pre-K) to begin the process of providing universal, public school pre-kindergarten education for every child, regardless of income.

* The bill is meant to fill the gaping hole in the President's No Child Left Behind law, which requires elementary and secondary school children to meet more rigorous standards while ignoring the preschool years which can best prepare them to do so. My bill would provide a breakthrough in elementary school education by taking a step at the Federal level to provide initial funding, and using such funding to encourage school districts themselves to add a grade to elementary schooling at ages three and four as an option for every child.

* We cannot afford to continue to blithely let the most fertile years for reading go by while we wonder why we can't teach Johnny to read. As the President presses No Child Left Behind into high schools, my bill asks him to begin at the beginning when children should begin their education.

* The Universal Pre-K Act responds both to the huge and growing needs of parents for educational childcare and to the new science showing that a child's brain development, which sets the stage for lifelong learning, begins much earlier than previously believed. However, parents who need childcare for their pre-K aged children are rarely able to afford the stimulating educational environment necessary to ensure optimal brain development. Universal pre-K education would be a part of school systems, adding a new grade for three-and four-year-olds similar to five-year-old kindergarten programs now routinely available in the United States. The bill would eliminate some of the major shortcomings of the uneven commercial daycare now available and would assure the qualified teachers and safe facilities of public schools.

* This bill's introduction is particularly timely here in the District of Columbia, where more extensive integration of early childhood education is planned as part of a larger effort to improve D.C. public schools. A recent report highlighted the economic benefits of early childhood education, generating $221 million each year in the District while starting early to expand job, career, income, and academic prospects of children, decreasing the amount spent on social programs to address teen pregnancy, crime, and the like.

* Compare the cost of daycare, most of it offered today with an inadequate educational emphasis, at an average cost of $6,171 per year, to the cost of in-state tuition at the University of Virginia, which costs $6,785 per year. Yet, more than 60 percent of mothers with children under age six work. That proportion is rapidly increasing as more mothers enter the labor force, including mothers leaving welfare, who also have no long term access to child care.

* Because of decades of refusal by Congress to approve the large sums necessary for universal health coverage, the Universal Pre-K Act encourages school districts across the United States to apply to the Department of Education for grants to establish three and four-year-old kindergartens. Grants funded under Title IV of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, ESEA, would be available to school systems which agree in turn to use the experience acquired with the Federal funding provided by my bill to then move forward, where possible, to phase in three and four-year-old kindergartens for all children in the school district in regular classrooms with teachers equivalent to those in other grades as part of their annual school district budgets.

* The success of high quality Head Start and other pre-kindergarten programs combined with new scientific evidence concerning the importance of brain development in the early years virtually mandate the expansion of early childhood education to all of our children. Traditionally, early learning programs have been available only to the affluent and to lower income families in programs such as Head Start. My bill provides a practiced way to gradually move to universal pre-school education. The goal of the Universal Pre-K Act is to bring the benefits of educational pre-K within reach of the great majority of American working poor, lower middle class, and middle class families, most of whom have been left out.

* Considering the staggering cost of daycare, the inaccessibility of early education, and the opportunity earlier education offers to improve a child's chances in life, three and four-year-old kindergarten is overdue. The absence of viable options for working families demands our immediate attention.

* I strongly urge my colleagues to support this legislation.

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