Children start to learn in utero, months before birth. They hear their mother sing or talk, and their brain neurons connect to identify separate sounds, or phonemes, like “ma.” During their first year they learn that connected phonemes have meaning, like “mama” means mother, and then that a sequence of words can have even more meaning: “I love mama.” At each stage of brain growth, the rules of language are internalized: “I love mama” and “I want a cookie” are both structured as subject, verb, object.

Similar development takes place for social interactions. Put two crawling babies in a safe environment without adult intervention and they will develop social rules, e.g., empathy, conflict resolution and sharing; “I won’t hurt the other baby because it could hurt me, and it is safer and more fun to play together.”

Verbalization and socialization are the keys to early childhood education. Study after study has shown that giving very young children help with the formation of those verbal and social skills will help them for the rest of their lives. This puts a huge burden on parents or their surrogates because the newborn infant is a learning machine, and the only effective teacher is another human. Babies learn absolutely nothing, for example, from television or its equivalent. They need to see human eyes and a moving mouth to develop language. The science is clear and well established: what the toddler learns will determine how the adult will fare.

We have known for over 40 years, thanks to two independent, statistically valid trials, that ensuring that children get help with verbal and social skills before they turn four will change the rest of their lives. Those kids that get that help will perform better when they go to school, not a surprise, but they will also – without further intervention — have lower rates of incarceration, stabler marriages, lower use of drugs and alcohol and dramatically better job success and income.

But instead of using our tax dollars to provide quality early education, we spend our money on what is mostly baby-sitting or its equivalent. New York’s recent focus has been on increasing the availability, or quantity of child care ‘slots’. You cannot blame the state for focusing on quantity, the motivation is clear: the child care desert is vast and growing and giving parents a way to get back to work will reduce unemployment and raise taxes. But you can fault the state for putting quantity ahead of quality. We must have both.

Many professionals have argued that we should view the development of our children as a continuous education process, not as a “child care” phase followed by kindergarten then school. Child care providers are teachers, a job that requires expertise in socialization and verbalization of little kids from the time that they can make a sound.

Many other countries recognize the value to their society and children of providing quality education from shortly after birth. The French creche, the English nursery, German kinderkrippe, Swedish frskola and Japanese hoikuen all provide care and early childhood education focusing on socialization and basic developmental activities.

These early child care facilities are run by trained professionals who are experts in the tools that help infants gain social and verbal skills. They are paid a living wage, mostly from taxes collected by their government. In the U.S., while there are some subsidies, most early childhood educators do not make enough to support themselves. Their average pay is $17.33 per hour, dramatically below the living wage. And yet the annual cost of having two kids in a New York daycare center is $33,000. The poverty level for a family of four in NY is $30,000. Even if that family was making three times the poverty level it would have to spend more than a third of its income on child care, a near impossibility.

This reduces the affordable choices for providing care while parents work to either recruiting another family member or neighbor to provide care, or more often having one parent stay at home and out of the workforce. The search for ways to care for kids can also push quality education to the back or away completely. We must do better, for ourselves, for the economy and especially for our kids’ future.

For four years the Cloudsplitter Foundation has been running a demonstration project to see if giving cash awards to teachers as they improve their skills can improve the quality of early child care. The project has been an overwhelming success, demonstrating that modest financial incentives can improve teacher recruitment, retention and skills. But no private foundation could afford to scale up that experiment to the entire state, with awards that let teachers get to acceptable income levels. That must come from public funding. But if the government were to take such an approach the results would more than pay for the program by freeing parents to return to the workforce (and thus generating more tax revenues), but more importantly through the long-term social improvements that quality early education can produce.

A quantity-versus-quality approach is clearly wrong. Of course, we need more child care centers and home-based educators, but those teachers must have the right skills if we are to reap the long-term benefits quality early education can bring. New York’s QualityStars program is one approach, providing training and five levels of skills certification.

The current workforce that provides early childhood education is made up primarily of women, many of whom got into the profession because they had children of their own who needed care. They then turned that need into a business. These women (and some men) are essential to both early childhood education and to our workforce. They need educational and financial support. Through them, if we provide the right financial incentives for skills improvement, we can have both: better educated caregivers who earn enough to support themselves and their families, but more importantly, children who grow up with a better shot at being successful.

Lee Keet

Cloudsplitter Foundation