Page 6
September 7, 2016
O PINION
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Re-examine BA Requirement for Preschool Staff
We agree, rule
will narrow path
to diversity
f ranCes s allah and m olly d ay
As the co-directors of Early
Learning Multnomah, we add our
support to the call for a re-exam-
ination of the Bachelors of Arts
degree requirement for Preschool
Promise providers. “Preschool
Promise Conflict, New Require-
ments Fail Kids of Color,” Port-
land Observer, July 20.)
We do not have enough af-
fordable high-quality preschool
in Multnomah County. With
by
funding from Preschool Prom-
ise, a state-funded initiative ad-
ministered by United Way of the
Columbia-Willamette and Mult-
nomah County, Early Learning
Multnomah is able to support the
creation of 192 high-quality pre-
school opportunities for low-in-
come children. It is a small step
forward in providing preschool
for the thousands of children who
would benefit from this important
foundation for school success. We
want to make this first step a smart
one.
In our work with families from
communities of color we hear time
and again their desire for teachers
and caregivers who mirror the
communities they serve. Fami-
lies want to send their children to
high-quality preschools staffed by
teachers who speak the language
of the children, share their racial
and ethnic backgrounds and reso-
nate with the families’ life experi-
ences. We want to be able to use
Preschool Promise funds to reach
that goal.
Unfortunately studies and re-
ports from the Center for Amer-
ican Progress, Brookings Insti-
tution, and others highlight the
challenges of achieving a diverse
preschool teacher workforce. Af-
rican American early childhood
teachers make 84 cents for ev-
ery dollar earned by their white
peers, who are already among
the lowest paid professionals in
this country with an average sal-
ary of $30,000 year. Wage par-
ity and strategies to attract and
retain minority teachers must go
hand in hand with the demand
for a highly-educated teacher
workforce.
Ron Herndon, director of the
Albina Head Start Program and
Kali Thorne-Ladd, founder of
Kairos PDX have effectively ar-
gued that a B.A. requirement for
providers will narrow, rather than
expand the path for those who are
best able meet the needs of our
underserved communities. (“Well
Intended, but with Devastating
Consequences,” guest opinion
piece, Portland Observer July 20
issue.)
We agree. That is why we will
continue to push for in-classroom
experience as a proxy for a formal
educational degree and work to
offer continuing education oppor-
tunities and training to raise the
profile and pay for those who do
this important work.
In a statement addressing
teacher diversity, U.S. Secretary
of Education, John B. King Jr.
said, “Achieving a diverse teach-
er workforce must be a long-term
policy goal with a suite of long-
term strategies put in place to help
minorities succeed in college and
to encourage them to return to the
classroom to help the next genera-
tion of students. Our failure to do
so will keep us stubbornly in the
same vicious cycle in which low
teacher diversity contributes in a
myriad of ways to low minority
student success in K-12 and col-
lege, which results once again in
low teacher diversity.”
We hope that others interested
in educational success for all stu-
dents will join us to advocate for
achieving a diverse teacher work-
force and will re-examine the B.A.
degree requirement for Preschool
Promise providers.
Molly Day and Frances Sallah
are co-directors of Early Learning
Multnomah, one of the state’s Ear-
ly Learning Hubs that work within
Oregon’s Early Learning Division
to support young children and
families to learn and thrive.
Make Sure Every Student is in School Every Day
Every child needs to feel welcome
m arian W right e delman
As a new school year
begins, parents, teachers
and administrators are
all thinking about how to
make it the best year ever.
One of the keys to stu-
dent success sounds very
simple but can make a profound
difference: making sure every stu-
dent is in school every day. This is
not the case in many schools and
school districts across the coun-
try. The Department of Education
estimates that five to seven and a
half million students miss 18 or
more days of school each year or
nearly an entire month or more.
Chronic absenteeism is defined
as missing at least 10 percent of
school days in a school year for any
reason. As part of the President’s
My Brother’s Keeper Initiative, the
Departments of Education, Health
and Human Services, Housing and
Urban Development, and Justice
have joined together to launch Ev-
ery Student, Every Day: A National
Initiative to Address and Eliminate
Chronic Absenteeism.
I was honored to participate in
their national symposium to share
what the Children’s Defense Fund
has learned since our first report in
1974, Children Out of School in
America.
We found from examining cen-
sus data at the time that at least 2
million children were out of school
for at least 3 months, including
750,000 between 7-13 years old.
We learned that the large number of
by
these children had physical, men-
tal, or emotional disabili-
ties. Another large group
were children pushed out
by discipline policies who
never returned to school.
In Holyoke, Mass., we
found children who had
recently migrated from Puerto
Rico staying home when it got cold
because they had no winter coats.
In rural Maine, we found chil-
dren who couldn’t afford the local
school district’s transportation fees
and were unaware that the state
would reimburse the local district
for transportation costs. In other
states like Kentucky the key barri-
ers were book fees.
We wrote: “If a child was not
white, or was white but not mid-
dle class, did not speak English,
was poor, needed special help with
seeing, hearing, walking, reading,
learning, adjusting, growing up,
was pregnant or married at age 15,
was not ‘smart enough’ or was ‘too
smart,’ then, in too many places,
school officials decided school was
not the place for that child. In sum,
out of school children shared a com-
mon characteristic of differentness
by virtue of race, income, physical,
mental or emotional ‘handicap,’ and
age. They were for the most part,
out of school not by choice but be-
cause they had been excluded.
We’ve made enormous progress
since then, especially for students
with disabilities. But we haven’t
solved the children out of school
crisis. Children on the margins re-
main at greatest risk for some of
the same reasons we documented
more than 40 years ago.
A recent National Public Ra-
dio story on absenteeism featured
Johns Hopkins scholar Robert Bal-
fanz, who studies chronic school
absenteeism, and a high-poverty
elementary school in Baltimore
making strides tackling the prob-
lem: “[Balfanz] has studied high
school dropouts for years, and in
his research he kept seeing a red
flag: chronic absences in elemen-
tary and middle school. Students
who miss a couple days a month
fall behind in reading — and if they
can’t read, they can’t pass tests.
eventually drop out of school.”
Chronic absenteeism is not to
be confused with the problem of
children being truant from school.
Often when a child skips school, he
is labeled as a discipline problem
and ends up being suspended or ex-
pelled and sometimes even referred
to law enforcement for action. We
must prevent suspensions and ex-
pulsions for truancy. I have never
understood why we put a child out
of school for not coming to school
instead of finding out why the child
is not in school.
The Department of Education is
now collecting the right data and
doing something about chronic ab-
To miss a month of school when
you’re 11 and 12, there’s got to
be something behind that. The list
included things like tooth decay,
mental health issues, and not having
a winter coat. — Robert Balfanz, Johns Hopkins scholar
‘To miss a month of school
when you’re 11 and 12, there’s got
to be something behind that,’ Bal-
fanz says — and at Wolfe Street
Academy, there was. ‘The list in-
cluded things like tooth decay,
mental health issues, and not hav-
ing a winter coat.’”
The Department of Education
sees chronic absenteeism as: “a
primary cause of low academic
achievement and a powerful pre-
dictor of those students who may
senteeism by promoting ideas we
know work. One common sense
idea goes all the way back to our
days of knocking on doors: More
school districts are starting each
morning by having staff call or
visit every family whose child is
absent from school to find out why.
Others also connect with fam-
ilies as the school year begins.
Some schools are making strides
connecting eligible but unenrolled
children with health insurance as
they enroll in school, allowing
those children to get the regular
care they need to stay healthy and
ready to learn. Some are partner-
ing with health clinics to allow
children to be treated on-site for
chronic conditions like asthma that
contribute to days of lost class time
and which can now be addressed in
a few minutes out of class.
The Department of Housing and
Urban Development is partnering
with the Department of Education
to promote housing stability for
families so children aren’t kept
out of school when they move fre-
quently and lack necessary school
records. Wraparound services also
help keep children in school. Wolfe
Street Academy in Baltimore, for
example, provides a box of do-
nated coats and other clothes in
the cafeteria and like other com-
munity schools, provides mental
health and dental services and a
wide range of programs encourag-
ing parents to get involved in their
school community.
Many schools provide mentor-
ing services to make sure students
feel supported, nurtured, and en-
couraged to be there. The simple
truth is every child needs to feel
welcome at school and know that
they will be missed by someone at
school if they miss a day. Schools
must make learning engaging and
fun and always keep the children
at the center. Those are the schools
every child will look forward to
going to every day.
Marian Wright Edelman is pres-
ident of the Children’s Defense
Fund.